It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that there may be no more important or influential work of MMA-related filmmaking than John Hyams’ 2002 documentary “The Smashing Machine.” Before “The Ultimate Fighter” was even a glimmer in Dana White’s eye, Hyams’ intimate portrait of the rise and fall of Mark Kerr introduced a whole generation of viewers to the brutal realities of life in an unforgiving sport.
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Almost 20 years after its release, “The Smashing Machine” still feels relevant and moving. As we watch Kerr struggle for success in Japan’s PRIDE FC promotion, then a booming behemoth in the nascent world of MMA, we also gradually learn of his personal struggle with addiction. Following Kerr’s ups and downs through the sport also introduces us to other fighters like Mark Coleman, who at the time was on his way to his career-defining victory in PRIDE’s 2000 open weight grand prix. Through this close study of Kerr’s life and times, we also get a snapshot of the sport at the turn of the century, and see telling glimpses of the characters who populate it.
The film had an instant impact, but also a lingering one. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003, then later aired on HBO. At the time, Variety called it “some of the most brutal ‘sports entertainment’ ever documented, without herding the viewer into a moralistic pen.” Kurt Otto, who would go on to co-found the short-lived, team-based International Fight League, often said he was inspired by the film to create a fight promotion that treated fighters better, giving them a training stipend and health insurance (the IFL was the first to do both).
But how did the idea for this documentary even get off the ground? And what did the filmmakers know about Kerr’s addiction issues when they started? Also, how did they secure such unfettered access to PRIDE events, at times filming from ringside during bouts or in the locker room afterwards?
For answers, I talked to director John Hyams, whose film career was effectively kickstarted by this project that emerged in uncommon fashion.
Editor’s note: This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
For starters, take me back to the seed of this idea. How did you first get onto this and go from there?
Hyams: At that time, I had kind of started out in fine arts and I was a painter and sculptor, and then was now slowly transitioning into film. I was really trying to sell scripts and get things done, but it was slow going back then. And at the time, a close friend of mine from college named Jon Greenhalgh, who was tending bar actually, reached out to me and said he basically had randomly raised $10,000 to make a movie through his bar patrons, but he didn’t actually have an idea for the movie. He just raised $10,000 on the promise that there was going to be a movie. So he asked me if I had any movie ideas, and I didn’t really have any idea at that point for $10,000.
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And concurrent to this was that Jon was a college wrestler at Syracuse, which is where he went to school. And one of his teammates on the wrestling team was Mark Kerr, and this was right around the birth of the UFC. And what seemed like an incredibly exotic thing at the time was that his friend Mark, who I’d met a few times at parties in college, was now involved in this thing, which had various different names. When one of these fights would occur, we would watch it, and the few that we watched always went rather quickly with Mark sort of dispatching his opponent really quickly. And it was pretty surprising because Mark, as Jon knew him, was not a brawler, was nothing of the sort, he was an NCAA wrestler who had been injured during the Olympic trials and kind of missed the Olympic dream and needed some cash and started getting involved in this thing and proving that, you know, freestyle wrestling skills were pretty effective in the ring.
So the $10,000, this is sort of pre-GoFundMe, and the guy says to a bunch of people sitting around a bar, ‘would you like to give me money to make an as of yet undetermined movie?’ And they say, ‘yeah sure’?
Right. And this is a testament to Jon’s powers of persuasion. He’s a charmer. He’s a lot of fun. He has great bartending skills and great producing skills. And so Jon had his regulars and they loved him. So he had somehow convinced them that he was going to make a movie and they just sort of believed him, and between a few of them invested some money, again with no idea of what the film would be. Then at one time he called me up and he said, ‘you know, my friend Mark, the guy who’s in ultimate fighting, he’s going to Japan in August and he’s going to fight a guy.’
During this time (Kerr) has also kind of climbed the ladder and he’s on top of the game right now. He’s really going to Japan and making a career out of this. And he’s one of the top guys, if not the top guy in his weight class. I wasn’t even aware of that, but I just wanted to have a film career. But he mentioned this idea of going and possibly doing some portrait of a fighter.
