From its humble beginnings as a scrappy viral web series nearly two decades ago, Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s Groundhog Day-esque mission of attempting to book a show at Toronto’s Rivoli Theatre has now, two TV seasons on, reached the big screen in truly miraculous fashion. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie sets the cinematic bar for both comedy and thrills this year, a delight for newcomers and fans alike––though, as Johnson tells me, those not knowing an ounce about these characters may even have a better time.
Ahead of the film’s wide release this weekend, I spoke with the director, co-writer, and star about evolving the show for the big screen (and why they scrapped the first version of the movie), keeping the momentum, constant re-editing, copyright law, and if we’ll ever see season three of the show.
The Film Stage: It’s pretty incredible that you don’t really need to know anything about the characters and can still have a total blast watching it. I’m curious what decisions you made to ensure newcomers would still enjoy the film?
Matt Johnson: I had heard, when we were making our TV show, that Nirvanna the Band is, in some ways, impossible to explain to somebody, but after watching it for two minutes, you could go write your own episode. I think that’s happening unconsciously in what I’m trying to do. The characters subscribe to such archetypes that they don’t require any explanation. In some ways, their stupidity and doomed nature—even their over-the-top, Rube Goldberg approach to problem-solving—almost makes it simpler to understand what they are about.
In some ways, it is deliberate that the film be understandable to a general audience, but it wasn’t like my friends and I had a specific plan saying, “Okay, Matt or Jay will say this or do this for the newcomers.” We just approached it the way we approach every Nirvanna the Band story: it begins with a plan. There isn’t much hand-holding. At no point do you hear what The Rivoli even is, or see Matt and Jay really rehearsing. All these details are left out.
In some ways, it’s been gratifying to hear what you just said: that you don’t need to know anything to watch the film. I feel, in some ways, this is “bad marketing” for fans, because I actually think you get more out of it the less you know. I sincerely mean that. People who have not only never seen the show, but anything else I’ve ever done will get way more out of this movie than people who have followed my career or have seen every episode of the show. I believe that is sincerely true because you’re catching up on everything as a whole, as opposed to just the individual idiosyncrasies of this particular story.
This is truly a better action movie than most I’ve seen in the last few years—not just because of the set pieces, but for the sheer sense of forward momentum. It’s in the show as well, but I think you bring a new level to it here. Did you get that sense when shooting, or was it found in the editing and watching it with an audience?
It’s a constant goal for Curt [Lobb] and Bobby [Hyland], the editors of everything that I do, that we never, ever linger. For some reason, the momentum is what makes it work. I believe if we screened a version of BlackBerry where it was everything we shot, even done coherently, it would not have been a comedy.
What makes these movies funny—going all the way back to The Dirties—is that you’re never left to catch your breath. The characters make a decision and immediately they’re doing the thing. They have that Adderall-induced energy of the way an adolescent boy thinks, where you go from vision to action within a single cut. My friends and I just find that hilarious. It’s another great observation, and one all of us are so grateful to hear because we shoot so, so much footage, but the real discipline is that we then cut 95% of it out.
You’ve mentioned how important it is to test the film and fine-tune things. Even after SXSW, you were still doing cuts. When did you actually have a final version, and can you talk about that testing process?
Calling it a “process” is giving it, maybe, slightly too much dignity because there’s no real rhyme or reason to it. We try to screen the film publicly for the first time at a film festival. This is true for all my movies. Then Curt, Bobby, and I will sit in the theater after the world premiere for any additional screenings with our notebooks and just follow the emotion of the crowd. We see where things we thought were clear are unclear, etc. We basically follow the energy of the room and then we recut the movie completely on-paper in the theater after the world premiere over the course of three or four days. Normally, it’s just taking things out.
In this case, we went home and did a re-edit. Then we had a Canadian premiere at TIFF and did the same process again, which was really fun. This movie has been recut twice, and if I’m being totally honest, I just changed something again today. There is an outside chance that the Blu-ray and digital release will be different from the theatrical version. It’s kind of a major change, too—we’ll see if I get away with it.
Wow, that’s amazing. Jay’s character considering moving on from the friendship is a big part of the movie and the show. That push-pull is the emotional connective tissue. Were there times you wanted to play that up more, even at the expense of comedy, just to keep the audience invested?
I’ll turn the question on its head: in my opinion, those moments are the funniest moments in the movie. The idea that Jay sincerely is going to leave, or that Matt really is wrestling with his identity within the friendship, to me and everybody that works on the movie, that’s why we’re making this. I think that’s funnier than everything.
In BlackBerry, the funniest scene in that movie to me is when I go up to Jay Baruchel and say, “They canceled movie night,” and I almost start to cry. The fact that these men can invest so much of themselves in something so small is hilarious. Because they seem so goofy, they don’t care, or they are emotionally invulnerable. To then see this is so meaningful to them that you may as well have killed them as opposed to put them through this, there’s nothing funnier than that. For whatever reason, that’s the way the world seems to work for me.
Talking about the more comedic moments, there are some incredible references, including a 2009 movie I won’t spoil, but also the blink-and-you-miss-it gags, like the bus ad with Jared from Subway. Were there certain jokes you wanted to include but had to cut? And what struck you about how culture has changed in the two decades since that era?
If there was something we thought of to put in the film, we more or less did it. That section of the movie is fairly compacted because we need to very quickly signal to the audience that Matt and Jay are in 2008 so the story can keep going. We didn’t have a ton of runway to litter more jokes in, but at the same time it’s rare for us to have a brilliant joke or visual symbol and then not do it.
