Before Benny Safdie began shooting The Smashing Machine, Mark Kerr gave the filmmakers a wrestling lesson.
The movie’s stunt team and others gathered around the padded ring at the Vancouver soundstage that functioned as homebase for the production to absorb a lecture from the two-time former UFC Heavyweight Tournament Champion. Kerr, the subject of Safdie’s biopic, was happy to oblige.
“You want to get me to light up?” Kerr told me in his gentle, inviting voice. “Have me teach wrestling.”
Working from the mat, Kerr demonstrated a series of foundational maneuvers like the double-leg takedown, something he’s executed thousands of times in training and in competition. Typically, he walks his opponent down to close the distance between them. Then, from a standing position, he lunges forward on his right leg, letting his left leg trail behind him. He penetrates, wraps his arms behind his opponent’s legs, braces his head against their midsection, lifts, gathers momentum, and then drives them to the ground. Kerr excelled at the move and still has the cauliflower ear to prove it.
Afterwards, Safdie, who brought his two young sons to work that day, threw Kerr for a loop. He asked to be on the receiving end of a double-leg takedown from the Smashing Machine himself.
Kerr shook his head. “I don’t think you want me to take you to the ground,” he told the acclaimed writer/director. “I’m just a little too big.”
Instead, Greg Rementer, the supervising stunt coordinator, a man with years of experience making painful things hurt less, double-legged Safdie while Kerr and the rest of the room observed. As his dad hit the mat, one of Safdie’s sons cried out, “No!”
The adults laughed, understanding it wasn’t real.
“How do you keep someone safe when you want ‘em to beat the shit out of each other?”
Every day, on set and off, Rementer said that he and his team toed the line addressing this question. Considerable time and attention went into achieving era-appropriate brutality without seriously injuring anyone, especially the star of The Smashing Machine, Dwayne Johnson, one of the most bankable and in-demand actors in Hollywood. Nobody wants to be the guy who accidentally broke the Rock’s orbital bone in pursuit of realism.
About twelve weeks before filming began, Rementer and his team put Johnson through MMA boot camp. “Practicing combos, learning standup, learning takedowns, and learning ground game specific to Mark Kerr,” he explained.
During his peak years, fighting at events for UFC and the Japanese league Pride, Kerr entered the ring weighing around 265 pounds. Because he competed as a wrestler in high school and college, and then trained at the Olympic level, his early style drew heavily on that skill set, as opposed to other mixed martial arts disciplines such as jiu jitsu. On the ground, he used his size and weight to pin his opponent to the mat and lay the hammers down. The Smashing Machine covers just a few years in Kerr’s career, during which he evolved from that wrestling-heavy style into a more comprehensive one, and the fights would have to depict that evolution in detail.
Kerr worked closely with Johnson, breaking down his style into easily understood fundamentals. Like Johnson, Kerr played high school football and could say to the star embodying him, “My double-leg [takedown] is like a tackle in football. I put it in the frame of reference and it was like, ‘Boom.’” With real respect, Kerr recalled coaching Johnson and then watching him visualize the lesson, his expression going almost blank, then saying, “OK. Got it.”
“All the stuff he’s done with wrestling and football, he can pick up on it mechanically and understand, OK, if I do this, this, and this, then that’s what I’m trying to accomplish,” Kerr said.
This sort of exchange of ideas was an old dynamic for Kerr and Johnson. Decades earlier, in the late 1990s, the two met to discuss professional fighting. At the time, they both worked out at the storied Gold’s Gym in Venice, and Johnson, early on in his pro wrestling career, was rehabbing a PCL tear. “We bumped into each other a couple different times,” Kerr said, “and at one point he’s like, ‘Hey, you want to grab lunch?’”
It was only years later that Kerr realized their conversation over lunch was more like an inquiry. Johnson asked the fighter questions like, ‘How do the Japanese pay? Do they pay you on time? How’s the work schedule?” The Rock was floating the possibility of leaving the WWE for a career in MMA.
