Paul Thomas Anderson figured out how to get the best out of Benny Safdie on the set of Anderson’s 2021 Licorice Pizza.
Safdie, known for writing and directing grimy, jittery, unpredictable New York stories with his brother Josh, was playing a new kind of character for Anderson: Joel Wachs, an idealistic, clean-cut, closeted Los Angeles city councilman.
But at one point, Anderson wanted a little more from Safdie’s performance.
“There was a moment shooting Licorice Pizza where Paul said, ‘I don’t think we can do much better than that,’ and it was a very playful way to amp me up to try and do better,” recalls Safdie. “It was relaxed, too, but he knew what he was doing.”
Benny Safdie knows what he’s doing, too. His new film The Smashing Machine — which just premiered at the Venice Film Festivals to strong reviews — is his first outing as a solo writer, director and editor. It originated with Dwayne Johnson approaching the Safdie brothers about adapting John Hyams’ 2002 documentary, also called The Smashing Machine, into a feature film.
It’s Johnson’s chance to prove he’s more than Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, the wrestler-turned-movie star and IP king better known for supercharging franchises than for subtle character work: He first worked with his Smashing Machine co-star, Emily Blunt, on 2021’s The Jungle Cruise, based on a Disney theme park ride.
Johnson met with the Safdies after their 2019 film Uncut Gems, which tapped into Adam Sandler’s prowess as a dramatic actor the same way Johnson and Safdie hope The Smashing Machine can show off Johnson’s acting bona fides. It’s a searing, soaring story about the sacrifice and loss that goes into competition.
It tells the true story of Mark Kerr, the mixed martial artist and UFC Hall of Famer known for steamrolling opponents. But as the film shows, Kerr’s work left him in excruciating pain, and nursing a private opioid addiction.
The film merges Johnson’s acting talents with his real-life experience as a professional fighter. The parallels between the UFC and WWE, where Johnson first rose to fame, hang heavy over The Smashing Machine: Johnson made his WWE debut in 1996, when it was still called the WWF, just a few months before Kerr’s UFC debut in 1997.
Both the WWE and UFC are known for asking everything of their athletes — and sometimes too much.
“It’s a love letter to those who struggle with pain,” says Johnson. “And it’s a love letter to my and Mark’s friends who died young.”
Blunt thinks Johnson may endure more than he lets on, in terms of the burdens of fame. “One day I said to Dwayne, ‘I think it’s heavy being The Rock, isn’t it?’” she says.
Johnson told her no, but she thinks he’s being coy: “I think it is. Who wants to be an all-star all the time? It’s tough.”
Her concern comes across on screen: She plays Dawn Staples, Kerr’s real-life former wife, who tended to catch blame in the couples’ bad times, but not credit in the good. Blunt embraced Safdie’s approach to the story, which involved long, uncut fight scenes, both in and out of the ring.
“Benny blurred the lines between reality and fiction all the time,” says Blunt. “Even how he shoots it, it’s almost like this prowling, observing camera. You almost didn’t ever see a camera. And so it really did feel like high noon when DJ and I had these fights.”
Benny Safdie, Dwayne Johnson and Pigeonholing
Blunt is known for versatility — pulling off everything from the comedy of The Devil Wears Prada to action heroics in A Quiet Place and Edge of Tomorrow to family-friendly charm in Mary Poppins Returns to serious drama in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, in which Safdie also acted.
But Safdie and Johnson have both, at times, been pigeonholed: Johnson is most celebrated as a muscle-bound, agreeable tough guy who often seems to play his likeable self — he’s so widely accepted, in fact, that he’s been the subject of presidential speculation. And Safdie became known years ago as a daring, DIY filmmaker seemingly obsessed with the seedy side of his hometown.
The Smashing Machine is a way for both of them to break out of those corners.
The son of a pro wrestler, Johnson started in football before joining the WWF and quickly establishing himself as a ring superstar with his athleticism and charisma. He made his film debut in 2001’s The Mummy Returns, and in its 2002’s spinoff The Scorpion King, then went on a run of films inspired largely by rides, games, past franchises, and high-concept team-ups: His credits include the Fast and the Furious films, Red Notice movies, DC superhero spectacles and Moana. He sets up projects smartly through 7 Bucks Productions, the production company he co-founded with former wife Dany Garcia and named after a time in the ’90s when, after being cut from the Canadian Football League, he emptied his pockets and found just $7.
By 2019, the year he starred in Hobbs & Shaw and Jumanji: The Next Level, he felt in his gut that he should shake up his career. And he believed a feature version of The Smashing Machine documentary might be the way to do it.
