Jay McCarrol and Matt Johnson, co-creators of Nirvanna the Band the Show and now Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie stand outside the Rivoli in Toronto, on March 3.Jon Laytner/The Globe and Mail
This past Sunday evening in the heart of Texas, Canada launched an invasion.
Inside the Zachary Scott Theater Center, just off the banks of the Colorado River that cuts through downtown Austin, an embassy’s worth of players from Canada’s entertainment industry politely stormed the gates of the annual SXSW Film Festival. The plan: to celebrate the world premiere of Matt Johnson’s new comedy Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, the most improbable, provocative and uproarious Canadian film since, well, the director’s last project, the 2023 smash BlackBerry. If you were a Canadian writer, director, producer, distributor, programmer or agent in the Lone Star State last weekend, then you were at the screening.
Review: BlackBerry follow-up Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie will make you laugh till it hurts
But as the Canadian contingent settled inside the auditorium, it quickly became clear that they were outnumbered (and almost certainly outgunned) by Americans. Most of the 400-plus seats were actually filled by locals – born-and-bred Texans (at least two of whom were dressed as the movie’s lead characters) who had stood in line for hours to watch the big-screen adaptation of their all-time favourite television series. A series that is explicitly and outrageously Canadian. Tariffs or no tariffs – Austin was coming out for Toronto.
“Not to dig up the corpse of this old argument, but if we premiered this film in Toronto, we’d get a soft touch from homegrown audiences and critics,” Johnson said the day after the screening, sitting alongside his long-time co-star/co-writer/composer/co-conspirator Jay McCarrol. “To become great, you need to surround yourself with people who are resistant to you – and you need to win them over.”
From the left: Jared Raab, Matt Greyson, Jay McCarroll, Matt Johnson, Matthew Miller, Robert Upchurch, Curt Lobb at the Nirvanna premiere at SXSW earlier this month.Amanda Stronza/Getty Images
That didn’t seem to be a problem Sunday night. During one of the most rapturous screenings in SXSW history – complete with fits of laughter so loud and prolonged that on-screen dialogue was often drowned out – the sold-out crowd ate up every single second of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, which supersizes Johnson and McCarrol’s cult TV series about two mischievous Toronto musicians/best friends.
Once the audience rose to its feet for a standing ovation, it felt as if Johnson and McCarrol had suddenly kicked open a cultural door that was previously locked to Canadian filmmakers. Over the course of one electric evening, the prankish pair – the country’s most irrepressible provocateurs, who’ve spent the past two decades gleefully bending and breaking all the rules – were crowned the kings of Canadian culture. The outsiders who somehow managed to make CanCon cool, borders be damned.
But Johnson and McCarrol’s success in Texas would never have happened without failing. And failing hard.
“We would have fallen face-first”
Every episode of Nirvanna the Band the Show (the extra “n” is both a legal precaution and a joke in and of itself) ends in spectacular failure.
From its first days as a scrappy early-aughts web series through its upgrade when Viceland picked the show up in 2017, the mockumentary-style sitcom follows the clueless misadventures of “Matt” and “Jay” as they try to score a gig playing the Rivoli, a Toronto nightclub of middling repute. Matt’s various schemes, which often rope in unwitting real-life Torontonians captured via guerilla-style filmmaking, usually leave the two friends financially ruined, on the run from the law, or worse. So it is only apt that Johnson and McCarrol’s initial plan to shoot a NTBTS movie ended in utter defeat.
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is a fully made-in-Canada endeavourElevation Pictures/Supplied
“Telefilm still has the pitch document that I brought to them when I was, what, 23 years old?” Johnson asks McCarrol as they pick over a plate of nachos and guacamole, harried SXSW attendees buzzing around.
“We’ve been ready to make a Nirvanna movie since day one,” replies McCarrol.
“We pitched it to the regional fund office for $200,000, and were resoundingly rejected,” says Johnson. “Which was for the best. I’m sure we would’ve fallen face-first in the most humiliating fashion.”
But Johnson and McCarrol’s fascination and familiarity with failure eventually led to the pair – alongside their producer Matthew Miller, cinematographer Jared Raab and a dozen other trusted behind-the-scenes collaborators – to turn another made-in-Canada collapse into a success story of their own: BlackBerry.
After that film broke out, both at home (where it won a record 14 Canadian Screen Awards) and internationally (where co-star Glenn Howerton was this close to scoring serious awards-race hardware), Johnson could have gone Hollywood, taking the route that so many Canadian filmmakers opt for when they get even a small taste of global recognition. Instead, Johnson invested his newly acquired creative capital into the most unlikely of follow-ups: a feature-length revival of a beloved but niche series that never made it past two seasons of broadcast television. (The team produced a third, but its rights were thrown into legal limbo as Viceland teetered and tottered in its corporate restructuring.)
“It’s about trying to live the life of the role model I pretended to be when I was younger, when I was saying that you actually can stay in Canada and make movies,” says Johnson, who has habitually castigated the creakier elements of CanCon while at also putting in the work to help effect genuine change, such as when he and Miller revamped Telefilm’s microbudget program a few years back.
