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B
enny Safdie desperately wants to tell me about the time he got punched in the face.
Over a long breakfast at Old John’s Luncheonette — the kind of New York diner that, despite a recent renovation, still emanates a distinct greasy-spoon vibe — the 39-year-old writer, director, and actor will wax poetic on a number of topics: elementary particle physics, the benefits of therapy, geeking out with Christopher Nolan, It’s a Wonderful Life. He’s as good a conversationalist as he is a filmmaker, and as one half of the duo responsible for movies like 2017’s Good Time and 2019’s Uncut Gems, that’s saying something. Those gritty, often harrowing, and oddly funny character studies helped Robert Pattinson and Adam Sandler dig into darker sides they didn’t normally get to display, and Safdie’s latest work, The Smashing Machine (hitting theaters on October 3rd), is about to do the same for Dwayne Johnson.
But first, Safdie needs to explain why he spent years chasing this new film, a biopic about early MMA champion Mark Kerr, in the first place. A while back, Benny was going to play a boxer in a project he was developing with his brother, Josh. So he started training at a gym. “You walk in, and there are all these loud noises, big guys punching shit, hitting each other,” Safdie says. “And you’re immediately like, ‘I want to learn how to do this.’” He was told he had talent and strength. Maybe the kid should consider an amateur bout.
Then, while sparring one day, Benny found himself on the receiving end of a KO. “I just got my ass kicked,” he says, shaking his head. “I got handed so many punches that I blacked out. I remember coming to, and everyone was like, ‘Don’t sit down. You’ll pass out.’ But it was the best feeling in the world. I said thank you to the guy who beat the shit outta me. Because now I knew what it was like. I was part of it.”
The role never happened — the pugilist character eventually turned into the developmentally disabled brother Benny played in Good Time — but Safdie was left wanting to communicate what he called “the love and compassion and empathy in that world of violence.” And when he discovered a 2002 documentary about Kerr (also called The Smashing Machine), he felt he’d found the perfect vehicle. Safdie had seen UFC fights with his stepdad in the early pay-per-view days of the sport, “back when it was still banned [almost] everywhere but Connecticut, and too hot to watch on television.”
He’d never heard of Kerr, however, until Johnson, a fan of Uncut Gems, reached out to the Safdies. Back when he was rising up the pro-wrestling ranks in the late 1990s and considering a transition to the MMA circuit, Johnson had met Kerr. Later, after the artist formerly known as the Rock caught up with that original doc around 2008, he bought the rights to Kerr’s story, filled with professional triumph and personal tragedy. Johnson envisioned playing the fighter — and he thought the Safdies were the ones to help him bring the biopic to the screen.
“There’s a juxtaposition of grit and desperation along with these loving moments in Gems,” Johnson says, in a separate Zoom interview. “I felt like, ‘I’m watching something that I shouldn’t be seeing’ — like, that’s how intimate it felt. And that was what I was looking for.”
Johnson sent the brothers the documentary, which immediately struck a chord with Benny. But then Covid hit, and the project “just drifted away,” Safdie says. He began developing the gloriously surreal series The Curse — about married real estate developers giving a small town a TV makeover — with his friend Nathan Fielder. “But I never stopped thinking about the movie.” One day in 2019, Safdie saw a famous image of Kerr wearing a Nautica sweater and tracked down a similar garment online in Johnson’s size. He sent it to Johnson, along with a handwritten note that read, “If you ever make this, whether I’m part of it or not, I hope this sweater helps you get into the mindset.”
Much has been made of the fact that Benny pursued The Smashing Machine project on his own, but he says there is no friction with Josh — the reasons are all quite practical. A follow-up to Uncut Gems that the Safdies had been working on with Sandler had hit a few snags, and Benny began to follow his muse in a slightly different direction. And in reality, the brothers had always “made things separately,” he says. Back when they were both attending Boston University, Benny made a short, while his older brother Josh worked on a feature entitled The Pleasure of Being Robbed. (It was Benny who took two separate phone calls from Cannes, saying that both movies had been accepted to play the festival; the French programmers had no idea the two men were related until he told them.) There was never a plan to work together per se, Benny says. When they started working on a prickly story about their father which turned into the 2009 feature Daddy Longlegs, however, their contrasting perspectives about their upbringing helped balance the emotional tone. A partnership was formed.
Still, Benny says, they were never wedded to being a duo. “We had different sensibilities and things we wanted to do,” he explains. “Once we’d finished Uncut Gems, it was like, what’s next? Josh was like, ‘I want to do this thing.’ And I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that thing. At some point, you want to do something that maybe you can’t explore because the other person is not interested.”
