Writing a Giant Inside Joke with Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol
Still from Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. Courtesy of Elevation Pictures.
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (NTBTSTM) is the must-see movie of the year! The film is based on Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s web series, Nirvana the Band the Show, which ran from 2007 to 2009 and the subsequent television series, which aired on Viceland from 2017 to 2018. For the highly-devoted fans of the series, NTBTSTM is a dream come true (despite watching the show for the first time a month before watching the movie, it was the most excited I was for a movie in a long time), and if you are not at all familiar with the show beforehand, odds are you will instantly fall in love with NTBTSTM and seek out the show as soon as the film ends. With non-stop laughs, outrageous creativity, unbelievable stunts, and a genius execution of fair use that at times feels like it crosses the line into copyright infringement, NTBTSTM is a wildly entertaining movie that will have you wondering how they managed to pull it all off.
The film follows Johnson and McCarrol, who star as fictionalized versions of themselves. Matt and Jay’s dream is to land a show at the Rivoli for their band Nirvanna The Band, even though they have never successfully recorded a song. The two constantly come up with outlandish publicity stunts and wild schemes to get the Rivoli's attention and unfortunately, none of their ideas have worked out. After their latest plan to play goes disastrously awry, Matt, Jay, and their cameraman, Jared, accidentally travel back in time to 2008, where the three of them will remain stuck unless they find a way to travel back to the future.
Ahead of the wide release of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie in theatres across Canada, REVERIE chatted with Johnson and McCarrol about the making of NTBTSTM.
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, (the Poster).
Both the web series and the television series have developed a dedicated cult following. “Even though it has been a difficult show to find, a difficult show to jump into, if you don’t really know anything about us it can be off putting at first, the name is bizarre, long, and confusing, and yet people have slowly found it and shared it over almost 20 years, so we are incredibly grateful that people have found it and embraced it,” McCarrol says.
Throughout the years, there have been a few movie ideas, but none fully materialized. “We would have loved to make a movie, but we did not have the wherewithal to think of how to do it,” Johnson reflects. “We were really scrambling around in the dark back then and didn’t have a great sense of story.” Making a third season of the television series also seemed more likely than making a movie. “It was only when BlackBerry started doing well that it was like ‘Oh, we’ll have an easier time making a movie than making a third season of the television show,’ which ironically might lead to us getting to make the third season of the television show.”
Originally, NTBTSTM did not include any web series footage. “The idea of using the web series footage in the movie for some reason didn’t occur to us until we already shot a whole other version of the movie,” Johnson explains. Editors Curt Lobb and Robert Upchurch dug through hours of unused web series footage to find material that seamlessly blends with the rest of the film. “They deserve the credit for basically writing that whole 2008 sequence. It’s not like we shot those things with the intention of using them one day.”
Once they settled on using the web series footage, paying homage to Back to the Future was the obvious choice. “Its time travel logic is the most evergreen, so we knew we could easily not get too bogged down in time travel logic,” McCarrol says. “Also, it has the best score and feel of that classic Hollywood experience that we’ve always made homages to in the world of Nirvanna.”
McCarrol shares that making the film, especially rewatching old web series footage, felt like a trip back through time. “It was such a trip to go back into a window of your life,” he says. Initially, the plan was to film new scenes at Matt and Jay’s old apartment, where the web series was filmed. However, the current resident had no interest in the film at all. “We tried to say, ‘You know, we’re not just a bunch of clowns. Have you heard of BlackBerry?’ They were like, ‘I don’t care about anything you guys are gonna throw at me.’ We had our art team build a perfect [replica] of our apartment in a studio… When we were sitting in there, it was like a real time machine, and it helps make you really aware of how far you’ve come from who you were.”
Shot in a cinéma vérité style, the series places heavy emphasis on unscripted moments of people unaware of the camera as they interact with Matt and Jay. “[It’s a] real person being caught in a really vulnerable moment of pure human authenticity,” McCarrol says. “We would be very critical of ourselves and always kind of slap each other's wrists when we could tell one of us was trying to be funny… It needs to come off as very authentic. Really, what ended up being the most authentic is whenever we were interacting with somebody, really real. They would become the star.” One example of this in the movie is when Matt and Jay talk to the Canadian Tire employee, who is very concerned about Matt and Jay’s well-being and safety. “We knew just seconds into talking to him that this guy was giving us so much great material and he was so interesting.”
