{"id":289757,"date":"2026-02-13T19:00:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T19:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/289757\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T19:00:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T19:00:08","slug":"nirvanna-the-band-the-show-the-movie-defies-gravity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/289757\/","title":{"rendered":"Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie Defies Gravity"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

It\u2019s tempting to liken Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie to like-minded mid-budget hybrid docu-comedies, like the work of Nathan Fielder or Jackass, but the most apt comparison for Matt Johnson\u2019s big-screen adaptation of his and Jay McCarrol\u2019s small-screen web series might be \u2014 somewhat improbably \u2014 Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning. The opening 20 minutes feature a set piece involving the CN Tower (which did not approve the film\u2019s use of its site) in a sequence that may stress out those who balk at heights. Nirvanna the Band the Show, which ran as a web series from 2007 to 2010 and then as a sitcom from 2017 to 2018 on Viceland, was not known for its stunts. But in order to make good on the movie-ness of it all, Johnson and McCarrol leaped and ran and dived into the sky, all for the sake of booking a concert at the beloved Toronto venue Rivoli.<\/p>\n

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is almost impossible to describe, but here\u2019s an attempt: Johnson and McCarrol play fictional versions of themselves \u2014 Matt and Jay \u2014 who are aspiring musicians in a band called Nirvanna the Band (no relation to the obvious) who try, in vain, over and over, to book a show at the aforementioned Rivoli with hopes of making it big. There\u2019s little narrative through-line; the show was far more akin to a comic strip than a narrative sitcom. Both the web series and the TV show allowed these characters to wreak havoc on the city of Toronto, frequently enlisting the help of unassuming and unprepared civilians, all in an effort of finally booking a single show.<\/p>\n

Following the success of Johnson\u2019s Blackberry<\/a>, he got the green light to adapt his and McCarrol\u2019s show into a film, which ups the ante several times over with death-defying stunts, time travel, and an alternate history in the mix. The feeling of watching the movie is entirely disorienting and completely hilarious. It is as much like Caught by the Tides as it is Back to the Future. Johnson and McCarrol don\u2019t want to give all their secrets away, but the movie they made was pieced together shot by shot, stunt by stunt, over a number of years. While Johnson and McCarrol never set out to make something that left its audience wondering how they pulled it off, the sense of disbelief and wonder never vanishes, even as you\u2019re laughing.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the movie you initially started out making. What was the first iteration like?
Matt Johnson: The idea was to make this movie very quickly: Blackberry had just come out, and the Canadian government had agreed to finance this movie. I was thinking it would be really fun to have these two characters from Nirvanna the Band meet people from different cultures \u2014 a bit like The Trip, which is a movie Jay and I both really like. We thought we might do something more non-narrative, like a tour film. But the real issue when we looked at the footage was that it didn\u2019t have any scope. It didn\u2019t feel like it should be a movie. In Canada, there\u2019s a TV show called The Trailer Park Boys, and they\u2019ve released a number of movies that feel like episodes of their TV show in terms of the scale.<\/p>\n

Jay McCarrol: We were watching it back and feeling a bit like, No matter how well we finish this, there\u2019s going to be something missing.<\/p>\n

Johnson: We were shooting this movie in different American cities where we didn\u2019t know anybody and we had no connections, and we were scrambling to make a story come together. And then we ended up setting the movie in Toronto in basically our own backyard. It felt so effortless that it made the extremes that we went through much more tolerable for us. Not because America is particularly difficult to film; in some ways, it was the opposite. My interpretation of the standard American citizen is that they all should be on television. It\u2019s like the entire country has media training. Everybody we met was a charismatic game-show contestant.<\/p>\n

Shooting in Canada just made everything less hard. One of the big tricks to how we made this movie is that we returned to the same thing over and over and over again. We shot many of those sequences over the course of weeks, sometimes months, one shot at a time. For example, when we\u2019re dragging that cable across town from the CN Tower to Queen Street to plug it in, we shot that piecemeal over the course of weeks, one or two shots at a time.<\/p>\n

A lot of what you guys do when you\u2019re shooting out in Toronto is interact with members of the public, who you enlist to aid and abet in these characters\u2019 various schemes. These aren\u2019t paid actors. They\u2019re not in on the bit. You\u2019ve called this \u201csocial engineering.\u201d<\/a> What\u2019s an example of how we see that social engineering play out onscreen?
Johnson: That CN Tower sequence that starts the movie is the perfect example: As you\u2019re watching Jay and I come out onto [the ledge of] the tower, it\u2019s not immediately apparent that the camera is not controlled by us. It\u2019s a GoPro on the head of a tour guide who had never met us before. We\u2019re getting this guy to look and move exactly where we need him to in order to create the beats of that sequence without him even realizing he\u2019s doing it, with the real crazy trick being that we leave with the footage.<\/p>\n

McCarrol: We always want our cameramen to be like National Geographic documentarians filming wildlife. We go through efforts to make it feel believable that a cameraman would just barely get his camera up in enough time to see Matt running around with a giant cable. We go over the psychology of how a four-person camera team could capture something so fantastic, and that\u2019s what ends up forcing us to find where those strange lines between reality and fiction are. We try to go as far as we can without actually needing to cross a line into fiction. Any of those tricks, it really is exactly what you\u2019re seeing 90 percent of the time.<\/p>\n