Personally, I didn’t really have a strong opinion about the sport one way or the other. I wasn’t for or against it. I was kind of fascinated by it. I’ve always been a boxing fan, but I really wanted to make a movie, and what I thought was one of my favorite documentaries ever was “Pumping Iron.” And the reason why I loved it is because it introduced me to a subculture that I had some preconceived ideas about, most of them kind of negative. And by introducing each of these characters and kind of helping me understand the psychology of these characters, then it suddenly gave me this emotional stake in the outcome of the competition. It used the competition as a narrative device. Now you had this stake in a competition that I normally would not care at all about, and because I got to know Lou Ferrigno and I got to know Arnold. And I thought, OK, we can maybe do something that is kind of a “Pumping Iron” in this world.
And a lot of it was based on Jon saying, ‘I know Mark, this guy’s really an open book and he’s not he’s not what you think of when you think of a fighter.’ So we got a bunch of equipment and four of us flew to Japan with the $10,000 that basically funded this trip. And what we would do is we would film this event, we would do some interviews, we’d follow the guy around for a week, we’d film the fight. And then we would go home and cut trailers and sizzle reels and try to get more money to make the movie. And that’s kind of how it went at the beginning.
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At what point did you figure out that Mark had a substance abuse problem and that this movie was going to be about something else as well?
That happened in real time, right on the heels of that fight. We didn’t actually go home right after the fight. The plan was we would go to Japan, we would film the fight, and then we would go home with Mark to Arizona and we would film him recovering from the fight, whatever that was. And then at a later date, when the next fight was coming, which was going to be a few months away, we would film the training for the next fight, and act two would conclude with the second fight. So that was our three-act structure. It was going to be fight, recovery, training, which of course in the end did not prove to be the structure.
So we went with him, I think it was Pride 7, his Igor Vovchanchyn fight. And so we’re following him around in that first fight and it’s a pretty frenetic situation. Mark is kind of an all over the place guy. There are these incredibly confessional, honest moments followed by evasive, kind of strange moments, all culminating in this very strange fight that plays out at the beginning of the movie where he is not quite himself in the ring and runs out of gas and runs into an opponent who is, you know, no slouch. And then there’s this kind of cautious, controversial ending to the fight that leads also to this massive locker room breakdown.
Then we all fly to Arizona, and now we’re not in Japan surrounded by all of the people at the organization, the fanfare and all that. Now it’s just four of us guys with Mark and his girlfriend in Chandler, Arizona. And he slowly starts, in this isolation, to reveal himself to us. And it was really days into it that he revealed that he had this problem. The scale of the problem would become more clear in the weeks that would follow. What he basically said was, it was clear that he was somewhat alone in the world with this addiction. At that point we were kind of his most trusted people, which was really quite sad to me actually, because we had just met, and what he proposed to us was that he was going to try and kick (the painkiller addiction) himself.
We would hang out with him and kind of monitor him and help him through this detox from opiates. We were incredibly conflicted. None of us are medical professionals or addiction specialists. It seemed like this was not going to work, but we agreed to be there with him. So now we’re in a house with him trying to monitor him, and what we’re soon finding out is that he’s got drugs hidden all over the house, and now we’re supposed to be policing this 275-pound addict. It got more and more insane really, and we were more and more concerned for his well-being, quite frankly. We’d all become incredibly close with him, and all of this was only happening because of Jon’s relationship with him. These guys were teammates. So all that stuff that plays out in the movie, with his overdose and all of that, that played out in real time with us there.
That must be a conflicted feeling for you as a filmmaker, because on one hand you feel a fondness for the guy and a sort of responsibility there, but then is there also a part of you going, ‘well this movie just got more interesting, and maybe this is honestly good for me even if it seems very bad for Mark’?
Yes. That’s certainly something that you feel as a documentary filmmaker. It’s that, ‘do I film the starving child or do I help the starving child?’ The photo journalist’s dilemma. We were feeling that, of course. Our agreement with Mark was, let us shoot everything, we’ll talk about everything in the end,and if you don’t want it, the world will never see it. And we meant that. I believe we all felt Mark was our friend first and our subject second.
What I was constantly hit with during this time – and I always saw the addiction as a by-product of this – was to me, ‘The Smashing Machine’ is a story about a person being really good at something that they hate. I don’t think Mark loved being a fighter. I don’t think Mark liked hurting people or getting hurt. I think he was just good at it, and he liked the perks. So his addiction, which started out as dealing with and masking physical pain, then turned into something much, much bigger than that. It was about dealing with this Faustian deal he’d entered.