7 Bucks Productions acquired the rights and set up meetings with directors, including the Safdies. “I love those guys and what they made together,” Johnson recalls. “I thought they were really interesting and unique filmmakers.”
The Safdies were the first filmmakers he met with — and Benny Safdie was the last. As the film evolved, the director was undergoing his own career shift.
Origins of The Smashing Machine
Growing up between Queens and Manhattan after their parents’ divorce, Benny, now 39, and Josh Safdie, now 41, became interested in filmmaking thanks to their father’s enthusiasm for recording family life.
Benny followed his older brother to Boston University, and then they returned to New York, working closely together: They wrote, directed, edited, and sometimes acted in their films, often working with a close-knit team of recurring collaborators.
Josh Safdie co-wrote and directed The Pleasure of Being Robbed, and edited it with Benny and Brett Jutkiewicz. The film debuted at South by Southwest in 2008 and established a pattern of gritty, street-level storytelling.
The brothers co-wrote and co-directed 2009’s Daddy Longlegs, a story of a movie-loving divorced dad and his two sons that was inspired by their childhood experiences and was showcased at the Cannes Film Festival.
The Safdies next made Lenny Cooke, a 2013 documentary about a former high school basketball star, and 2014’s Heaven Knows What, a dreamy but brutal depiction of heroin addiction in New York City.
They began to get wide recognition with 2017’s Good Time — a film that director Matt Reeves told MovieMaker in 2022 helped lead him to cast its star, Robert Pattinson, as Batman. Benny Safdie’s performance as Nick Nikas, the developmentally disabled brother of Pattinson’s character, Connie, drives the frenetic, captivating action.
The Safdie brothers’ popularity — and respect among fellow filmmakers — exploded with Uncut Gems, which starred Adam Sandler as a desperate, gambling-addicted jeweler trying to use an expensive gem to pay off his debts. Dark, funny and relentlessly tense, the film was widely acclaimed and became one of A24’s biggest hits.
Though its success led to the meeting with Johnson, The Smashing Machine would soon go on hold, thanks largely to Covid.
So Benny Safdie spent much of the first half of this decade on a series of acting roles. He also got in touch with his true self, separate from a filmmaking identity he shared with his brother.
“Nobody looks at me like a young Jewish dad,” he says with a wry smile. “But that’s who I am. I’m a Jewish guy who has two kids and it was nice that someone saw that.”
He’s referring to director Kelly Fremon Craig, who cast him as loving dad Herb Simon in her 2023 film Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. The film revolves partly around Herb’s interfaith marriage with Barbara Simon (Rachel McAdams) whose Christian parents don’t approve of her marriage to a Jewish man. (Safdie himself is in an interfaith marriage with his wife, Ava, and has said her family is very welcoming.)
Acting in other directors’ films meant getting to see some of the greatest at work. Safdie particularly stood out in 2023 as the Hungarian-American theoretical physicist Edward Teller in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Teller, known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, plays a crucial role in the film: He voices the fear that the world could be destroyed by the device he’s helping J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) build.
Nolan cast Safdie in the role after asking Anderson about the actor’s work in Licorice Pizza. Safdie’s very serious Oppenheimer role became an unlikely viral sensation as people memeified his line, “Until somebody builds a bigger bomb.”
“I saw a meme that said ‘until somebody builds a bigger Mac’ or something like that. I was just like, ‘Oh wow. That’s a thing now,’” says Safdie. “It’s weird because you have no idea when you’re doing it. I’m just delivering these lines in a Hungarian accent.”
By 2024, something had changed in his partnership with Josh, and the two Safdies called it quits on their filmmaking partnership. Benny Safdie has called the split amicable, and a natural progression of what they both want to explore. Josh has not publicly commented.
The two continue to share a production company, Elara Pictures, which has recently worked on 2023’s The Curse — a show Benny Safdie co-created with Nathan Fielder, which stars the two of them and Emma Stone. Other Elara projects include director Alex Braverman’s Andy Kauffman documentary Thank You Very Much and director Matt Wolf’s HBO documentary Pee-Wee as Himself.
The Smashing Machine arrives in October, and Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, a sports adventure starring Timothée Chalamet and co-written with longtime Safdie brother collaborator Ronald Bronstein, debuts at Christmas. Both films will be released by their longtime production partner, A24.
Benny Safdie is ready for the inevitable comparisons.