In terms of my observations of the changing culture: it’s strange, because I live in such a bubble in Toronto, and also amongst this small group of peers, I almost feel as though I’ve been outside of those changes. The way I’m working with my friends in this tiny little pocket of west Toronto, you could say the world hasn’t changed at all, which is, in some ways, what the movie is about for my character. This guy is behaving as though not one day has passed since he first sat down with Jay and started screwing around.
Of course, that can’t be true for me personally because I’m different than I was then. But in another way, it is true. I am still just as ignorant, naive, and, let me just say, intimidated by the culture around me. That I almost don’t dare look at it right in the eyes. In some ways, I’m staying blissfully ignorant to the changing norms of society—mostly dictated by your country, in the best way, by the way. I would say I seem to be somewhat unaffected by it personally, other than making a movie about some superficial observations that maybe you’d have. It doesn’t really change my day-to-day lifestyle.
You’ve mentioned you first shot different iterations of this movie, including a road trip across America, but then scrapped it. Did you realize pretty early on that wasn’t coming together, and how quickly did you shift to this Back to the Future mold?
No, it was the opposite, actually. My character was so hopelessly optimistic—or you could say stupidly optimistic. It was a true Nirvanna the Band plan: we got back from the Berlin Film Festival [in 2023] and I loudly exclaimed, “I’ve got an idea! Let’s do a road-trip Nirvanna the Band movie where we recreate the book A Confederacy of Dunces!”
Jay—in true Jay fashion—said, “That sounds ridiculous. That’s never going to work.” I said, “Let’s do it anyway.” So we bought an RV and left a few months later with no script, just shooting. The story has become slightly apocryphal. It wasn’t that we hated the footage or that we thought this story wasn’t going to work; it was Jay’s observation that it felt too much like the TV show. There was nothing superficially signaling to the viewer that this was a movie.
That was the key observation. The scales fell from our eyes. We were like, “Oh, right!” I had stupidly suggested that we parody obscure literature, which is such a pretentious and ludicrous… well, a very Nirvanna the Band pitch. Jay was the one who said, “The way the TV show would parody other TV shows, we need to parody the biggest movies of all time and make it seem like we are inside the biggest movie of all time.” Within minutes of that suggestion, we had the basic concept for the Back to the Future story.
There’s some chatter online about people not believing a distributor could get away with releasing this movie because of the potential copyright issues, but you’ve actually said one of your first steps is talking with your copyright lawyer about what you can legally pull off, which can be a boring process. Can you describe that process for people who think you’re just flying by the seat of your pants?
It’s funny, have I actually said this is a boring topic? If I were to make a statement about it, the work that goes into this vanguard copyright infringement is the type of “boring”-style essay-writing you had to do in high school. Although it seems illegal and fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, it’s exactly like being in a 10th- or 11th-grade English class trying to present a thesis on a novel, making a point in writing. So that’s what I would mean when I say it’s “boring” because the way in is less like a bank robbery and more like writing a position paper, which was surprising to me.
I remember a quote from the DVD special features of the show Lost. One of the writers said, when talking about the books left with Sawyer, he’s reading Of Mice and Men. Then they made an episode that was in some ways based on that book. One of the writers said, “It was very strange. We were all sitting in the writer’s room realizing that these characters could have these books and someone said, ‘Wow, I guess it’s really useful that we were forced to read these things in high school, because now look at how much we’re getting from them.’”
When I heard that, I found that to be such a useful reframing of my education. All these things I was allergic to as a kid, that I scoffed at and thought were a waste of my time—in the idiomatic sense of thinking “When am I ever going to use calculus as an adult?”––it’s strange that the more these things can become integrated into your adult life, the richer everything feels. I’m talking only about myself here. Getting to actually sit down and write an argument as to why my stupid movie should be allowed to infringe on the copyright of a massive, superstar story connects me with that high school kid who was sitting frustrated at a desk. Maybe that’s why this film is so focused on that mirror nature of your young self versus your old self. Strangely, all my movies have that, about an arrested adolescent refusing to let go of their youth because they literally think they’ll lose something. The older I get, the more true that seems.
How much do you think Nirvanna the Band is your playground to experiment with things that you then use for larger projects like BlackBerry or the upcoming Tony?
Yeah, it’s like a “Skunkworks.” I’ve never heard that question before. Again: you are clearly a very clever man. That’s absolutely the case. What’s so useful about it, in true “Skunkworks” fashion, the results of these experiments within the Nirvanna the Band ecosystem are also risk-free. In the same sense that a Matt plan can’t fail––because we know, going in, it will never achieve its intended goal, but it will achieve something unintended––all of these bizarre formal experiments, whether it’s this black-and-white flashback language, the way specifically we are using wireless mics and zoom lenses to shoot on the street… BlackBerry, even though in some ways it’s so restrained, it is sort of the “adult version” of these same aesthetics, both in terms of performance, but also writing, the way Jared [Raab] is shooting it. You mentioned before, it’s cut in a way: “Who cares if the audience is slightly behind? They’ll catch up.” Better they catch up then get ahead of us.
Again, not intentional. It wasn’t a master design, but it just so happens I’ve luckily created a dual career where half my work is done in this bizarre experimental art-comedy world and the rest of it are these sincere dramas that are all filmed with actors. [Laughs] I’m grateful I fell into that.
There are rumors that you’ve partially shot a season 3 of Nirvanna the Band. Will we see that after the movie?
The abbreviated answer is: I only shot BlackBerry to make season 3 and when I found out that BlackBerry wasn’t going to get season 3 of the show released, we pivoted to this movie in the hopes that it would get season 3 released.
So we will see. I’m amazed the movie is even being released in theaters; that’s already a stunning reversal of all our expectations. So who knows. Maybe if there’s enough interest, season 3 becomes a reality. And to tie everything together to the finale of season 3: you will finally get to see that Confederacy of Dunces episode.
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is now in theaters.