Benny Safdie and John Oliver Grapple With The Smashing Machine

Is Benny Safdie the hardest-working man in show business? Somehow, between acting in The Curse, Happy Gilmore 2, and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, he also wrote, directed, produced, and edited The Smashing Machine, the first movie he’s made without his brother Josh. A bruising biopic of MMA legend Mark Kerr, it earned him the Silver Lion for Best Director at Venice and marks the start of Dwayne Johnson’s prestige era. To make sense of the madness, Benny rang up his friend John Oliver to talk standing ovations, prosthetics, and unlocking The Rock.

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TUESDAY 9:45 AM SEPT. 9, 2025 TORONTO

BENNY SAFDIE: How are you?

JOHN OLIVER: Well, how are you?

SAFDIE: I’m tired.

OLIVER: No shit. Well, at least it’s not like this is going to be relentless for months.

SAFDIE: I know. Exactly. [Laughs]

OLIVER: You know what they say about eye of the storms, right? You’re in them for such a small period of time.

SAFDIE: Yeah. You’re like, “Oh, this is so nice.” They didn’t tell me the weather would clear up.

OLIVER: Should we start now? I’ll pre-apologize to the transcribers. I think my Slack is on. I don’t know how to stop the alerts. There’s going to be constant fucking clicking through this.

SAFDIE: [Laughs] Oh, that’s great.

OLIVER: There it is now. The graphics channel just opened. That’s a very bad sign. So, where the fuck are you?

SAFDIE: I’m in Toronto. I just came back from Venice, I think two days ago at this point.

OLIVER: It’s always a great sign for your state of mind when you’re having to guess how long ago you crossed an international border.

SAFDIE: [Laughs] Yes, it was back and forth, back and forth.

OLIVER: I have a question about Venice. What goes through your head during a 15-minute standing ovation?

SAFDIE: Of course everybody’s talking about these ovations. But when it’s happening, you’re like, “How do I respond to this?” It’s crazy.

OLIVER: I don’t know what you would even do with your hands or with your head at that time.

SAFDIE: What’s kind of amazing is, as it’s going on, you just look out at everybody, make eye contact with various people, and they’re all just so excited. You don’t realize how long it is.

OLIVER: Yeah.

SAFDIE: I just kept looking at different people and I’d have like a five-second unspoken conversation with them in the audience. It was wild.

OLIVER: You’re amazing, because I saw clips of it and I’m watching you do some version of that, and it felt like a long time. Then I realized I’d been watching it for, like, 80 seconds.

SAFDIE: [Laughs] And then everybody started crying and then I started crying. It’s such an old
festival. The whole place breathes history from that stuff.

OLIVER: Not just from that stuff, Benny. You’ve got to remember it’s where Jeff Bezos had his second wedding.

SAFDIE: [Laughs] Oh, yes, that’s right. He had it in the theater where we were.

OLIVER: Wait, is that true?

SAFDIE: Definitely not.

OLIVER: Let’s go right back to the start because I loved this movie, and the documentary too. I hadn’t seen it until you told me to watch it a few years ago, and it really does linger with you.

SAFDIE: Oh, for sure.

OLIVER: What was it that got under your skin so deeply after you first saw it?

SAFDIE: Well, Mark Kerr himself is such a strange, beautiful guy. He’s so big, and at the same time, so soft-spoken and gentle. He’s trying to understand his emotions like a psychoanalyst. But then he can go in the ring and beat the crap out of somebody like you could never imagine. Afterwards, he’s trying to figure out what motivates him. And you’re just like, “Where did he come from?” I just fell in love with the guy, and I really wanted to understand him.

OLIVER: He seems so vulnerable, doesn’t he?

SAFDIE: Yeah, as soon as he steps out of the ring, all of a sudden he’s as fragile as possible. And I thought, “That’s one of the coolest things that I’ve ever seen.” And the fact that Dwayne [“The Rock” Johnson] wanted to tell that story— there’s definitely a deep connection that he feels with whatever Mark was going through. And in some weird way, I understood it also. We made a documentary about a basketball player, Lenny Cooke, where the footage came from a similar time period. And so, when I was editing that movie, I really clicked into the mindset of that time, so part of making this movie was wanting to time travel and actually experience what that era would feel like.

