Christopher Nolan has eclectic taste. His influences as a filmmaker range from Stanley Kubrick (“Interstellar” is Nolan doing “2001: A Space Odyssey”) to Michael Mann to Terrence Malick. Yet he also enjoys more lowbrow films like the “Fast & Furious” franchise and the NASCAR comedy “Talladega Nights.”
On a recent episode of “The Director’s Cut” podcast, Nolan appeared alongside Benny Safdie (a director/actor who appeared in Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” as Hungarian psychist Edward Teller and will also be in Nolan’s next film, “The Odyssey”). This year saw the release of Safdie’s “The Smashing Machine,” a biopic of wrestler and former Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) champion Mark Kerr, as played by Dwayne Johnson/the Rock.
Speaking on “The Director’s Cut,” Nolan had only praise for “The Smashing Machine” and the performance which Safdie mined out of the Rock. “Dwayne’s performance doesn’t tell you what to feel at any point, there’s nothing demonstrative about it, but you understand him fully,” Nolan said about how Johnson inhabited Kerr and his struggles. “[The movie is] a really remarkable and radical piece of work that will be understood more and more over time.”
For most of his acting career, Johnson has been an old-school action star in the mold of Arnold Schwarzenegger, i.e. he plays broadly the same archetype in rote movies, and so is not an actor who disappears into roles. “The Smashing Machine” comes off of Johnson trying and failing to ride the superhero movie wave with “Black Adam” in 2022. While “The Smashing Machine” has not been a commercial success, the film and especially Johnson have been praised, including by Nolan.
Again, Nolan loves “Fast & Furious,” and presumably Johnson as DSS agent Luke Hobbs in those movies. How, Nolan asked on the podcast, did Safdie know that Johnson had this performance in him?
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Christopher Nolan loved Dwayne Johnson in The Smashing Machine
Dwayne Johnson as Mark Kerr in The Smashing Machine – A24
“As soon as I met [Johnson], I just knew,” answered Safdie. “It was the way that he spoke to me, the way he was asking questions, there was something behind his eyes that I just saw, and it was also the fact that he was so adamant about wanting to tell this story.”
Nolan praised how the film is “in tune with Mark’s struggle,” which he credited not just to the performance but Safdie’s direction. Much of their conversation centered on how Safdie filmed the fight scenes — both the ones in the ring and Mark’s arguments with his girlfriend, Dawn (Emily Blunt). Safdie said he operated with a self-imposed challenge of trying to create “increased intimacy by pulling the camera back.”
Most of Safdie’s previous films (co-directed with his brother Josh) like “Good Time” and “Uncut Gems” feature handheld, long lens close-ups to create claustrophobia. “The Smashing Machine” moves away from that. A question Safdie was looking to answer was, “Can you get close to somebody from far away?”
“I felt always inside [the film], always very, very connected with it,” Nolan said, “And that’s why I’m so fascinated by the long lenses, the sort of objective distance of things, because I felt unlike your earlier work, on ‘The Curse’ for example, where you’re doing a lot of kind of long lenses […] for the purpose of alienation, a not dissimilar set of techniques has the entirely opposite effect in this film, you feel very in tune with these people.”
If the box office failure of “The Smashing Machine” doesn’t discourage the Rock from further dramatic roles, maybe he can be in the next Christopher Nolan movie.
“The Smashing Machine” is currently playing in theaters.
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