“Films very rarely do this”: the Nirvanna the Band duo on fair use, 80s blockbusters and guerrilla filmmaking

Canadian actor-filmmaker Matt Johnson (BlackBerry) and actor-musician Jay McCarrol return to cinemas with the hugely ambitious, frequently hilarious and anarchic feature comedy, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. It follows the improvised web series Nirvanna the Band the Show (2007 to 2009) and TV series (2017 to 2018), in which Johnson and McCarrol play fictionalised versions of themselves, as aspiring band members aiming to get a gig at the Rivoli theatre in Toronto. The movie goes one step further, throwing in a time-travel element that takes the band back to 2008 as they seek their fame and fortune.

James Mottram: How did this start? Did you both fantasise about being in a band?

Jay McCarrol: No, it never had anything to do with wanting to be in a band. We could have been trying to do anything, but the band just fit the arc, or the goal, of what these guys were trying to become, and they never succeed at it. It was about the constant trying and failing, and the lessons that you take in that revolving door – that was the repetitive theme of our show.

Matt Johnson: But the music was important because Jay was so gifted naturally in an almost preternatural way as a musician. If [audiences] were really paying attention, they’d be like, ‘Wait a minute, one of the guys in this band maybe could become a famous musician.’

Had you always planned a movie? After all, you fold in material from the earlier incarnations into the narrative here…

McCarrol: People are always asking us, ‘Did you guys know at the time that you were making a time-travel movie?’ No, we just got so lucky. The editors really did pour over footage for hours and hours and hours, because back in the day, the way Matt and I shot the web series was so wild. We made so much improv, and then edited it afterwards.

How guerrilla was the shoot?

McCarrol: Ninety percent of it. If you really think about it, you can probably see where we would have had a controlled environment where we set ourselves up, but the massive majority of the movie is just shot in the world, because that’s just what we’ve always loved to have as the backdrop. Can’t get better than reality.

Did you run into trouble?

McCarrol: There’s a little bit of this going on all the time, but that ends up being a small nuisance most of the time, rather than a big issue. We can usually de-escalate something. If we have to leave somewhere, okay, we’ll leave, we’ll come back later, or we’re only shooting illegally in some spot for just a quick moment. We don’t have a huge setup. This is not like when you see trucks lined up on a street. We’re just showing up with four people, and we’re launching right into it. We just basically discuss this part of the movie that we’ve already put out in a story form. We know what we’re going to shoot, but there’s no script. So usually it’s on the Uber or van ride over that we are discussing how we’re going to do it, and we just block it live.

Johnson: We’re also not going out of our way to try to mess with people, and I think that also makes a big difference compared to somebody like Eric André or Sacha Baron Cohen, where the point of what they’re doing is to try to get as many people looking at them. 

Back to the Future (1985) is the plutonium that powers the movie. What is the enduring appeal of that movie? 

McCarrol: We’ve always dipped into that magical era of movies. We grew up with it, so that’s what hit us in our generation the hardest, in terms of the dragon we’re always going to chase, in terms of how magical things can feel on screen. We love the huge blockbuster moviemaking moves. It fuels a lot of our ideas, and we can riff on it a lot, but also when they’re made so well like that, they become such great crutches that we can just rip off story beats and then just reskin them as our own. It’s like a major trick.

You make a gag in the film about the struggle you’ll have with clearing rights, especially with clips to Back to the Future. Did it all come under ‘fair use’?

Johnson: BlackBerry was much harder, in terms of the fair use that we used in that film. So, although I guess you could say I am exaggerating the difficulty on screen of what this is going to be like, I knew that the audience was going to feel the same way you do, which is ‘This does all seem illegal.’ You’re dead on. It is fair use that we’re using, and it’s the same lawyer that we’ve been using on these movies since way, way back over 10 years ago. And so I think that the reason it seems larger than life is because films very rarely do this.

You even show billboards, when your characters time-travel back to 2008, of Grand Theft Auto IV. So did the video game’s makers Rockstar ever come after you?

Johnson: I think Rockstar would think this is cool. They also play with fair use, except in a different way. You’ll remember all those radio stations that they recreate. I can’t help but feel like that’s a major reference for Nirvanna the Band, because Jay, when we were first coming up with the show, was playing a lot of GTA. We used the radio shows as soundtrack of the web series, because we were so excited by them, they were so fun; taking the culture of American radio and mocking it in such an open way.

Hopefully, you guys won’t end up in jail…

McCarrol: It would be really funny. We went to jail for the fair use stuff that we’re just touting all this bravado over. Yeah, we’re fair use kings, and then we just end up in jail!

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is in UK cinemas 3 July, with preview screenings on 1 July.