If you came out of “The Smashing Machine” thinking “that must have hurt,” it was by design.
Director Benny Safdie strove to make his biopic about pioneering mixed martial arts fighter Mark Kerr (played by a barely recognizable Dwayne Johnson) as true to the sport’s brutal 1990s ring action as could possibly be simulated.
With the 2002 Kerr documentary of the same name and vintage cage-fight footage as guides, Safdie and his team of actors — which included current MMA stars and championship athletes — stuntmen, camera people and sound experts established formal rules to make every slam, punch and knee to the head reverberate all the way to the cheap seats.
“We were very, very specific to the way the fights actually happened,” says Safdie (“Uncut Gems”), whose own boxing training sparked his interest in making this his first solo feature-directing effort without brother Josh. “Yes, they’re condensed, because some of them were very long, 20, 30 minutes. But I wanted to do justice to what those fights were, historically.”
Much rougher than what we see today, that is.
Prizewinning MMA fighter Ryan Bader makes his acting debut in “Smashing Machine” as Kerr’s colleague and close friend Mark Coleman. While he adjusted to life as a thespian pretty quickly, play-punching was a matter of not mixing messages for the former wrestling champion.
“I’d never really fake fought,” Bader says. “I had a meeting with the stunt guys that was like, ‘You want to make it as real as it really could be?’ I told them I could pull my punches pretty good, but if I give you a little bit, especially to the body but also to the head, I could put it where the glove hits but the fist isn’t going through and it’s going to look very, very real.
“A lot of the takes on the ground are real punches, though,” Bader recalls. “One guy said, ‘Yeah give it to me, let’s make it look real.’ One time I hit too hard and he got a big ol’ cauliflower ear.”
To make both fake and real contact easier to sell, cameras were kept outside the ring. Opposite to the aesthetic of most boxing films, which place the camera as close to the action as possible, this made questionable jabs harder to detect — while evoking the feeling of sitting in the arena or watching on TV.
“There is a line between the athletes and the audience,” says “Smashing Machine’s” cinematographer and A-camera operator Maceo Bishop. “That’s an important line to maintain and respect, and it’s actually an exciting thing. It moves you closer to the edge of your seat. You want to get right up against but not cross that line.”
Bishop placed movable cameras with different focal lengths on opposite sides of the ring to capture the action, almost always with the ropes visible in the foreground. For handheld shots, he instructed extras playing attendees with better credentials to get in his way, not move out of the camera’s path as experience trains them to do.
“Our film differentiates itself from a lot of other fight films in our intention to sort of catch up to the action,” Bishop explains. “Not be there and know exactly where everything was going to happen. If it was ever too easy to get a shot, we made an adjustment to make it harder for ourselves.”
Perhaps the most potent element of “Smashing’s” fight scenes is how they sound. The fingerless grappling gloves MMA fighters use made for sharper, more painful impact noises than padded, puffier boxing gloves do. These were enhanced by hours of recordings of hands striking skin. And double Oscar-winning prosthetic makeup artist Kazu Hiro designed a lifelike silicone dummy of Johnson’s upper body for knee-to-head shots, which everyone agreed was fun to punch — and sounded authentic when they did.
Mics were also embedded in posts to catch cornermen chatter and layered under mats for more realistically thunderous takedowns.
Oscar-winning sound mixer Skip Lievsay (“Gravity”) and co-mixer Paul Urmson always went for new sounds of fighting.
“We tried to avoid the chop-socky, punchy cliche sounds you hear in a lot of boxing movies,” Urmson notes. “Y’know, there wasn’t punching big sides of beef or anything like that.”
“I think the jazz drumming thing is new to the game,” Lievsay says of the percussive element that grows in prominence as the fights’ stakes increase. “It’s probably been done by some, but it isn’t in ‘Raging Bull’ or ‘Rocky.’”
Movie magic such as that was sometimes the only way to give scenes the necessary punch. For all his commitment to filming fights faithfully, Safdie had to employ a few tricks — including one that might have gotten his head handed to him.
“Oleksandr Usyk came onto the movie having just won the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world,” Safdie says of the Ukrainian boxer, who plays MMA kickboxer Igor Vovchanchyn in the film. “He’d known some wrestling, he’d known some kicks, but his main focus is boxing. So his punches are tight to the body, square, and they go out and close. So when he was doing a ground-and-pound, you couldn’t see his arms!
“So I’m thinking, how am I going to go up to the heavyweight champion of the world and tell him his punches don’t look good?”
An apologetic Safdie demonstrated winding out wide and pounding down, the champ mastered the new skill by the sixth take, and the director lived to fight another day.
