Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt talk ‘The Smashing Machine’ at Venice
Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Benny Safdie arrive Venice Film Festival with ‘The Smashing Machine’
Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, and Benny Safdie appeared at the Venice Film Festival with their competition title The Smashing Machine.
“It’s my first time in Venice,” the Rock told the crowd on Sept. 1 as he entered the room for the official press conference.
Johnson was joined by his co-star Blunt and director Safdie, whose film premiered the same evening. The project also marked Safdie’s first outing as a solo filmmaker.
The film follows fighter Mark Kerr (Johnson) during the no-holds-barred era of the UFC, capturing him at the peak of his career as he grapples with self-doubt, personal demons, and complicated relationships. At the same time, his girlfriend Dawn Staples (Blunt) struggles to find her own place in Kerr’s turbulent and contradictory world.
Explaining why he chose to tell a story set in the 1990s, Safdie said: “At that time period, there was something so experimental about what was going on. You had all of these different martial arts forms competing against one another, and it was just such a unique sport.”
He also reflected on the close-knit culture behind the scenes. “It was such a tight community, where everybody knew and cared for one another,” he noted. “To have that contradiction—the violence of fighting paired with such intimacy and love—was really beautiful to me, and I wanted to explore it.”
At the presser, Johnson stressed how this project fulfilled a long-standing ambition to break free of the Hollywood mold that had defined much of his career. For years, he admitted, studios pushed him toward box-office spectacles. Many of those films succeeded, some less so, but the pattern left him wanting more.
“I had a great time making those movies, and I don’t regret them,” Johnson said. “But even at the height of that run, there was this voice in my head asking, what if there’s more? I knew I wanted to stretch further—to prove to myself I could go beyond the category I’d been placed in.”