When you\u2019re going for something like the CN Tower sequence, does the gamble become scarier when it starts to feel like you\u2019re going to get away with it?
Johnson: I think both Jay and I are quite hesitant, and oftentimes we back away from things. Curt [Lobb] and Bobby [Upchurch], our editors, are always telling me specifically, \u201cYou got too scared. This could have gone way farther.\u201d<\/p>\n

McCarrol: It\u2019s really hard to stay committed.<\/p>\n

Johnson: And I think in some ways that speaks to our Canadian-ness, or at least mine \u2014 the desire to not get in the way of somebody\u2019s day is so powerful in my mind when we\u2019re shooting this that I\u2019m always taking my foot off the gas before we really inconvenience somebody.<\/p>\n

Was using the CN Tower part of what you wanted to do when it came to expanding the scope?
Johnson: That was one of the first things that we realized we should do.<\/p>\n

McCarrol: It was also a bit of a white whale for us in the Nirvanna universe. The show started as an extension of us just being real and sincere with our lives, but then it became fun that we were hitting more Toronto landmarks, and in that pursuit, we realized the CN Tower is like our city\u2019s greatest piece.<\/p>\n

To what extent do you try to plan some of these set pieces around other things going on? I was reading you did the trolley stunt the same day as the Eras Tour.
Johnson: The credit for that goes to our producer, Matt Grayson, who tries to set good conditions for us. When we\u2019re doing things in public, it\u2019s not so much that we might get arrested, it\u2019s more about the efficiency of trying to shoot something that complicated without permits and very quickly. Planning it the same day as a Taylor Swift concert in Toronto means that there\u2019s so much chaos in the city that whatever we\u2019re doing is not going to compare. Matt tries to set up our shoots as often as he can with that type of defense mechanism.<\/p>\n

A friend was saying that the proverbial \u201cfifth Beatle\u201d of your operation is also your lawyer. To what extent are you roping him into the creative process?
Johnson: Yes, his name is Chris Perez, and we have a very direct back-and-forth conversation about more or less every single thing that we do. It\u2019s been that way since my first film, The Dirties. We are trying to be at the vanguard of fair-use law, specifically American fair-use law, and we\u2019re only able to do so because Perez has kind of walked me through, film after film, what we can and can\u2019t do and the circumstances that we need to create in order to do these things legally. Writing the use cases creatively, why these things need to happen in the film \u2014 it\u2019s actually quite fun. It\u2019s bizarrely like high school again, where you get these little assignments of \u201cMake a case in two paragraphs as to why Back to the Future is narratively important to this film\u201d or \u201cWhy this song is narratively important to this film\u201d over and over and over again.<\/p>\n

McCarrol: And if it\u2019s not, then we can be maneuverable and adjust the writing so that it does fit a case that we can justify.<\/p>\n

\ufeffBack to the Future is a huge touchstone in this film, as your characters go back to 2008, which was about a year after the web series started. There are several bits about comedy that haven\u2019t aged well \u2014 references to Bill Cosby and Russell Peters, and there\u2019s a scene from The Hangover. How has your own comedy changed between then and now? Is there a difference in terms of what you will and won\u2019t touch?\u00a0
Johnson: We haven\u2019t really been asked that, but my answer is no. I view more or less everything as on the table. My sense is, especially in Nirvanna the Band the Show, that if it\u2019s making us laugh, there\u2019s something to it. Curt and Bobby are really the only other people who see our raw footage, so we go pretty crazy when we\u2019re shooting, acting as much like adolescent boys as we can. Maybe at a subconscious level there\u2019s a certain amount of self-censorship.<\/p>\n

McCarrol: I think we, collectively, have a pretty deep desire to protect ourselves. So, yes, when we shoot and we improvise, there\u2019s no script and tons of shit is said. We say everything. I think, generally, everybody subscribes to this idea that the edgier or the more contentious the language, we have a bigger responsibility for it to be clever enough and to strike that balance where we know that the broad audience is going to understand that the intention is to all laugh at this together. It\u2019s like if we can take the edgiest, rudest stuff and somehow get a whole family to have a wholesome laugh at it, that feels good. In the web series, we enjoyed pushing boundaries because that was sort of the time.<\/p>\n

Johnson: There\u2019s nothing that little kids like more than taboos. They feel sacred.<\/p>\n

McCarrol: Like sticking your hand in the cookie jar.<\/p>\n

Johnson: By the way, I know you can see me moving out into the snow, and it\u2019s because I\u2019m going to a Magic tournament.<\/p>\n

McCarrol: Oh, that\u2019s today!<\/p>\n

Are you competing? Observing?
Johnson: A little bit of both. I would love to go and just play in a tournament for fun. That was my dream as a kid. I\u2019m writing and directing the Magic Card movie for Legendary and Hasbro.<\/p>\n

I have one more question, which takes us back to the beginning of our conversation when we talked about TV movies and The Trailer Park Boys. What do you think makes for a successful TV-show movie, or how did you think about transposing one medium into another?
Johnson: I think credit might go to Bobby for this answer, but I think a successful TV adaptation of a show could work as the beginning of an audience watching that show. And by that I mean even though it\u2019s absurd to say, I think that for most people, this movie is going to serve as the pilot of the TV series, and they\u2019re going to go from watching the movie to the TV show as a continuation from this. If there\u2019s anything we did that was cynical in terms of the construction of the movie, it was to try to make it so that if this is the very first time you\u2019ve seen these characters ever, that you will be excited to leave this and then watch the show, as opposed to something that only people who had ever watched the show would enjoy.<\/p>\n

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