“He had a lot of the same demeanor that I had,” Kerr said. “He was quiet, softspoken, very patient. He’d ask a question and not talk over you, just sit there and listen. It's one of the qualities that I admire a lot about DJ, his ability to be totally present and in the moment with you.” Those traits made it easy for Kerr to trust Johnson with his story when it came time to make the movie.
Benny Safdie did not want to use visual effects and preferred to limit the use of stunt doubles in The Smashing Machine. Verisimilitude, after all, is a central idea turned over in all of his work. He prefers a documentary style — “voyeuristic” was the word Rementer used — and as such, the fights needed to play out in long takes and wide shots.
Rementer described practical approaches to safety that would suit Safdie’s vision, like placing additional padding in the gloves to allow for light contact or adding padding beneath the ring to cushion a fall. Depending on camera position, it was possible to simulate hits by having an actor punch an offscreen pad instead of someone’s body. But given Safdie’s demands, easy solutions were seldom on the table. The performers, Johnson included, needed to train to throw punches and pull back rather than push through. They had to bring a fist or knee at full speed to their opponent’s body or face without contact.
It was Safdie’s idea to cast real MMA fighters in the film. These professionals could not only help Johnson better understand the technique, but they could also push the envelope on what was possible, toeing the line of acceptable contact.
Ryan Bader plays Kerr’s good friend and sometimes rival Mark Coleman, the inaugural UFC Heavyweight Champion nicknamed “The Hammer” for his “ground and pound” technique. (The real-life Coleman’s one note to Bader: “Make me look like a savage.”) Like Kerr and Coleman, Bader was a college wrestler before becoming a professional fighter, participating in his first UFC event in 2008. He had never acted in a movie and was most surprised at how comfortable he felt on set, despite the physically and emotionally violent subject matter; Bader acts opposite Johnson in one of the most devastating scenes of the movie, a confrontation between the friends about Kerr’s drug use.
Rementer broke the fights down into as few as five or as many as 12 sections that they would train for and rehearse. The real fights acted as models but according to Kerr, they’re not move for move recreations in every case. The actual shoots were grueling, often taking place over just one or two nights—shorter than other films Rementer’s worked on. According to Bader, the shoots were “sometimes harder than a real fight.”
“We went hard,” Bader said. “Going super hard and then letting your body cool off and doing that over and over again for sometimes three to four hours banged up my knee a little bit.” He said that some of the stuntmen playing his opponents were former fighters and “we kind of had a little handshake deal” to make it look real, including some actual contact. “A couple of those punches were real,” Bader said.
Bas Rutten, who trained Kerr during his prime, plays himself in The Smashing Machine, and in one instance egged on a moment of real contact behind the scenes. It was Yoko Hamamura’s first day shooting a fight scene with Johnson, and he was being asked to break “the cardinal rule” of stunts. “As stuntmen, we never touch an actress or an actor,” Hamamura said. But Johnson wanted him to punch him in the face during their next sequence. “I was going against everything that I was taught not to do.”
A larger-than-life character, Rutten urged Hamamura to do it. Hamamura then looked to his boss, Rementer, for guidance. He “shrugged his shoulders and he’s like, ‘Do what DJ asked,’” Hamamura said.
With Rementer’s permission, Hamamura—a former professional fighter turned stunt person—prepared to lay into one of the most famous mugs on the planet. At 65-to-70 percent power, of course—anything less would look fake and anything more would be dangerous.
“I punched him about 20 times in the face, nonstop. Hammer fisting, punches straight to the cheek. I mean, he was taking quite a beating,” Hamamura said. They filmed the sequence multiple times and each time Hamamura did what Johnson asked.
“That's when I really truly appreciated him as a performer,” he said, “being able to act through all this stuff.”
When it was over, Johnson thanked him. “He shook my hand afterwards,” Hamamura said. “He was like, ‘Dude, that was amazing.’”
Ross Scarano is a writer and editor from Pittsburgh. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, The Wall Street Journal, The Ringer, GQ, and Pitchfork.