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Christopher Nolan has eclectic taste. His influences as a filmmaker range from Stanley Kubrick (“Interstellar” is Nolan doing “2001: A Space Odyssey”<\/a>) to Michael Mann<\/a> to Terrence Malick. Yet he also<\/em> enjoys more lowbrow films like the “Fast & Furious” franchise<\/a> and the NASCAR comedy “Talladega Nights.”<\/a><\/p>\n On a recent episode of “The Director’s Cut” podcast<\/a>, Nolan appeared alongside Benny Safdie (a director\/actor who appeared in Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” as Hungarian psychist Edward Teller<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n 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\u00a0not<\/em> 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<\/a>, the film and especially Johnson have been praised, including by Nolan.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n