Lots of brothers work together. Not all of them get a New York Times article about their creative split. “I get that need for built-in drama,” he admits, in reference to the headlines announcing that the Safdies were “done making movies together.” They’d had heated fights on sets, sure, but they were still family. “There are these Ukranian boxers, the Klitschko brothers. And a fan I know would always say, ‘Oh, what I give to see them fight each other!’ So I get it, but…” Safdie shrugs.
After relishing the experience of making The Curse, Benny felt that something was different in his creative process: ”Like, OK, it’s time for a change.“ Some of his early shorts, he notes, revolved around two characters he’d crafted into separate meta-comedy personae that he’d trot out for open-mic nights and film on the sly. One was named Zachary Mulden, whose “funny” stories revealed how pathetic his life really was (an anecdote about waiting two hours to ambush friends during a paintball game ends with him admitting he actually doesn’t have any friends). Another was a “Wall Street guy” who fancied himself an observational comic, who Safdie dubbed Ralph Handel. A typical routine would start with Handel going, “So I went to the grocery store, and guess what I got? Anybody? Anybody?” Then he’d describe the frozen pizza and pack of gum he purchased in banal detail.
It was the sort of gonzo performance art that Safdie loved, and he remembered the buzz he got from going out on a limb in front of a crowd. The fact that he was trading lines with Fielder and Emma Stone in The Curse — he played Dougie Schecter, the unctuous producer of the show-within-the-show — as well as co-writing and co-directing episodes, reminded him how fun it was to be in front of the camera, too.
So when filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson (Licorice Pizza) and Claire Denis (Stars at Noon) started hitting him up with offers to act in their projects, Safdie increasingly said yes. He was still waiting on a call from Johnson that he wasn’t sure would ever come when Christopher Nolan reached out to offer him a role as a scientist in Oppenheimer. He jumped at the chance. And in between setups, Safdie would kill time observing Nolan at work and shooting the shit with his co-stars, notably Emily Blunt.
“He’s just a glass of bubbles,” Blunt says of Safdie, in a separate call. “He’s so light, and it’s just wonderful to be around him. Having seen his movies, I think I was expecting someone way more intense. But he just has this wonderful, guileless hopefulness about the world and about creating. And yet, you know, he also understands struggle. He understands panic, and anxiety, and humanity at its most broken. And he’s interested in revealing that in the most unique ways.”
One day while chatting with Blunt, Safdie mentioned Johnson, the sweater gift, and their abandoned project.He knew that she and “DJ” were close pals after co-starring in the 2021 adventure film Jungle Cruise, and he wondered if Dwayne had ever received the pullover. Blunt then reached out to Johnson, who says he never got the shirt. (“I’m sure someone on his team saw the letter, which looked like a psychopathic eight-year-old had written it, and went, ‘Yeah, DJ doesn’t need to know about this,’” Safdie says, laughing.) But the star wondered if Benny was still interested in making the film. They soon began hashing out what would be the younger Safdie’s debut as a solo feature director. Blunt was cast as Kerr’s emotionally volatile wife, Dawn, which — as both she and Benny respectively mention — was anything but a done deal. It wasn’t until Safdie saw a clip of her and Johnson getting ready for the 2023 Oscars and noted their rapport that he texted Johnson: “It’s got to be her.”
And judging from the way that Safdie turns The Smashing Machine’s blend of get-in-the-ring brutality and domestic strife into a combination of Rocky and Marriage Story, you can see how he’s filtered a real-life sports story into a unique take on redemption, addiction (Kerr struggled with opiate addiction, and overdosed twice) and self-acceptance, one bloody haymaker at a time. It’s unlike your typical biopic, as well as unlike any other film that Johnson, nearly unrecognizable under a lot of prosthethics, courtesy of the Oscar-winning make-up designer Kazu Hiro, has done before — his own version of Raging Bull.
(That film turned out to be a big touchstone for both Safdie and his lead; when it’s name-checked during our interview, Johnson excitedly tilts his Zoom camera and points to a framed picture on his living room wall: It’s a vintage poster of Martin Scorsese’s 1980 boxing drama, which was part of Safdie’s wrap gift to Johnson.)
It feels like Safdie is starting a new chapter that is both of a piece with his work with his brother and completely his own. “I really wanted to do something that felt like a virtual reality for emotions,” Safdie says of The Smashing Machine, before pushing away his empty breakfast plate. “You know, what does it feel like to be that guy and go through that struggle? I wanted to capture that feeling of getting punched in the face, then needing to do it again and again.”
Production Credits
Grooming RHEANNE WHITE. Photographic assistance EVELYN FREJA.
