MMA legend Mark Kerr compares the movie to his real-life story

This article contains spoilers for The Smashing Machine.

The Smashing Machine‘s most important critic is the man who inspired it all. And legendary mixed martial arts fighter Mark Kerr tells Entertainment Weekly that the A24 biopic about his life and career is about as close as it can possibly get to the true story.

Written and directed by Benny Safdie, the gritty sports drama (in theaters now) stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as the UFC fighter and MMA pioneer. The movie follows the rise and fall of Kerr’s career from 1997 to 2000, based on HBO’s 2002 documentary The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr, as well as his fraught relationship with now-ex-wife Dawn Staples (played by Emily Blunt) and struggle with opiate addiction.

The first time Kerr watched the film, Safdie showed him an unfinished cut, curious to see if he was on the right path. Kerr watched it with his brother Michael and Safdie, and was moved to tears by the end of it.

“We stood up, crying, and then I’m hugging Benny,” Kerr says. “And out of the corner of my eye, I see Dwayne and Emily had snuck in the theater — they didn’t want to interfere with my experience with it. They decided, ‘No, we’re going to come in at the end of it when the credits roll.’ And we sat down and talked for probably 45 minutes to an hour after.”

Kerr says the biopic is “incredible” with how “authentically as possible” it tells his true life story. “It just blew me away,” he adds.

However, there are some key differences in how Safdie portrayed pivotal scenes. Below, Kerr and Safdie explain where the movie differs from the true story behind it.

Mark’s early, dominant wins

The movie opens with Kerr’s first MMA tournament, the World Vale Tudo Championships in Brazil, where he absolutely dominates his opponents swiftly and brutally in every match. His impressive performance in those rounds earns him the nickname, “Smashing Machine.” However, Kerr tells EW that those early wins were actually much more violent than what’s shown onscreen.

“The last fight I had that night was against Fabio Gurgel, and I was frustrated because he wouldn’t quit, meaning he wouldn’t give me his will,” Kerr says. “I crushed his orbital bone all the way back. He never fought again afterward.”

Kerr says Gurgel had to get his entire eye socket replaced with a plastic recreation because “there was no way to rebuild it” after their fight.

“I mean, absolutely brutal,” Kerr adds. “The next day, his wife calls me up and says, ‘Fabio wants to have you up to the house for lunch.’ And it made no sense at all to me. I know physically how badly I hurt this guy. Reluctantly, I go up for lunch, and I’m figuring he’s going to have these other guys up there and they’re going to take their turns holding me down, beating the f— out of me.”

What happened that day, though, changed the course of Kerr’s entire career (but ultimately didn’t make the movie because of time).

“His wife cooked a beautiful lunch and we sat down, she interpreted for a couple hours, and we just talked,” he says. “There’s this complete separation of what happened in that ring. And Fabio, whether he realized in the moment or not, he’s the one that kind of set the standard of how I would carry myself through mixed martial arts. I didn’t talk s— outside the ring. I didn’t need to because when I got in the ring, that was my language. Fabio just gave me a blueprint of how I was going to carry myself through it.”

Mark’s first loss that was changed to “no contest”

After moving on to the Pride Fighting Championships in Japan, Kerr experiences his first loss in the ring. However, he believes his opponent, Igor Vovchanchyn, employed illegal knees to the head, so he takes his complaint all the way to Pride executive Nobuyuki Sakakibara, who ultimately changed the ruling to “no contest.”

According to the filmmaker, the only real changes made to that scene were who Kerr spoke with at different moments, and his emotional crash out later.

“He can’t understand what it means to lose, and the deep emotional pain,” Safdie says. “I don’t know if he went into the locker room and cried like that, but I saw tears in his eyes as he was talking to people [in the documentary] and I thought, ‘I want to see him, all alone, break down.'”

Kerr says that entire movie sequence is “pretty close” to what happened in reality and how poorly he handled losing that match.

“That referee never reffed another one of my matches,” Kerr says. “The way that you complain in Japan is not to the top. You start with your handler, and then they work it up the chain. So for me to go to Sakakibara and complain about what happened in the ring was just not normal.”

And the way in which the movie captures the Japanese exec’s shock over Kerr’s confrontation was totally right, according to Kerr. However, he says he was “a lot more aggressive” towards Sakakibara in real life.

“I was f—ing really pissed, and then it turned from pissed into this, ‘What the f— am I doing?'” Kerr adds. “My opiate use started picking up, and going into that fight, I wasn’t sober. I was on a lot of narcotics. I should have lost. The way that it was portrayed was accurate. This was just the first crack in my facade, and it was really heavy.”

Mark’s overdose

While the movie doesn’t shy away from Kerr’s addiction to painkillers, the moment when he overdoses and ends up in the hospital is not explicitly shown onscreen. Rather, the film recounts him hitting rock bottom through Dawn discussing Kerr’s overdose in a phone conversation with his MMA peer and friend Mark Coleman, which Safdie explains was an intentional choice.

“I don’t think I actually asked him specifically about the moment he was found on the floor, because it’s in the documentary, we were able to see what happened to him,” Safdie says. “Having experienced situations like that in your life, you’re usually surprised by the situation — you have to catch up to what’s going on. I wanted it to be representative of the people around him as the ones that have to respond and pick up the pieces, to see how it affected Dawn and what his friend was going to do in that moment.”

There were some differences in how that moment played out in real life. According to Kerr, it was actually his therapist who found him passed out on the floor when he overdosed, not Dawn. And it was a different wrestling friend who visited Kerr in the hospital to help him realize he needed rehab, not Coleman.

