From writer-director Benny Safdie (Uncut Gems, Good Time), comes a new film about pioneering UFC Hall of Fame fighter Mark Kerr, at once a high-pressure sports biography and high octane emotional spectacle, transporting viewers to the dawn of a new era as it follows the strongest fighter the sport had ever seen from the heights of fame to rock bottom and back again.
Benny Safdie is a director, writer and actor based in New York. His projects include The Smashing Machine; Showtime/A24’s The Curse, for which he was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and a WGA Award for writing; Oppenheimer; Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret; The Stars at Noon; Licorice Pizza; Good Time, which he also co-directed and received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor; Uncut Gems; Heaven Knows What; Daddy Longlegs; Telemarketers; Pee-wee as Himself; Thank You Very Much; and Lenny Cooke. He will next be seen in Netflix’s Happy Gilmore 2 and recently wrapped production on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey for Universal.
What was it about Mark Kerr’s story that captured your imagination?
It was Dwayne who brought it to me. He approached me in, I think, 2019, to possibly do this movie. I watched the documentary about Mark and instantly fell in love with him, because I couldn’t believe that he existed. There was something about him that I felt like I understood.
What was that?
I think it was the fact that he was dealing with so much, and he had to pretend like he wasn’t, because of the kind of work he was doing. His emotions and complexities and intellectual nature seemed to be at odds with what he was in the ring, which was this kind of enormous, physical, incredible specimen. The two things seemed so contradictory. I wondered, how do you bridge those? It was almost as if, when Mark was outside of the ring, he was covering up that part of him that you saw in the ring. There was something like a disconnect. He was so sweet and so kind, and the way he spoke was so musical and beautiful. There was something interesting to me about what he was hiding and how he was able to smile and pretend like everything was okay until he couldn’t, you know?
Nobody knows what you’ve gone through in your life until you tell them.
Dwayne gets that, too. I knew Dwayne saw exactly what I saw in Mark. That doesn’t happen a lot, where you instantly know that the other person is thinking exactly what you’re thinking. That in itself made me think, There’s something that can happen here, between us. Dwayne and I could do something with this.
When you first got into Ultimate Fighting Championships and Mixed Martial Arts back in the ‘90s, it wasn’t too well-known, was it?
It was very new. And when it was first starting, specifically, there was something intense about it. People were trying to figure this thing out—like, “What is it?” Today you get all of these kinds of fights popping up in your feed. The quality of the imagery is insane. It’s an incredible thing to see. The matches are endless.
I was talking to [former Mixed Martial Arts champion] Bas [Rutten] about it, and he said, “I won all my fights in the first round because the first round was 30 minutes long!” There’s this kind of gladiatorial quality to it.
You have these [fighters] going to Japan and Brazil, and they have such an affection there for this kind of new form of fighting, and yet it has never really been accepted here in the US. Early on, it was kind of neglected. These fighters who are in the movie were not necessarily forgotten, but they weren’t lauded in the same way as boxers, you know?
What happened after Dwayne approached you with the idea for the movie?
There was something really complicated about Mark that I wanted to explore. And there was something about Dwayne, too. He has this image of himself out in the public, but as he spoke to me about Mark, and as he talked about this movie, oh my God! I realised there was a whole other side to him that we could explore together.
There’s a gentleness to Dwayne. I remember when we were talking about his character in the movie, I told him that one of the inspirations for the movie was It’s A Wonderful Life, because if you think about it, what changes in that movie is George Bailey’s perspective on life. Frank Capra does that. He shows you people, and he gets you to understand what they’re going through, their struggle.
Was there any reading material that helped you?
There was an amazing book called Losers. It’s all about different people in various different sports who have lost. And there’s an essay by Gay Talese, who interviewed Floyd Patterson after he lost to Muhammad Ali. And it’s one of the greatest things I’d ever read. Patterson specifically mentioned that when he got knocked out, there were two things that he felt. One was that the whole place wanted to give him a hug, that he felt everybody feel for him in that moment when he went down. The other thing he said was, “I wish there was a trap door in the middle of the ring that led straight to my locker room, because the longest walk I ever had to take was from the ring to my locker room.”
I wanted to show that. I wanted you to feel that walk from the ring all the way back in the elevator so you could experience that vulnerability, in that moment, because you don’t really look at the person who loses. You’re looking at the person who wins and celebrates.
How would you describe your relationship with the real Mark Kerr?
It was strange, because — again, just like with Dwayne — there was something that I felt was unspoken with myself and Mark. Like, Wow, we get each other in a really strange way. I didn’t know how to explain it, but I felt it, and I really did feel like I could trust him, and he could trust me. It was the same way with Mark and Dwayne. Mark would start remembering fights that his mother and father had when he was younger, and that kind of got pulled into his performance with Dawn, because it was an element that everybody can relate to.
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