“It’s so funny to me because it’s like, ‘Hey, we both made a movie.’ Whatever happens, happens,” he says. “I’m excited to see what he does, but it’s just like we were making movies together and now we’re making movies apart. People are going to do whatever they do. I’m just psyched.”
He recalls that last fall, he was on the Upper West Side when someone told him about a film set in the city: “You have to head down to Orchard Street. They just took that whole place and they turned it into the 1950s.”
It turned out to be for Marty Supreme. The person who told Benny about the radical transformation had no idea it was his brother Josh’s doing.
“It’s kind of cool if you think about it,” Benny Safdie says.
Dwayne Johnson and Benny Safdie on Not Faking It
With The Smashing Machine, he will try to do what Paul Thomas Anderson gently nudged him to do on Licorice Pizza: Do better than he’s done before.
“You should always be trying to get a little bit better or different. I’m trying to do new things in different ways,” Safdie says.
In a pre-production meeting, he pitched a bold idea that adds to the visceral feel of The Smashing Machine: For fight scenes, he wanted the camera to always be outside the ring, with no quick cuts or editing-assisted illusions.
Johnson recalls: “Benny and I were in a meeting, and he said, ‘I have something to pitch you. Tell me I’m crazy and I’ll never bring it up again: I would love to never cut away when you’re in the ring or in the cage.’
“I said, ‘I would love that. I will train hard, and I will come in in the best, and hopefully decent, shape.’”
The approach reached its apex in the film’s recreation of an infamous fight in Japan between Kerr and Kazuyuki Fujita, who is played in the film by actor and MMA fighter Yoko Hamamura.
“I pulled aside Yoko Hamamura,” Johnson recalls. “I said, ‘Hey, you have to hit me in the face.’ And he thought I was kidding. He goes, ‘No, no, I can’t do that.’ I said, ‘I mean it. I’m not trying to be a tough guy. You know what happened in this fight with Kerr and Fujita, and Benny’s not cutting away.’”
Safdie jumped into the conversation to confirm: “I’m not going to cut away. I’m staying right there.”
Johnson insisted: “Please, please rock me. We got one shot with this. … You know how to hit. If you hit me here, I think you’re going to break my jaw. If you hit me up here, you’re going to break my cheekbone. If you could somehow… we get one shot at this, so rock me.’”
Hamamura did as he was asked, and the scene appears prominently in the Smashing Machine trailer, released in April.
“He f—ing rocked me so hard,” Johnson recounts. “It winds up in the trailer, where I’m up on my knees, and I’m wobbly and dazed. I was concussed and wobbly for days after that. But we didn’t cut away. And I’m glad we didn’t because that was a very pivotal fight for Mark that actually changed his life.
“Benny wouldn’t let us fake it,” Johnson adds. “If Mark got rocked, I got rocked.”
Safdie and stunt coordinator Greg Rementer meticulously mapped out every round and takedown, but the pain was real.
“There’s a level of respect for what these fighters go through. You can’t fake that. You have to feel it,” says Johnson.
“Dwayne had to learn how to fight like Mark, to really make it feel believable,” explains Safdie. “That’s the first thing that takes you out of a movie like this — if you can just tell they’re not doing this stuff.”
The rest of the film sought the same believability: Cinematographer Maceo Bishop, who worked on The Curse, shot The Smashing Machine movie on 16mm film, lending a textured, frank aesthetic. The cast includes Ukrainian boxer Oleksandr Usyk as fighter Igor Vovchanchyn, and one of Kerr’s real-life trainers, Bas Rutten, as himself
Prosthetic artist Kazu Hiro, meanwhile, reshaped Johnson’s face to take away the visage so familiar to audiences.
“The whole goal was just to disappear. I wanted that for so long,” says Johnson. “Without the prosthetics, Mark and I have some similarities. We’re bald and kind of the same size.”
Safdie and Johnson went back and forth with Hiro, an Oscar winner for both Darkest Hour and Bombshell, to find the right version of Kerr. Safdie maintained from the beginning that he didn’t want to completely lose Johnson behind prosthetics.
“There were a handful of iterations from Kazu, and that went from trying to look like a spitting image of Mark, and then he’d slowly dial it back and modulate it a little bit more here in the eyebrows, a little bit more here in the nose,” says Johnson. “It wound up being around 15 or 16 actual applications of prosthetics.”
Safdie says he fell in love with the contrast of Kerr’s hulking body and vulnerable way of navigating the world.
“He’s aware of how he talked to people and related to people. He was very sweet. He was the opposite of who he was in the ring,” Safdie says.
