Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol on the Unlikely, Legally-Challenged Journey of Getting ‘Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie’ to the Big Screen [VIDEO INTERVIEW]

Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol desperately want to play the Rivoli in Toronto. 

That’s been the ongoing premise for the two creatives’ web series-turned-TV show-turned-movie for twenty years. They inhabit fictionalized versions of themselves as a two-piece “band” who co-op in their downtown Toronto apartment, practicing not-even-half-realized songs and performance pieces, and coming up with ludicrous plans to play at the Rivoli, inexplicably treating the dive as if it’s Madison Square Garden. In the original self-produced web show, these plans involved putting up flyers and stealing booking schedules. In the Viceland-produced television show, it was sneaking into the Sundance Film Festival and stealing artifacts from museums. In the new Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, it’s lawlessly skydiving off of the CN Tower and time-traveling back eighteen years into the past. 

But make no mistake, no matter how much the brilliant new film adaptation of the show raises the stakes well within the domain of insanity and fantasy, Johnson and McCarrol still want to keep you on your toes with how much of their preposterous, sometimes seemingly dangerous antics are real or fake. The project’s genius is in its blurring of the dividing line between reality and performance, incorporating real-world docufiction filmmaking into propulsive narrative trajectories often guided by the way the real world does or doesn’t cooperate with the two’s ambitions. When Johnson scales to the top of the CN Tower, you may be inclined to believe you’re watching a fabrication, but the pair’s seeming inability to disclose the logistics of filming the event suggests otherwise. 

The project’s insane set-piece construction aside, its humor has always come from the bumbling banter and behavior of its two stars and their interactions with Toronto’s citizens. Nirvanna’s unsuspecting-public-prank-show contours continue in the movie, broadly following the tradition of something like a Borat, Nathan For You, or Jackass. But even though Johnson and McCarrol get unwitting individuals involved in plots they don’t even know they’re helping push forward, it pointedly avoids maliciousness. Fans are quick to refer to Nirvanna as a celebration of Toronto and Canada, and The Movie cements that with its loving focus on regular people who remain amiable in impossible situations.

Nirvanna is also a celebration of Johnson and McCarrol’s decades-long friendship, underlined by the movie’s plot: a not-so-subtle Back to the Future riff that institutes an emotional and temporal rift between the pair’s characters, injecting genuinely poignant drama into a relationship long-time fans are invested in alongside the newfound blockbuster-sized grandiosity. Even still, that homespun charm and humor of a scrappy passion project by two best friends never loses its veracity. This is something only Johnson and McCarrol could ever make, and it may just be their masterpiece.

I talked to Johnson and McCarrol about the surrealism of their cult hit making it to theater screens, making the movie for fans rather than a general audience, and whether Back to the Future 2 or 3 is the better sequel.

NEON will release Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie in theaters on February 13.