I’ve been around a number of fighters and some of them love to fight. We spent time with Renzo Gracie, and they were fighting since they were just little children, you know, rolling around like puppies. He had such a healthy relationship to it, if one can have that, but he did. So, we did see other sides of it. It wasn’t about condemning the sport, whatever you might feel about it, but looking at this person’s relationship to it and the damage it was inflicting on his body and his soul.
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I felt the whole time, I would have been thrilled if Mark said, ‘I’m out.’ That was always the ending I was hoping to happen when we were with him, is that he would quit the sport, because I thought it was doing damage to his life and his soul. And so my conflict wasn’t really so much with whether or not I was exploiting a subject, although, of course, that would factor in. My anxiety was that I think there were a lot of people, certainly when you’re getting investors in the documentary and you’re getting access to these events, who are hoping that you are creating a piece that is promotional for the sport in general. I felt conflicted there because I didn’t really want to be an advocate for or against the sport. I just wanted to tell a story about this guy who is in this. And if we were showing the negative impacts that this sport has had on his life, to me, that was the story. Not that the sport is a bad thing, but that this is a person who is having a very cursed relationship with this pursuit.
So at some point did you end up sitting down with Mark and saying, ‘here’s what we think is our final cut of the film, let’s watch it and you can tell us if you’re OK with it’?
That was one of the more challenging things about it, that we had this agreement with Mark. We said, ‘you have veto power if you want it.’ Anything he didn’t want in there, he could get rid of it. But the agreement was, we were not going to show him anything until it was ready. This was something I was pretty adamant about, because if he got the wrong impression, if we didn’t present something to him that we really knew was all the way there, he might get spooked and it could be over. So the only cut he saw was basically what amounts to the final cut, and we had been editing it for about 18 months. During that time he was now making career comebacks and he had a new manager. At one point, we were brought out to Arizona. They were really desperate to see what we had, and he was getting very nervous because he’s thinking, ‘hey, I’m actually trying to get back into this. I don’t want this stuff out there.’ We were open and honest with him and we just kind of rode it out saying, ‘we’re not going to show you anything yet, we’re not done, we’re still working on it.’ I’m sure it was pretty anxiety-producing for him, but we just kept moving forward.
Finally, we got to a cut that we really believed in and we brought Mark to New York and we had rented out a screening room and it was just Mark and Jon and myself, and possibly the other two guys in our crew, Neil Fazzari and Steve Schlueter. We just sat in this room with him sitting in front of us, and we just screened the movie, the one that you’ve seen, basically. I don’t really think there’s any changes from that. It was a powerful experience. I remember just looking at his big shoulders from behind and seeing him react physically, going through it all. It was incredibly emotional, and when it ended we were all a bit of a wreck. But then he kind of hugged us and he said he loved it, you know? It was honest, he felt, and that was all we really wanted was for it to be that.
And up until that moment, we still didn’t have a signed agreement. We never tried to get him to sign anything. So he could have said no at that time. I think we even already had sales reps. I think we were about to go out with it, and that was the last thing that happened.
Reading about your career, it seems like you went on to do so many things that were very different from this. When you look back on it now, how do you feel about it?
Well, I love it. I feel like it was my beginning as a filmmaker, and I think I learned more about filmmaking from ‘The Smashing Machine’ than I did from anything else that I’ve done ever since. It was something that we went into so blindly and basically just turned our lives over to it for a couple of years. And in the course of making one pretty good movie, we spent a couple years making a number of horrible movies and shooting a bunch of bad stuff and editing a bunch of bad stuff on the long road to learning how to construct a story. So just from my personal career level, I look at it that way.
But beyond that, I think it really makes me remember those guys, those two guys (Kerr and Coleman), especially at that time in their lives. It makes you think about what has happened with everyone that were subjects in this movie. We’re still in touch with Mark, and we’ll hear from him sporadically. It’s not an easy life, to be a fighter. The ending is rarely a pretty thing. That’s kind of the hardest thing.You see people who get involved in professional fighting become accustomed to this lifestyle where no matter what is happening on the outside, the wheels can completely fall off, and all I’ve got to do is get back in the ring. For a short period of time, I can solve all the problems.
For a while that works and your life can be really out of control outside of the ring, but as long as you’re on top you can fix it all with one good night of work. But over time, that one good night isn’t such a good night anymore. It’s a pretty brutal cycle.
(Top photo: Saitama Super Arena in Saitama, Saitama Super Arena, Japan; Tomokazu Tazawa/Getty Images)
