Before Benny Safdie started taking pictures The Smashing MachineMark Kerr gave the filmmakers a wrestling lesson.
The film’s stunt crew and others gathered across the padded ring on the Vancouver soundstage that functioned as homebase for the manufacturing to soak up a lecture from the two-time former UFC Heavyweight Tournament Champion. Kerr, the topic of Safdie’s biopic, was completely satisfied to oblige.
“You want to get me to light up?” Kerr advised me in his light, inviting voice. “Have me teach wrestling.”
Working from the mat, Kerr demonstrated a sequence of foundational maneuvers just like the double-leg takedown, one thing he’s executed hundreds of occasions in coaching and in competitors. Typically, he walks his opponent down to shut the gap between them. Then, from a standing place, he lunges ahead on his proper leg, letting his left leg path behind him. He penetrates, wraps his arms behind his opponent’s legs, braces his head in opposition to their midsection, lifts, gathers momentum, after which drives them to the bottom. Kerr excelled on the transfer and nonetheless has the cauliflower ear to show it.
Afterwards, Safdie, who introduced his two younger sons to work that day, threw Kerr for a loop. He requested to be on the receiving finish of a double-leg takedown from the Smashing Machine himself.
Kerr shook his head. “I don’t think you want me to take you to the ground,” he advised the acclaimed author/director. “I’m just a little too big.”
Instead, Greg Rementer, the supervising stunt coordinator, a person with years of expertise making painful issues harm much less, double-legged Safdie whereas Kerr and the remainder of the room noticed. As his dad hit the mat, one in all Safdie’s sons cried out, “No!”
The adults laughed, understanding it wasn’t actual.
“How do you retain somebody secure while you need ‘em to beat the shit out of each other?”
Every day, on set and off, Rementer said that he and his team toed the line addressing this question. Considerable time and attention went into achieving era-appropriate brutality without seriously injuring anyone, especially the star of The Smashing MachineDwayne Johnson, one of the most bankable and in-demand actors in Hollywood. Nobody wants to be the guy who accidentally broke the Rock’s orbital bone in pursuit of realism.
About twelve weeks earlier than filming started, Rementer and his crew put Johnson by means of MMA boot camp. “Practicing combos, learning standup, learning takedowns, and learning ground game specific to Mark Kerr,” he defined.
During his peak years, preventing at occasions for UFC and the Japanese league Pride, Kerr entered the ring weighing round 265 kilos. Because he competed as a wrestler in highschool and faculty, after which educated on the Olympic stage, his early model drew closely on that ability set, versus different blended martial arts disciplines akin to jiu jitsu. On the bottom, he used his dimension and weight to pin his opponent to the mat and lay the hammers down. The Smashing Machine covers only a few years in Kerr’s profession, throughout which he developed from that wrestling-heavy model right into a extra complete one, and the fights must depict that evolution intimately.
Kerr labored carefully with Johnson, breaking down his model into simply understood fundamentals. Like Johnson, Kerr performed highschool soccer and will say to the star embodying him, “My double-leg [takedown] is like a tackle in football. I put it in the frame of reference and it was like, ‘Boom.’” With actual respect, Kerr recalled teaching Johnson after which watching him visualize the lesson, his expression going nearly clean, then saying, “OK. Got it.”
“All the stuff he’s done with wrestling and football, he can pick up on it mechanically and understand, OK, if I do this, this, and this, then that’s what I’m trying to accomplish,” Kerr stated.
This type of alternate of concepts was an previous dynamic for Kerr and Johnson. Decades earlier, within the late Nineties, the 2 met to debate skilled preventing. At the time, they each labored out on the storied Gold’s Gym in Venice, and Johnson, early on in his professional wrestling profession, was rehabbing a PCL tear. “We bumped into each other a couple different times,” Kerr stated, “and at one point he’s like, ‘Hey, you want to grab lunch?’”
It was solely years later that Kerr realized their dialog over lunch was extra like an inquiry. Johnson requested the fighter questions like, ‘How do the Japanese pay? Do they pay you on time? How’s the work schedule?” The Rock was floating the potential for leaving the WWE for a profession in MMA.