“It’s hard to say that your whole career and then the second you get the opportunity to leave, you take it. It’s something that I care about so much, being from Canada. It’s a gift.”
Such gifts have their costs. BlackBerry, which carried a roughly $10-million production budget, was only made possible thanks to partial financing by U.S. partners. But Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, which cost about half as much, is a fully made-in-Canada endeavour. While most of the budget came from the federal arts financing agency Telefilm, with Canadian distributor Elevation Pictures kicking in cash to close financing, Johnson and producer Miller also put their fees back into the production.
“I don’t encourage other people to do this. But I was happy to do it to make it work, because when I was putting BlackBerry together, although it didn’t wind up killing me, I was so beholden to our U.S. financiers in ways that I wasn’t comfortable with,” says Johnson. “It was about deciding who I could cast, how I could talk about the movie and worst of all when I was able to release the movie. BlackBerry was a Canadian movie that I felt we should have controlled, but we lost a lot because of the American piece of the financing.”
Staying inside the Canadian system for NTBTSTM also afforded Johnson and McCarrol the freedom to keep on doing their favourite thing: failing with gusto. For starters: The version of the film that premiered at SXSW this past weekend is radically different from the movie that the team started filming in October, 2023. In fact, the pair only stopped shooting the movie just 10 days before the Austin premiere – and, according to Johnson, “that wasn’t even the final day. There will 100 per cent be more filming.”
Initially, the movie was going to be closer in execution to that first Telefilm pitch from way back when – a wild road-trip movie in which Matt and Jay drive an RV across the United States, the pair convinced that achieving American fame will finally help them score a gig at the Rivoli. But after spending four months filming in Detroit, Chicago and New Orleans, the film’s brain trust (which includes editors Curt Lobb and Robert Upchurch and producer Matt Greyson) scrapped the entire idea and started fresh.
Because the film’s budget was relatively small, there were no international financiers to placate, and the crew was nimble – there were only about seven people on “set” at any one time – the production could easily pivot. Which led to Johnson and Co. rewiring the movie into an epic time-travel flick that re-contextualizes old, unused footage from their original web series to tell a Back to the Future-inspired comic misadventure.
“It hurts when you might not use something you love, but as this movie shows, no footage we shoot ever really stays dead,” says Johnson. “The stuff we shot as kids is now the most important part of the movie!”
“If there is a future for Nirvanna the Band the Show as a series, then we’ve got tons of footage ready to go,” McCarrol adds, hinting that the series’ long-lost third season might see the light of day if the film succeeds.
‘It’s important as a bellwether to other Canadian filmmakers that ‘Canadian film’ is not a dirty word. I have no plans of moving – I’m not going anywhere,’ Johnson says.Jon Laytner/The Globe and Mail
While the pair are well aware that NTBTSTM is a tougher general-audience sell than BlackBerry – a ripped-from-the-headlines drama that boasted genuine name recognition in Howerton and Jay Baruchel – the new film is filled with enough jaw-dropping moments captured in the filmmakers’ signature eccentric style that it should spark its own series of media frenzies once Canadian audiences get a hold of it.
From nerve-wracking sequences set atop the CN Tower to an extraordinarily audacious scene in which Johnson and McCarrol appropriate a very real, very serious Toronto Police Department press conference for their own subversive purposes, the movie feels like one giant cinematic dare that turns Toronto into the blockbuster-sized city it was built to play.
“In the past 12 hours since the premiere, I’ve had endless conversations with people asking me what is real and what isn’t,” says Johnson. “The best answer that I can give is that the things people think we faked we really did, and the things that people haven’t even thought of, we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on VFX to make it look like it happened. Now, at the CN Tower, we’re playing all kinds of tricks. … It would have been international news otherwise.”
“And we’d be dead,” McCarrol adds.
The film will be distributed theatrically inside Canada by Elevation, though it has yet to find a U.S. distributor – another part of the reason it came to SXSW. But for Johnson and McCarrol, they‘ve already won.
“From the very beginning of our film careers, we realized that success is making it for yourself and hitting that mark,” says McCarrol. “Obviously we’d love to show this to all the fans in America and across the world who stuck around following the series. We can cross our fingers that I can tell someone from any country, go down to the theatre and watch it. But it’s not in our control.”
While Johnson might be surrendering even more control by dipping his toes outside the Canadian system – he recently started preproduction on a biopic of the late chef Anthony Bourdain for the U.S. indie powerhouse studio A24 – the director remains all-in on the Canadian system. And Nirvanna’s unexpected place within it.
“My dream has been to make movies in Canada with Telefilm as a partner at this exact scale. Provided they have an appetite for this, it’s an inexhaustible creative resource that can last us easily for another two or three decades,” Johnson says. “And it’s important as a bellwether to other Canadian filmmakers that ‘Canadian film’ is not a dirty word. I have no plans of moving – I’m not going anywhere.”
