When it came to playing the brutal, battered and drug addled UFC fighter Mark Kerr in his new movie, “The Smashing Machine,” Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson agreed to a hard bargain.
It was clear that there would be scenes of extreme ring violence. After all, the movie takes place in the 1990s, when UFC bouts were anything-goes bloodbaths. Wound gouging and head-butting made for such a spectacle that the late Senator John McCain disparaged the sport as “human cockfighting.”
In the spirit of maintaining authenticity, director Benny Safdie and The Rock made a pact that is virtually unheard of for a Hollywood star vehicle. “At one point, I said to Dwayne, ‘I don’t want to cut away. I think it’s important that we see him get hit,’” Safdie told The Post. “We talked about this early on, the one moment when he was actually going to get punched in the face.”
When that moment of bonafide contact was nigh, for a scene in which Kerr gets savaged, The Rock said to Safdie, “OK this is it.”
Then, Safdie remembered, “Dwayne said to the [stuntman playing the opposing] fighter, ‘Yoko, you’ve got to hit me.’ Yoko was, like, ‘I’m sorry, sir. I’m not going to do that.’ Dwayne said, ‘You have to. You know [where to hit me] to not break my jaw or kill me. Give it to me!’” At that point explained Safdie, “He gets hit in the head for real. It doesn’t look the way a fake punch would look.”
And that was not the only difficult request made by Safdie. Incredibly, he told The Rock – one of the most muscular and primed individuals in the world – he needed to somehow get even bigger for the role.
“Dwayne is a big guy, and Mark is a bigger guy. So, I told Dwayne that he needs to get puffier. He said, ‘Okay, give me four months.’ Dwayne built himself up to have the body that Mark had – and he changed his body based on the fights he was having.”
The star had to put on 30 pounds of muscle – which is no small feat, and it came in addition to the 32 prosthetic pieces he regularly donned.
It reached a point, said Safdie, “that he was acting with his back.”
Such a quest for verisimilitude is consistent with the entire movie – also starring Emily Blunt as Kerr’s then girlfriend Dawn Staples – which opens with grainy footage that appears anything but staged.
“My wife got me an early UFC shirt that reads ‘As real as it gets’ on the back,” said Safdie, who was approached by Johnson following the release of “Uncut Gems” (which he codirected with his brother Josh, whose own debut solo effort “Marty Supreme” is scheduled for release in December). “That was my main motto. This whole thing needs to look like it really happened.”
In fact, the scripted film, which dropped in theaters on Friday, was inspired by a 2002 documentary “The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr.” That film helped get Johnson and Safdie going on this idea.
“As I watched [the documentary], I instantly felt like I could understand Mark and I fell in love with him,” said Safdie, speaking of a man with a Mr. Universe build who intellectually broke down his need to physically destroy opponents.
The documentary captures him saying, “I don’t go out to try and punch a guy’s face in; sometimes I have to.”
Continued Safdie, “I could understand his struggles, what he had been through, what he was trying to hide from the world, putting on a face for other people but struggling on the inside.”
Mark “The Smashing Machine” Kerr broke out, beginning with his debut fight in 1997, as an early superstar of mixed martial arts. At the same time, it’s been reported that he was so unsure of himself that he wanted to back off of his first fight and only relented after being told it would cause a riot.
Nevertheless, he crushed opponents inside UFC’s signature octagon ring, as well as more traditional rings around the world — thus earning his nickname. However, he also crushed himself. Loaded up with steroids and addicted to opiates, he overdosed at least once.
Safdie’s warts-and-all portrayal tells the story of someone who may have been too philosophical for the world he put himself into. He had been an elite college wrestler at Syracuse University and, following a stint as a rock ‘n’ roll roadie (hauling equipment for The Who and The Rolling Stones), a former teammate introduced him to mixed martial arts as a profession. In need of money and wanting to do something that was at least parallel to the sport he loved, Kerr decided to go for it.
“Mark was not the guy who got joy from pounding the hell out of another person,” John Hyams, who directed the documentary, told The Post. “But he happened to be really good at it.
“He was completely terrified by the idea of what he was doing. Then he went in and obliterated everyone in front of him. Suddenly he was on a roller coaster where he was the best guy at what he did and was making more money that he could have imagined.”
Johnson also observed this while working with Kerr to make the movie, noting to NPR that he is a “physical anomaly,” because of his huge brawn, coupled with the ability to “move like a cheetah” and harness his viciousness to win.
And yet outside of the ring, “he is sweet and he’s so gentle,” Johnson said.
In real life, Kerr’s greatest opponent was addiction, brought on by the emptiness he often felt.
“After a fight, it is the loneliest place in the world, even if you win,” Kerr told The Rock in an interview for Sports Illustrated. “You’ve got nothing in front of you.”
In both the feature and the doc, after a fight in Japan he asks a medic for opiates and becomes annoyed to be offered nothing stronger than Tylenol. Back home in Arizona, driving his car, he hits up his physician for something that could be injected. In his house, the doc and the feature show him shooting drugs.
“Mark was addicted to opiates,” said Hyams. “He was dealing with pain all the time. But it wasn’t just physical pain. It was also psychological pain of knowing you are obligated to fight a person, on a certain day, several months away.”
Art Davie, who created UFC (currently owned by TKO Group Holdings), puts into perspective the pre-bout dread that a fighter could feel: “You’re going into an arena, dressed in your underwear, in front of a whole bunch of strangers and you will punch and kick a guy you don’t know very well. It’s a crazy business.”
As Kerr himself – who once hit an opponent so hard that the bruiser’s teeth went flying out of the ring – put it about the violent nature of his chosen sport, “There are methods to try to facilitate a will being forfeited. It’s a weird psychology.”
He likened the winning of a fight to an orgasm. For the SI interview, he said, “I’m putting enough pressure on you to give it up. I’m taking your will to win. It’s like taking your will to live. It’s that powerful.”
He got straightened out with rehab and is currently clean. However, his glory as an MMA fighter was diminished after the OD. Kerr began his career with a stunning 11-0 record (winning fights in Brazil, the UFC octagon and the Japanese MMA league that was known as PRIDE Fighting Championships) but then ended up on a losing streak, finishing at 15-11.
After the fighting ended, Kerr got his real estate license and later sold cars. Right now, though, “The Smashing Machine,” is drawing early Oscar buzz – and snagged a standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival.
Kerr also got inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame this past June, one more indication of how the pioneering MMA fighter is finally getting his due.
The movie includes a glimpse of Kerr playing himself, shopping in a supermarket, walking out to his car and smiling. “We’re seeing him in real life,” said Safdie of the scene.
“I wanted to show that the guy you see walking down the supermarket aisle … You might brush him off as just this nice guy. But he’s lived a life that you would never imagine.”
