The Rock and Benny Safdie wanted to make sure The Smashing Machine looked as real as possible. That meant taking some real punches during some fight scenes, and unfortunately, The Rock says he got a concussion during one sequence.
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was a guest on Tuesday’s episode of The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. The host mentioned how real the fight scenes in the movie looked, and Johnson credited Safdie’s “as real as it gets” motto for that. Johnson previously told Variety that Safdie wanted to shoot without his stunt double, opting to shoot it without cuts in a cinéma vérité style.
Johnson told Fallon that he prepared himself to take punches for real, noting that if you’re going to shoot an MMA film, you need to “go all the way.” One scene features Johnson, who plays Mark Kerr, facing off against a Japanese fighter named Kazuyuki Fujita (played by Yoko Hamamura) during the 2000 PRIDE Grand Prix. Johnson explained how this scene also happened in real life during Kerr’s fight, and they needed to replicate it for the movie.
“There’s a scene at the end, and this happened in real life, Mark Kerr is in Japan and he’s fighting in front of 30,000 people. And he’s fighting against a fighter named Fujita. Mark Kerr is on all fours, and Fujita is just wailing away on him. Mark Kerr is not moving, but the camera is right there in this documentary [that the movie is based on]. And he’s with it, he’s not knocked out, he’s loopy. He’s just [staring off towards the camera]. He’s taking every hit, and I said to Benny, ‘That’s how we’re going to shoot this?’ And he goes, ‘Yes.’ “I told our fighter —
“Oh, why did I bring this up?” Fallon joked.
The Rock says his co-star initially refused to hit him
“Thanks, Jimmy. My jaw is not the same,” Johnson replied. “I said to our fighter, ‘I know it sounds crazy, but you’ve got to hit me. You have to hit me.’ And he is a Japanese fighter, very respectful, he goes, ‘No, no. I will not hit you.’ He refused to hit me and finally I said, ‘Please, we have one shot at this. You must hit me.’”
Safdie came over and told Hamamura that he knows he respects Johnson, but he also respects the fight Kerr had, and asked him to keep the integrity intact.
“So you’ll see in the movie, [punches his fist] he’s rocking me over and over and over again,” Johnson said. “It was wild. So after that fight, you see me and I look like I’m loopy, that’s ‘cause I had a concussion [and I was dazed]. But it’s the thing you’ve got to do. You realize if you’re going to make an MMA movie, you’ve got to go all the way. And that’s what we did with this.”
MMA star Ryan Bader, who plays Mark Coleman in The Smashing Machine, spoke with WrestleZone about his working relationship with The Rock. He also spoke about how real the fighting was in the movie, sharing that he had a ‘pact’ with other fighters to lay it in a bit more to make things look authentic.
Read More: The Rock Details Weight Loss Goal For New Movie: ‘Think Clint Eastwood At 75’
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