OLIVER: You’d have to be obsessed to do what they’re doing because there was almost no other reason to be doing it at that time.

SAFDIE: The only reason to do it is the feeling you get inside the ring. You’re fighting four guys in one night, and it’s like, “What would possess somebody to do that?” I wanted to understand it.

OLIVER: The easy answer is to say, “He’s doing it because he’s being paid more than other fighters.” But it also speaks to the fact that if you took that money away, you get the feeling he’d do it anyway.

SAFDIE: For sure.

OLIVER: Money is an excuse that makes sense to people who don’t understand why you’re doing it.

SAFDIE: Exactly. And it’s amazing that all the fighters are friends.

OLIVER: That’s the thing that really lingers. It’s such a unique group of people at such a unique time, genuine outsiders. They’re at the start of something that might not turn out to be anything, but they’re doing it.

SAFDIE: And they’re in a completely different country. People are saying things like, “What you’re doing is illegal.” And so, they have to go to the other side of the world to do it.

OLIVER: I had to keep reminding myself just what level of pariah they were back then. Especially given what the sport has become. John McCain was trying to get it banned.

SAFDIE: Yes! The first fight that was able to happen in New York was just a few years ago. I remember going to see a fight in 2002, and there was only one place you could go, and that was at the Mohegan Sun in Connecticut.

OLIVER: There’s something about the brotherhood on display. The only other time I’ve seen anything like it was in the documentary Beyond the Mat. Have you seen that one?

SAFDIE: No, I have not.

OLIVER: It’s the late-’90s version of WWE. The Rock is in that as well, and there’s a scene that I’ve never forgotten, where he’s talking to Mick Foley’s kids before they’re about to fight and he’s about to hurt him.

SAFDIE: Oh, wow.

OLIVER: He’s putting his arms around Mick saying, “Hey, look, I love your dad. We’re going to go and play in that ring together.” They both do everything right to explain to the children that they’re pretending, and then during the fight, the kids are horrified because, of course, they can’t understand why their dad’s bleeding.

SAFDIE: There’s an amazing clip of [Mark] Coleman [Kerr’s rival], and he wins and his face is all bloody, and his daughters are in the ring and they’re hysterically crying. I think he’s saying, “Daddy’s okay.” I was just like, “This is the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever seen.”

OLIVER: Yeah, even the first fight that you see, all you can hear is Mark Kerr saying to the referee, “Is he okay?”

SAFDIE: Yes. I talked to a referee, because there’s a lot of real referees in the movie, and this one ref was like, “You don’t understand. I have to get in there and push them off. They’re the best human beings on the planet, but when they’re in the ring, they become a different person.”

OLIVER: Oh, wow.

SAFDIE: And they come back to reality and they’re like, “Oh, my god, I hope they’re okay.” I boxed for a little bit, because I was going to play a boxer in something, and that’s where I saw the closeness of all of these people. Going into a boxing gym, you wouldn’t think that it would be a very loving, inclusive environment, because there’s so much testosterone and violence in the air. But if you want to go and learn, they’re going to teach you. And if you come back every day and show dedication, you’re in. It’s the most incredible feeling to be welcomed by them, and you just want more of that. I think that is part of the addiction.

OLIVER: Yes. How close was this to a path that Dwayne may have gone down himself ?

SAFDIE: As I was talking to him, I realized that he could see this as an alternate life for himself.

OLIVER: Yeah.

SAFDIE: Like, he genuinely went to the place of, “If this didn’t happen or this didn’t happen, maybe this is where I would have been.” And so, in his brain, I think he was really living out another life and what that would feel like. That’s why, specifically with the prosthetics, I didn’t want to completely change his face. We settled on a very subtle change so you could still see him through it.

OLIVER: Yeah.