“He had a lot of the same demeanor that I had,” Kerr stated. “He was quiet, softspoken, very patient. He’d ask a question and not talk over you, just sit there and listen. It’s one of the qualities that I admire a lot about DJ, his ability to be totally present and in the moment with you.” Those traits made it straightforward for Kerr to belief Johnson along with his story when it got here time to make the film.
Benny Safdie didn’t need to use visible results and most well-liked to restrict the usage of stunt doubles in The Smashing Machine. Verisimilitude, in spite of everything, is a central concept turned over in all of his work. He prefers a documentary model — “voyeuristic” was the phrase Rementer used — and as such, the fights wanted to play out in lengthy takes and large photographs.
Rementer described sensible approaches to security that might go well with Safdie’s imaginative and prescient, like putting extra padding within the gloves to permit for gentle contact or including padding beneath the ring to cushion a fall. Depending on digicam place, it was potential to simulate hits by having an actor punch an offscreen pad as an alternative of somebody’s physique. But given Safdie’s calls for, straightforward options have been seldom on the desk. The performers, Johnson included, wanted to coach to throw punches and pull again reasonably than push by means of. They needed to convey a fist or knee at full velocity to their opponent’s physique or face with out contact.
It was Safdie’s concept to solid actual MMA fighters within the movie. These professionals couldn’t solely assist Johnson higher perceive the approach, however they may additionally push the envelope on what was potential, toeing the road of acceptable contact.
Ryan Bader performs Kerr’s good good friend and typically rival Mark Coleman, the inaugural UFC Heavyweight Champion nicknamed “The Hammer” for his “ground and pound” approach. (The real-life Coleman’s one notice to Bader: “Make me look like a savage.”) Like Kerr and Coleman, Bader was a university wrestler earlier than turning into knowledgeable fighter, taking part in his first UFC occasion in 2008. He had by no means acted in a film and was most shocked at how snug he felt on set, regardless of the bodily and emotionally violent subject material; Bader acts reverse Johnson in one of the crucial devastating scenes of the film, a confrontation between the buddies about Kerr’s drug use.
Rementer broke the fights down into as few as 5 or as many as 12 sections that they’d prepare for and rehearse. The actual fights acted as fashions however in accordance with Kerr, they’re not transfer for transfer recreations in each case. The precise shoots have been grueling, typically happening over only one or two nights—shorter than different movies Rementer’s labored on. According to Bader, the shoots have been “sometimes harder than a real fight.”
“We went hard,” Bader stated. “Going super hard and then letting your body cool off and doing that over and over again for sometimes three to four hours banged up my knee a little bit.” He stated that a few of the stuntmen enjoying his opponents have been former fighters and “we kind of had a little handshake deal” to make it look actual, together with some precise contact. “A couple of those punches were real,” Bader stated.
Bas Rutten, who educated Kerr throughout his prime, performs himself in The Smashing Machineand in a single occasion egged on a second of actual contact behind the scenes. It was Yoko Hamamura’s first day taking pictures a combat scene with Johnson, and he was being requested to interrupt “the cardinal rule” of stunts. “As stuntmen, we never touch an actress or an actor,” Hamamura stated. But Johnson needed him to punch him within the face throughout their subsequent sequence. “I was going against everything that I was taught not to do.”
A bigger-than-life character, Rutten urged Hamamura to do it. Hamamura then regarded to his boss, Rementer, for steerage. He “shrugged his shoulders and he’s like, ‘Do what DJ asked,’” Hamamura stated.
With Rementer’s permission, Hamamura—a former skilled fighter turned stunt particular person—ready to put into one of the crucial well-known mugs on the planet. At 65-to-70 p.c energy, after all—something much less would look faux and something extra can be harmful.
“I punched him about 20 times in the face, nonstop. Hammer fisting, punches straight to the cheek. I mean, he was taking quite a beating,” Hamamura stated. They filmed the sequence a number of occasions and every time Hamamura did what Johnson requested.
“That’s when I really truly appreciated him as a performer,” he stated, “being able to act through all this stuff.”
When it was over, Johnson thanked him. “He shook my hand afterwards,” Hamamura stated. “He was like, ‘Dude, that was amazing.’”
Ross Scarano is a author and editor from Pittsburgh. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, The Wall Street Journal, The Ringer, GQ, and Pitchfork.