Safdie explains that he often used Coleman as a stand-in for multiple different people in the movie, including Kerr’s own brother. “I want that to be known, because Mark’s brother was very involved in certain parts of his life, and he was very helpful,” the filmmaker adds. “He’s not in the movie in the same way that he was in his life, and I think that he deserves credit for being there for him.”

But despite those minor changes, Kerr was “proud” to see how that scene captured the essence of the shame and guilt he felt as he finally accepted the depths of his addiction.

“I was carrying this thing around and I had nobody to talk to about it. People might’ve suspected, ‘He might be on something,’ but I never confessed,” Kerr says. “That moment where all of it’s out is this relief. When Benny described how he was going to do it, I didn’t know if DJ could get there as an actor. I didn’t know if he could sit in those moments and really digest all of that emotion and then translate it out, but it was brilliant.”

Mark and Dawn’s fight

The movie portrays yet another one of Kerr’s most traumatic moments when he and Dawn get into one of the biggest fights of their relationship. Their cruel insults escalate into Dawn locking herself in the bathroom and holding Kerr’s gun up to her head. Kerr breaks down the door and wrestles the gun away from Dawn, and he restrains her until the cops arrive and take her away.

“The contrast between what happened, and the documentary, and how that scene went down, it was as close to watching a home movie,” Kerr says. “It’s like being a voyeur, watching my life, and almost feeling like I need to turn away. ‘I shouldn’t be watching this.'”

For his part, Safdie admits he had no idea how that fight actually happened in real life.

“I knew the beats of where it ended up,” the filmmaker says. “The things they say hurt one another. Dawn told Emily that Mark would put her down and made her feel not as smart as he was, and Mark would willingly say, ‘I treated her wrong, and I would say things that made her feel bad.’ So I sent what I had written to Mark, because I didn’t know what they said behind closed doors. I just took a crack at it based on my own experiences. And he said, ‘That’s it. That’s what it felt like.'”

Kerr says watching that devastating scene was “visceral” but ultimately “therapeutic” for him all these years later. But he wants to make it clear that Dawn “didn’t know anything about handguns,” and wasn’t actually trying to kill herself in that moment.

“In my nightstand next to my bed, I always kept a Glock handgun, which doesn’t have a safety on it,” Kerr says. “And I always kept a round chambered. Normally, if you have a gun around, you don’t have a round chambered, and she doesn’t know any of this. She takes it out without being aware that her finger’s in the trigger guard, and she doesn’t understand that it doesn’t take much pressure to pull that trigger to discharge the bullet, and there’s no putting the bullet back in the gun once it’s fired.”

Kerr explains that moment was Dawn’s “ultimate cry for help.”

“She’s just this little girl asking me to love her and pay attention to her, and I have no clue how to do it as a little boy that’s dealing with his own set of problems,” he adds. “That desperation, looking back on it, that’s how emotionally sick both of us were. Mental illness and all these different things, 25 years ago, it wasn’t like it is now. Watching a movie of my time back then and watching me, I could actually sit there in the movie theater and clearly see my part better than I ever have. I could see how hard I was on the people I loved, and how hard I was on Dawn.”

The only part of that scene that wasn’t true? The gift that Kerr previously gave Dawn, which she ultimately destroys during their argument. Safdie warned Kerr in advance that he had changed expensive silk robes into a delicate Japanese bowl so she could shatter it on the ground, and Kerr admits “it had more impact” in the movie.

“I bought Dawn these really, really expensive silk robes. Back then, I think they were $1,000 a robe,” Kerr says. “Dawn tore the robes up in front of me, and so that was represented by the bowl being shattered, then rebuilt. But the symbolism was the same.”

Mark’s first real loss in the ring

Kerr and Dawn’s domestic dispute foreshadows his first official loss in the ring in the Pride Grand Prix 2000 Finals. After advancing to the quarterfinals, Kerr lost to Kazuyuki Fujita, marking the end of the rise of his career.

Safdie only made slight changes to the ending, like adding a conversation Kerr has with a doctor after the loss. “I really wanted to show what the loss did to Mark, compared to what it did to him in the beginning of the movie,” the filmmaker says. “You’re seeing the same thing happen, but you’re seeing a different person respond to it. We’re now seeing him in the same position as the guy we saw in the beginning who had lost, and I just wanted to show Mark finally, willingly, acknowledging that he lost.”

Kerr says that Johnson “did a great job” portraying what happened during that pivotal fight, as he fought until he literally dropped.

“Most people don’t know that the rules for that fight were 15-minute rounds,” Kerr says. “Royce Gracie, who participated in the event, said, ‘The only way I’m doing this is if there’s 15-minute rounds,’ but a normal mixed martial arts event right now is five-minute rounds.”

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About 12 minutes into that single 15-minute round, Kerr remembers hitting a wall that he just “couldn’t climb over.”

“I’m on the ground, and for whatever reason, the thought that came to my head was, ‘I signed up for this, this is my penance. This is the price I have to pay,'” he says. “They paid to come in and see me fight regardless if I won or lost, so there’s no reason for me to tap out. So it was me taking a beating for two minutes from Fujita, just kneeing me and kicking me, and me just trying to defend points where it’s going to hurt worse than others.”

While he was never the same after that fight, the loss represented an important shift in his perspective that was important for Safdie to include.

“As I got to know Mark, I realized that his process of recovery, both from drugs but also just bad feelings and emotional clarity, was very beautiful,” the filmmaker says. “‘This is not who I am. I’m going to change how I define myself.'”

Spoken like a true legend.

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