SAFDIE: Because he’s a part of the story too. Him and Mark are talking to each other in the performance. It’s a very subtle thing. I said from the beginning, I want the ability that at any moment, you could rip 10 seconds from this movie and put it on TikTok and it would feel like it was a real thing, like, “When did that happen?” I wanted it to have the same vibe and texture of the stuff that you come across on your phone because that’s what feels real now.

OLIVER: How many cycles of that prosthetic thing did you go through? One of the most famous faces in the world is functionally gone, and yet he can show you parts of it at different points and to different degrees.

SAFDIE: I’m going to send you a text with this picture that I took when we found it, because Kazu [Hiro, the makeup artist] did three different levels. One was very minimal, and it was just Dwayne. Another was halfway. And then the other was a full facial reconstruction of Mark Kerr. And I was like, “Well, we’re not going to do that one because it just felt wrong.” And then we settled on this middle ground where it was just the eyebrow and the nose and the ear. Then we started really focusing on the minutiae of, “Well, what do the eyebrows actually look like?” Because if they’re too thin and too pointed, it makes him look a little bit angry, and there’s something soft about Mark’s eyes that we really needed to highlight. So I sent Kazu a picture of my eyebrows, and he was like, “Oh, I’ve been fascinated by your eyebrows.”

OLIVER: Oh, shit.

SAFDIE: And I said to Dwayne, “How do you feel right now?” And he said, “I feel like myself looking through this.” And I said, “This is it. We’re done.” This stuff had to stay on while he was fighting, but we never had to worry about it.

OLIVER: I’m slightly in awe of what he did. That job is either a dream or a nightmare.

SAFDIE: Exactly. It’s razor-sharp.

OLIVER: “Do you mind if we smash the shit out of those prosthetics?” “My work of art? Yeah, I mind a bit.”

SAFDIE: [Laughs] And then on top of that, I didn’t change how I shot, so you’re close up in his face.

OLIVER: “Kazu, do you mind if I have the camera about two inches from his fucking face? Is that something you like?”

SAFDIE: [Laughs] Yes. He was just excited that I was shooting on 16-millimeter because that adds something to it.

OLIVER: But it’s so striking, because they’re both incredibly charismatic men, but their charismas are totally opposite of each other. The Rock’s charisma is so loud, and Mark is so quiet.

SAFDIE: When I met Dwayne, he had that quiet magnetism where, when he looks at you, you could tell he’s really looking at you and really just trying to listen to you. You don’t expect that when you see him because he is so big and magnetic in other places.

OLIVER: My final question is, how is Mark Kerr doing?

SAFDIE: What was very important to me was that I wanted him and Dawn [Staples, Kerr’s ex-wife] both to feel okay with the outcome. I wanted it to be a restorative experience. I wasn’t going to change anything or pull any punches, for lack of a better analogy, but I wanted it to be therapeutic for them to watch it and come to a closure on it. Everybody was here yesterday in Toronto, and they were all okay. Mark said, “Look, I was thrown to the side of the road and forgotten. Now, people are talking about me and it feels weird because I don’t feel like I deserve it.” I’m like, “You do deserve it. You did some wild shit. And you laid the foundation for what happened later. And it’s only fair that you guys get recognition.”

OLIVER: He’s a big part of something that has turned out to be significant, and as you watch him pushing a grocery cart across a car park at the end, you feel like, “I just want him to be okay.” He seems so fragile for someone who is so clearly almost the opposite of that.

SAFDIE: I was just so happy that he’s alive. He’s learned so much, he is regretful, but he talks about his recovery in the most beautiful way.

OLIVER: Well that was great, Benny.

SAFDIE: This was the best, John. Thank you.

OLIVER: Alright.

SAFDIE: I’ll see you later.

OLIVER: Bye. Thanks, mate. I’ll see you later.

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Hair: Rheanne White using Bumble and Bumble at Tracey Mattingly.

Prop Stylist: Ruby Hartman.

Fashion Assistant: Keally Betanoz.

Production Assistant: Abby Lorenzini.

Location: Rudy’s Bar & Grill.