Another example of this is the very genuine interaction on Queen Street between Matt and a girl from France. “I even laugh when I’m talking to that girl from France,” Johnson recalls. “She laughs and so do I. It’s like we both break character, and somehow it doesn’t seem like we are.”
One of the most entertaining parts of the web and television series is all of the wacky stunts and highly elaborate plans that blur the line between fiction and reality. NTBTSTM ups the ante with one of the most jaw-dropping stunts they have ever done: Matt and Jay skydiving off the CN Tower into the SkyDome. “It’s so hard to judge it against other things we’ve done, but it required the most at every level,” Johnson says.
“We’ve always done this, even in the web series, where we write what we know is the natural evolution of what these characters would want to do based on their motivations, and then we would go and have those characters attempt that, and see what happens,” McCarrol explains. “Often that leads to things where maybe something unexpected or really interesting happens. We will pivot our writing to use that real event you couldn’t have ever written and use that as a narrative hinge as much as we can. In this case, we went into the CN Tower and thought, ‘Are they gonna throw us out?’ Maybe we had some gags or lines up our sleeves, like maybe we’re hunchbacks, and they start asking about our huge padded parachutes under our jackets… It was pretty hilarious that it was no questions asked, and we just walked right in.”
It’s impressive how the pair creatively utilize fair use to incorporate copyrighted material in NTBTSTM. . However, this does come with its share of complications, as it can be quite tricky, and at one point, even in the movie, Matt breaks the fourth wall and declares, ‘This is going to be a copyright nightmare. If you’re watching this in theatres, thank your lucky stars.’
“The thing about having fair use and parody law in play doesn’t necessarily mean that we are going out to make all of these references, contacting them, and then getting permission,” McCarrol explains. “What we have is a really great lawyer who understands the boundaries and basically just has a benchmark for us to hit for any given thing or certain criteria we need to meet. I think a lot of people don’t really know how free things can be if you are meeting the criteria. In our case, we just have a little more malleability and manoeuvrability because we have such a small team… If we had a really tight leash on how to make those references, we wouldn’t be able to explore as much.” Sometimes, to keep the things they are paying homage to or referencing, it needs to be rewritten a bit and become a very important part of the narrative line. “A lot of movies and TV shows don’t work that way. They have their script and a target that they hit. There is really no changing it, and definitely no going back to just redo something, and we are constantly redoing things… We wanted to push the frontier of what’s possible.”
Making sure those references and homages stayed in was crucial, as they have always been a huge part of who the characters are. “They are such open apertures to the world in a very naïve way, and now it is sort of what they are coasting on and what they live on,” McCarrol says. “They have a shared referential type of relationship. It really defines them in terms of how they are in this ‘arrested development’ of what their influences were in their childhood and what formed them to be what they are.”
McCarrol also describes the specific references as a “giant inside joke” that the audience is a part of. “People will see us making these specific references and pulling from maybe obscure things, and if that hits with them all of a sudden, without even looking at the camera, you have made this incredible connection to somebody watching who is like, ‘Oh my God. I just liked those three things that you mentioned in the same way,’” he says. “It’s always compelled a lot of people to tell us, ‘I really think you’re making this show for me.’ It’s almost the opposite: we aren’t making the show for anybody but ourselves, but we are so alike with so many people.”
Despite how absurd and goofy their concepts can be, the series at large manages to be incredibly heartwarming and feel-good, ultimately becoming about the power of friendship. “On one foot, we would just be super silly, wildly referential, evil to each other, Machiavellian, and do underhanded selfish moves to show how childish and naïve that we were, and to offset that with this heart and to realize that these are vulnerable boys with quite potent feelings, given how young and vulnerable they are, was something we thought was really touching from the very beginning,” McCarrol shares. “When something can successfully hit you in the gut with a nice sort of gut punch, it kind of justifies all the wild or edgy stuff that we do… I think it surprises people that a movie that is so silly can all of a sudden just take one step towards giving them a hug.”
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie will release in theatres on February 13th. “I can’t believe that people, especially filmmakers, will watch something like this and be as complimentary as they are, and I take a huge amount of pride in that, and I would say in some ways it’s the meaning of my life,” Johnson says.
“It was just completely us and our selected creatives that made exactly the movie that we wanted,” McCarrol adds. “It’s kind of a once in a lifetime thing.”
*This article combines a Zoom interview with Jay McCarrol after a screening of NTBTSTM in September at the Calgary International Film Festival (CIFF), and an in-person interview with Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol prior to the NTBTSTM screening in Vancouver in November.