Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie

Matt Johnson is the center of attention wherever he goes. He’s especially popular in his hometown of Toronto, where his advocacy for young Canadian filmmakers and warm, self-referential humor have made him one of the city’s most favored sons. Mayor Olivia Chow was in attendance when Johnson and his co-star/co-writer Jay McCarrol brought their film Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie back to Toronto for a TIFF Midnight Madness screening that Jonson calls “one of the foundational moments of my adult life.” 
After years of attending the festival, he “wanted so badly to share that same kind of joy with a group of people in Toronto,” the culmination of a journey that began with Johnson’s DIY debut feature The Dirties (2013), through the Sundance premiere of his second feature Operation Avalanche (2016), and into the commercial and critical success of his third feature, BlackBerry (2023).
The obvious line of questioning when watching Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie—Johnson’s fourth feature—is wondering how the hell they pulled this thing off. The film is based on Johnson and McCarrol’s show on the now-defunct Viceland network, itself an expansion of their original web series; in every version of Nirvanna, Matt and Jay play exaggerated versions of themselves, overgrown adolescents whose lives revolve around a series of outrageous, yet naive—and often very dangerous—gambits designed to get their band a show at hallowed Toronto rock club The Rivoli. 
“I can understand how people might say, ‘This is a scathing critique of media obsession,’” Johnson says of his Nirvanna alter ego. “What they don’t understand is that I like these characters. I agree with them.” He concedes that Matt’s worldview is “psychotic, and I mean that medically,” but argues that “everybody could use a little bit more of that. I think it would give all of us the kind of confidence that we need to do great things.”
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is built around a pair of outrageous stunts, both of them involving the CN Tower, a 1,815-foot landmark that dominates the Toronto skyline. Although he’s loosened up a little since the film’s premiere at SXSW, Johnson is still tight-lipped about those sequences—partially because they were filmed without permits. But it’s obvious watching the scenes, sleight-of-hand movie magic aside, at least some of what we’re seeing is real. 
“The key thing when you’re making movies in the independent system is that you need to be doing something that they couldn’t do in Hollywood,” says Johnson. “If a Hollywood movie were to do [these sequences], they would rebuild the CN Tower, they would do it with [professional] actors. It would be a $5 million stunt.” He adds that Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie cost around $2 million total in US dollars, much of which went to sustaining a small crew of between four and eight people during the film’s 200-plus day shoot. 
This extended production period allowed for Johnson and McCarrol to play, filming verité and hidden-camera footage around Toronto. Johnson describes the vibe among the core crew as “endless summer camp,” and says their nimbleness and commitment was key to capturing one of the film’s most unbelievable shots: A real piece of nightly news footage of Johnson and McCarrol running away from Drake’s mansion after a real shooting in May 2024. 

These events are recontextualized in the movie, of course, but “the idea of getting a call on a Saturday and hearing, ‘Hey, somebody just got shot outside Drake’s mansion…I know it’s the weekend, but do you guys all want to drive up there?’,” as Johnson puts it, is the kind of down-for-anything attitude that made the film possible. “When you have a very small team, you can shoot a lot, especially since everybody’s so invested,” he adds. 
And it’s not just the stunts that are risky. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is full of enough copyrighted material and real brand references—Back to the Future and Orbitz soda both play important roles in the plot—to give a clearance manager a panic attack. Johnson stands by this reference-based element of his comedy, saying, “you’d be a fool to deny what made you. The people who walk around and act like the television shows that they watched growing up weren’t fundamentally informing their personality, they’re leaving so much on the table.”
Larger meta elements inform Johnson’s style as well: He often casts Canadian filmmaker friends like Ben Petrie (The Heirloom, Honey Bunch) and Ethan Eng (Therapy Dogs) in his films, partially as a way to recreate the energy of his DIY early work: “When I was putting together the cast for BlackBerry, I was telling my story of being an independent filmmaker and making movies with a group of friends,” Johnson says. “In some ways, the theme of my life is that friendship, ambition, and work are always going to collide in some way.” 
This manifests rather literally in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, in which Johnson and McCarrol interact with their younger selves as part of the film’s time-travel plot. This effect was achieved through clever compositing and the diligent work of editors Curt Lobb and Robert Upchurch, who reviewed hundreds of hours of footage left over from Nirvanna’s original web-series run. “That was total trust,” Johnson says of his editors. “They’ve watched all my raw footage. They’re the two people in the world who really do know how stupid I am.”
Audacity has worked in Johnson’s favor before: In 2016, his Zapruder Films announced a contest in which the company would give away its annual funding from Telefilm Canada—around $12,000—to a first-time female screenwriter. (The winner of that initial contest? Chandler Levack, who would go on to direct I Like Movies and the upcoming Mile End Kicks.) The stunt got a lot of press, and eventually led to a series of meetings between Johnson and Telefilm that established the Talent to Watch program for emerging Canadian filmmakers. 
“Basically every single voice that’s come out of English Canadian cinema in the last decade has all been from that program,” Johnson says of Talent to Watch, which provides support for first-time feature filmmakers whose total budgets range between $150,000 and $500,000 CAD, spreading funds out among a larger group of smaller-budgeted projects rather than concentrating it in a handful of multimillion-dollar films. “This is knowing full well that many of those movies will not work,” Johnson adds. “But we will find the next big voice in Canadian cinema by taking these crazy risks on so many people.”
Since then, BlackBerry broke records at the Canadian Screen Awards, and Johnson has been tapped to direct the upcoming Anthony Bourdain biopic Tony for A24. That project is budgeted at around $15 million, but Johnson quotes BlackBerry producer Niv Fichman: “no matter what the budget is, you’re always having the same fights,” he says. “The budget of Nirvanna the Band, to me, was the same as the budget for BlackBerry, which was the same as the budget for Tony, because the scale of the production always grew to match the budget.”

Filmed between those two projects, Nirvanna calls back to Johnson’s anarchic early work, a film made for a relatively small amount of money by a small, devoted group of friends with minimal supervision from the powers that be. It deals directly with themes of aging and (im)maturity, with some surprisingly wise observations about how friendships evolve throughout different phases of life.
“What’s really happening is that I am falling more and more under the spell of this process, and becoming comfortable with it affecting me,” Johnson says. “The older I get, the more I realize that—and this is what Nirvanna the Band is about—not achieving that goal, and being at peace with not achieving it in a Sisyphean way, is the deep lesson of life. You will never be what you want to be, because by the time you get there, your goals will have moved,” he says. “As long as you can stop focusing on the trophy at the end, then you can be happy now.” 
He knows that he’s been lucky, but “What’s that quote? ‘The harder I practice, the luckier I am.’”