(This story originally appeared on USA TODAY.)
Minor spoiler alert! We’re discussing plot points from “The Smashing Machine” (in theaters now), so be warned if you want to go in completely cold.
With the new sports drama “The Smashing Machine,” director Benny Safdie and Hollywood megastar Dwayne Johnson want audiences to experience the world of a mixed martial arts fighter through their eyes.
For Mark Kerr, the Ultimate Fighting Championship pioneer played by Johnson, watching his life unfold on screen has been “therapeutic.” He tears up recalling the 15-minute standing ovation at the movie’s Venice Film Festival premiere. “Smashing Machine” follows Kerr in the late 1990s on his quest to be the greatest fighter in the world but also tackles his struggles with painkillers and volcanic relationship with girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt).
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“Parts of me were just so hard on everybody around me, especially the addiction part,” Kerr, 56, says in a video chat. “At the time, I didn’t understand how it just impacts every single person in my orbit.”
“Smashing Machine” follows Kerr’s career in the late 1990s on a quest to be the greatest fighter in the world but also tackles his dependence on opioids and volcanic relationship with girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt). Safdie had “deep conversations” with Kerr in crafting a narrative around the complicated balancing act of his emotional and physical selves.
“That’s what the movie’s about, that struggle to come to peace with yourself, that struggle to become aware of who you are,” Safdie says. And while he aims for it to be a “truthful representation,” the director did change things from real life, “putting people in rooms they weren’t, making things up and trying to glean things about what happened.”
The “Smashing Machine” himself discusses what’s fact and what’s fictionalized:
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Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson, second from right) takes a picture with his opponent (Oleksandr Usyk, far right) after a match in “The Smashing Machine.”
In “Smashing Machine,” Mark transitions from freestyle wrestling to the fledgling days of extreme fighting in 1997 and goes on an undefeated streak. The matches are pretty violent, with nasty punches to the face and vicious knees to the head. After one win, Mark meets up with his opponent afterward but there’s no ill will − instead, manly embraces happen and pictures are taken.
In real life, Kerr was also surprised by this in his early days. He had an “absolutely brutal” contest with Brazilian MMA star Fabio Gurgel in his home country, “to the point where I was trying to take his will to win and he just wouldn’t give it to me. I was frustrated and I put my thumb in his cuts and all this other stuff.” The day after his victory, Gurgel’s wife called Kerr and invited him over for lunch, and although Kerr worried he might get jumped, instead the two fighters had an enjoyable meal and chat. It was a “pivotal” moment, he says. “It set the tone for me of this is how you carry yourself.”
Did the ’Smashing Machine’ buy his girlfriend a Japanese vase that she smashed on purpose?
In one of film’s early moments showing Mark’s softer side, he’s in Japan shopping for a souvenir for Dawn and buys a gorgeous gold-leaf bowl (plus a scarf because she likes colorful things). Later on in the movie, during one of Mark and Dawn’s domestic disputes, she hurls the bowl to the ground, leaving it in many metaphorical pieces.
In reality, it was an expensive silk robe rather than a bowl. Safdie wanted “that violent explosion,” Kerr says, and it was “a lot easier to break” a bowl than to tear apart a robe, which is what actually happened. “For Dawn to hurt me, it was like, ‘Yeah, OK. You got this for me and (now) it’s ripped up.’ ”
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Did Mark Kerr’s girlfriend really pull out a handgun during an argument?
Director Benny Safdie (far left) goes over a particularly emotional scene with Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson on the set of “The Smashing Machine.”
“The Smashing Machine” depicts several fights between Mark and Dawn, some of them smaller – like using the wrong milk in his smoothie – but others quite harrowing. In the film’s climactic tussle, the couple is having an increasingly volatile disagreement and she pulls out a handgun, tearfully holding it close to her head in the bathroom. Mark acts quickly to defuse the situation, and it ends with Mark holding her and both of them shattered emotionally.
That “extremely powerful” moment plays out on screen much like it did in real life. Kerr says Dawn “didn’t know anything about handguns” and had never even shot one when she pulled a Glock 23 out of nightstand, and was unaware the gun didn’t have a safety. The whole scenario shook him.
“She was a little girl that just needed to be loved and I had no clue how to love her. Like, no clue at all,” he says. “So she was just crying and asking for it. Now we tried this way and that way, and it just was not the way that she needed to be loved or accepted.”
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The movie does have some lighter, loving moments between Mark and Dawn, who married in 2000, had a son and later divorced. In one scene, they’re at a carnival and Dawn wants to go on a Gravitron-type ride but Mark doesn’t, citing his sensitive “tummy.” He waits for her and ends up having his own fun on a carousel.
Kerr told Safdie about “something similar” that happened, where Dawn was more “adventurous” than he was, and the filmmaker hatched the scene to show what he’s like in vs. out of the ring. “As bad a dude as I am, realistically this (carousel is) more my speed,” he says with a laugh.
Kerr also gave Safdie a note on the scene: “I go, ‘I probably don’t use the word ‘tummy’ but that’s OK.’ ”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How accurate is The Rock’s depiction of ‘Smashing Machine’ Mark Kerr?
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