U.S. filmmaker and actor Benny Safdie attends the premiere of The Smashing Machine at the Princess of Whales Theatre during the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 8.COLE BURSTON/AFP/Getty Images
The Smashing Machine is both the title of Benny Safdie’s latest movie and something of a maxim for the filmmaker. In his collaborations with his older brother, Josh, Benny has beaten, broken and bruised the bodies and egos of Hollywood players not used to such cinematic injury, from putting Robert Pattinson through the wringer in Good Time to giving Adam Sandler an increasingly dire series of panic attacks in Uncut Gems.
But the younger Safdie sibling is now crushing the spirit, among other things, of the world’s biggest movie icon with The Smashing Machine, which stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as the real-life mixed-martial arts fighter Mark Kerr. Directing without his brother for the first time – Josh will get his own solo chance in the spotlight later this fall with his Timothée Chalamet comedy Marty Supreme – Benny uses the sports-biopic trappings of The Smashing Machine to craft an idiosyncratic story about a man on the precipice of self-destruction, with Kerr battling addiction and the pains of MMA life.
In a way, though, the film’s arrival on the awards circuit also represents something of an inner battle for Safdie himself, given that it’s being released just as the filmmaker is making serious strides as an actor, having recently worked with everyone from Christopher Nolan (playing Cillian Murphy’s scientific nemesis in Oppenheimer) to Sandler (as Happy Gilmore 2’s villain). Is Safdie setting his sights on the ring of acting or more behind the ropes as a director?
Ahead of The Smashing Machine’s North American debut at TIFF last month, The Globe and Mail sat down with Safdie to discuss his fighting strategy.
Congratulations on the Venice Film Festival win for best director for The Smashing Machine. What’s your headspace now, coming straight from that into Toronto?
Right now, I’m kind of out of my head. You win, then you get on a plane, and try to work through all these things. It’s a huge honour, but it’s crazy.
That sense of craziness feels baked into the project, though. I mean, you’re working on your biggest film in terms of resources and scale, but it’s still very much an independent film. But an independent film that also happens to be led by the biggest star on the planet.
The way that I approached it with Dwayne was no different than I’d done before – we’re just going to make this and figure it out. We talked for a long time, I think a year and a half, just while I was writing it, and I was letting him into every thought that I had in my head. Because if we were going to do this, we’re going to be doing this shoulder to shoulder.
So it’s about trust.
We need to have full trust in each other, because he was going to have to open himself up to me in a way that he’d never done before. I saw that there were things that he wanted to talk about that maybe people didn’t think he could, you know? Because he is so strong and invincible and that gives people comfort. But what if you could see the vulnerability in there? And that was in Mark, too.
Had you always wanted to make a movie about that ultimate-fighting world?
I went to an MMA fight in early 2002, and I remember there’s just something about this incredibly graphic violence, but also the imagery of a match. In Japan, there are these green rings they use, they feel almost lost to time. I wanted to recreate that era. Which made me think, well, how will I shoot this? How will I show the fights in a way that hasn’t been seen before? I never wanted to go inside the ring itself. I wanted to see it only from the outside. That’s our point of view to the fight.
There is a very documentary-like approach to the film, yes. Moments in which we see Mark and his girlfriend, Dawn from out of the corner of our eye, or from above, as if we’re spying on them. Was that viewpoint built into the script?
It’s always evolving, sometimes literally on the day. I’m changing words, scratching things up, constantly evolving. Because I just want to make it feel and look and sound real. So you’re going to do whatever it takes to make it feel that way. I wanted to disappear as a director, so everything was in service of that feeling. I also cast a lot of real people, non-actors, in roles. I love chasing that kind of realism in performance and style. I remember at one point, Mark and Dawn are having a conversation outside in their backyard, and I wanted a plane to fly overhead, to background the conversation a bit. So we put a plane in the sky, just passing over the house.
Wait, you hired a plane to fly over the scene?
No, no, we just put the sound of a plane on the soundtrack in post. I wish I could hire a plane, though. But I like how that plane noise, it sounds like a mistake. Normally, a plane flies overhead, and you go, okay, let’s reshoot it to get rid of that noise. I wanted it to feel as if you were there.
You have experience wearing prosthetics as an actor, thanks to your role in Oppenheimer. Did that help you when it came to working with Dwayne and the amount of prosthetics he had to wear here?
I said to Dwayne that I remembered feeling that there were certain things about prosthetics that kind of got in my way, that made me conscious about my performance, and I didn’t want that here, because there’s a lot of physicality needed. I wanted it to be a mixture of Dwayne and Mark. I would ask Dwayne, “How do you feel right now when you’re talking to me here?” when he finally had the eyebrows, the nose, the hair, everything perfect. And he looked at me, and there was this subtle balance of him feeling like both himself and Mark.
Do you see yourself devoting more of your time to directing, or acting? You were just in the biggest movie of the summer, Happy Gilmore 2 ...
I see them both as a conversation. One makes me better at the other. I get to work with people that maybe I wouldn’t while directing. It gives you amazing insight. And it puts you in your place a little bit.
The Smashing Machine is now playing in theatres.
This interview has been edited and condensed.