He describes the difference between fiction and documentary as having “a little bit more control of the levers”: “You can put the audience in rooms that they weren’t in.”
“I want people to feel what Mark felt,” says Safdie. “I would always say there’s this radical empathy idea that I wanted to do in the movie. To make empathy cool.”
Emily Blunt on Playing Dawn
Key to the sense of empathy is the relationship between Mark and Blunt’s character, Dawn, who is at times the only person who keeps the fighter tethered to the world.
Blunt recalls that as soon as Johnson told her about The Smashing Machine documentary, she watched it, then called him, saying: “You have to make this movie. You were born to play this.”
Watching the doc, Blunt was struck by how Dawn was at times vilified.
“She needed the bakery from Mark and he gave her crumbs,” Blunt says. “They had this insanely codependent, passionate, loving relationship that was like two comets coming together, and the collision could end very badly.”
Both Mark and Dawn struggled with addiction and tried to get each other sober. But even in the best of relationships with fighters, it’s easy for a partner to feel left out.
“Even without the addiction, you’re an outcast if you’re with a fighter. Any wife or girlfriend of a fighter will attest that you are on the outskirts,” says Blunt. “You are not a part of that gang. You are not necessary. But you might be necessary when the fighter experiences the depression that often follows a fight, win or lose. Then you become necessary.”
Blunt says she had her eye on playing Dawn from early on.
“I said to DJ, ‘When you make it, I’ll play Dawn.’ But I didn’t want to push that on Benny,” she recalls. “He might have had someone else in mind. I didn’t want it to be like, I’m muscling my way in. It had to be his decision.”
Safdie, meanwhile, had noted the spark between Blunt and Johnson during their promotional work for Jungle Cruise.
“You could just sense there was such a realness to that. They really wanted each other to succeed. That’s it,” he says.
When Safdie reached out to Blunt about playing Dawn, she says, she was elated to join “the carousel of this mad world.”
She soon became more than a scene partner for Johnson: She was an anchor, confidante, and a collaborator as they plunged into the story’s darkest corners. Their trust, built on Disney’s escapism, paid off in Safdie’s reality.
Johnson likens acting out the addiction and violence in The Smashing Machine to standing on a shoreline, trying to fight big waves. He remembers thinking: “How the f— do I do this?”
The answer, he says, was trusting his collaborators.
“You grab their hand, say, ‘OK, we don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we’re going to do it,’” he says. “We’re going to trust that we’re going to make it through and trust that as we get through this, Benny’s going to be the one to help pull us through.”
Blunt says working on the film “taught me to lean into the brokenness of everybody and not shy away from it.”
Winning and Losing
As we speak with Johnson, there’s a palpable moment when his voice drops and the room seems to shrink. The Rock is gone, and there’s just Dwayne.
A man who misses his friends.
“I lost a lot,” he says, quietly. “I lost a lot of my friends in wrestling. They OD’d, and a few committed suicide. And the last one who committed suicide was a few years ago. He was one of my best friends and he just couldn’t handle the pressure.”
He’s talking about Brian Christopher Lawler, who died by suicide in 2018 at the age of 46.
At the time, Johnson wrote on Instagram of Lawler: “Hurts my heart to know how Brian decided to check out. I never knew him to be suicidal, but I guess sometimes the pain just gets to be too much for one to take.”
Johnson counts Mark Kerr as “one of the lucky ones. He OD’d twice” — but he survived.
Johnson and Blunt went to the UFC Hall of Fame Induction ceremony in June, where Johnson presented Kerr with a trophy celebrating his induction as the 21st member of the Hall of Fame’s Pioneer Era Wing.
“It’s not about the wins, it’s about the pressure to win,” Johnson said in his speech inducting Kerr. “In Mark Kerr’s case, and I think this goes for life, sometimes the winning becomes the enemy, and the thing that really matters is actually in the loss.”
The idea that “winning becomes the enemy” became a mantra while making The Smashing Machine.
“As we were shooting the film, that was a phrase that we kept repeating to each other. That kind of anchor just shifts you psychologically. It let us look at these scenes differently. We looked at Mark and Dawn’s life differently,” Johnson says.
“In that world, succeeding is being on top, and you realize that in the pressure of winning, human beings break. As capable as they seem to be, they break. And hopefully, they don’t become broken. Hopefully, they break and they heal. Right? Because the road to being completely broken — we know where that road ends,” he adds.
“How willing you are to heal and open up and be vulnerable, that’s the greatest lesson.”
The Smashing Machine arrives in theaters October 3 from A24.