A lot of eyes are going to be on the upcoming drama The Smashing Machine when it arrives later this year. The movie will see Dwayne Johnson in a rare dramatic turn, the sort of role even The Rock admits may have scared him a little. But seeing the nearly unrecognizable actor in a serious drama isn’t the only thing that will be unique in the movie.
The Smashing Machine is about early UFC fighter Mark Kerr, and as such, we can expect some potentially action-packed sequences that show Kerr competing. However, director Benny Safdie tells Vanity Fair these scenes won’t be up close and inside the ring like we’re used to seeing in Rocky movies. Instead, the audience will get the experience of being the audience at a UFC fight. Safdie said…
I wanted it to feel like you were at the fight, ringside. I put all these rules on myself—I said, ‘It’s like our camera crew has third-tier press passes. We can’t get the primo spots, we have to be behind everybody and fight our way through. When you are distanced and you have that voyeur point of view, it can be hard to access the person. But I learned on The Curse that you can do both. You can have it be far away, but also be directly in their heads at the same time.
The Smashing Machine is based on a documentary, and Benny Safdie wanted to film the movie in a documentary style. To that end, he brought in Maceo Bishop as DP, who had previously worked on The Curse, Safdie’s reality TV-influenced black comedy.
Going with a documentary style of filming explains the decision to take the camera back to the audience perspective during the fight scenes rather than get up close and personal. This method of filmmaking also extended to the movie’s more intimate moments, including the clashes between Johnson’s Mark Kerr and Kerr’s girlfriend Dawn Staples, played by Emily Blunt. Johnson says the sets were constructed so that the actors couldn’t even see the cameras that were filming them…
You didn’t see a camera—you didn’t see a light, a setup, nothing.
It certainly had to have been an interesting filming experience to have all of the elements of filmmaking hidden from view. The style has the potential to add an element of rawness to The Smashing Machine. The film will chronicle Mark Kerr’s experience with both substance abuse and a violent home life.
Whatever happens with The Smashing Machine, Dwayne Johnson looks poised to attempt a new era in his career. He has a second film with A24 already planned, and he’s even set to make a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese.
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