The Detours To ‘Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie’

The last time The Music checked in with Canadian duo Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol, it was around the premiere of Season 2 of Nirvanna The Band The Show in 2017. At the time, the team behind the cult comedy series were shooting its third season, with an aim to release it the following year.

2018 came and went with no updates, and so did 2019, 2020… And just when fans had given up hope, Johnson began teasing a movie was in the works while on the road promoting his film BlackBerry in 2023.

The highly anticipated Nirvanna The Band film finally had its world premiere at SXSW in Austin earlier this year. Even those unfamiliar with the show, which ran from 2017–2018, and the 2007–2009 web series it was based on, felt the hype.

And after acclaim in Texas, and screenings at other festivals, Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, is touring the US and will have its Australian premiere at SXSW Sydney on Oct 15 and Oct 19.

Its title is a mouthful, and McCarrol admits he’s “completely just given up on making any effort to try to explain” what Nirvanna The Band is exactly, “because it's just not going to work.”

Despite that, and the fact that the movie fits between the show’s second and third seasons, the only thing you really need to know to watch and enjoy it is this: Two lifelong friends, Matt and Jay, are trying to get a gig at their local venue, The Rivoli, in Toronto.

In the film, their latest plan goes pear-shaped and they’re accidentally transported back to 2008 in a Back To The Future-themed story.

The original premise for the film was drastically different, however, with Johnson revealing he originally thought they should shoot it in Europe, and that the entire movie was going to be a “Talented Mr. Ripley parody”.

“I think I was in Scotland, or maybe Ireland, and it was right after we'd premiered BlackBerry at the Berlin Film Festival,” he recalls, “and I was noticing just the way people talked in the street, which I found so funny… I thought maybe if we went through Europe to all of these English-speaking countries here, it would be really funny and it would be quick.”

When Johnson returned to Canada and they began mapping out the film, they realised it would be “financially impossible” to film the whole thing in Europe.

“And then we decided that we should do it in the United States,” he adds. “I had this crazy idea to make it based on the book Confederacy Of Dunces, which is this unadaptable American book that people have tried to make into a movie many, many times, and it always either obliterates its production or kills the people that are trying to do it.”

McCarrol chimes in: “I was like, ‘I don't even know what that is. What's the story?’ And we tried to figure it out. I was trying to pitch, ‘Why don't we do something more sci-fi, like a Bill & Ted thing?"

The Confederacy Of Dunces pitch won, and before they knew it, Johnson was running naked through the streets of Memphis. They also “shot a ton in Detroit, Chicago”. 

“Because we'd never really travelled, I had never been to any of these cities before, so much of it was me learning about the culture of these places as a tourist and being like, ‘Oh my God, this is crazy,’” Johnson tells, “and so making the movie became almost like an afterthought as we were going to these different places.

“We shot a ton of that movie, going all the way down to New Orleans. But I would say even midway through shooting that, the plan to make something very quick exposed itself as more or less impossible. You've seen the movie now. The complications of that plot, it's like it eats itself in terms of how complicated it is... I shouldn't say complicated, I should say complex.”

They returned to Canada, and after struggling to piece it together how they wanted for a feature film, they decided to start over: ‘Hey, why don't we make an entire movie in Toronto instead?’ 

“There was a little bit of a vulnerable moment where my master plan had a moment to seize on,” McCarrol says. “And I remember asking, ‘Why don't we maybe talk about the Bill & Ted thing? Let's do a little time travel.’”

It took one conversation over dinner to confirm the plan, then Johnson went home and wrote the entire story on one Saturday, “a two-page script that we shot verbatim,” the filmmaker reveals.

“It was never changed,” McCarrol shares.

Johnson describes creating the film that audiences are now seeing as a “profound, magical, creative experience”. 

“We use this metaphor a lot of remembering a dream, where truly great ideas when you're coming up with them, especially when you're coming up with them in a group, nobody has a full picture of what the idea is, but it seems as though unconsciously everybody knows what it is, we just can't remember it,” he says.

“And so, as people will bring up different details of what could be in the plot, it's almost like we're all remembering a dream that we had the night before. As soon as you hear a detail that's salient or correct, everybody knows that it's right, because we all had the same dream. You get this feeling or this reaction of ‘yes’. Everybody just goes, ‘Yes, that was in the dream. Exactly.’

“And this entire plot, literally every single beat, from me coming back, and now I've got this new band that is hyping me up, to Jay becoming incredibly famous, to me showing up at Jay's concert, all of it. It literally wrote itself within under 24 hours from having no idea to having the finished script that we shot more or less verbatim.”

The film feels just as organic from a viewer’s point of view, which is exactly what they were aiming for.

“We are trying to be unpretentious about how these things get written, because Jay and I are also huge fans of Nirvanna The Band,” Johnson says. “We follow them and push them into places that we want to see.

“The reaction that other people have watching it, it immediately feels like we're all in on the same joke, that we're all in the same club. And that the fans of it also had the same dream, they just didn't realise it. When they see it, it's like they get to remember the story as opposed to experience it.”

There’s tension between Matt and Jay in this film, which is a direct follow-on from season two, where the latter is questioning their dynamic and his future. Jay’s professional ambition is driving a wedge between them that hits the breaking point.

“[Success] is just around a corner, and [Jay’s] so tempted, rightfully so, in that opportunity,” Johnson says. “Whereas Matt is so content to be in this gerbil wheel, irrespective of the fact that I think at some level, he knows it's never getting him anywhere. This movie was trying to deal with that.

“But it's an evergreen idea. I think it's true within Jay and my real friendship as well. But it's also, I think, universally true. It's about outgrowing your friends, but still realising that they have a place in your heart that you can never escape.”

McCarrol adds, “Yeah, I feel like by being friends with Matt since we were kids, anyone who's had a friend that long and has actually been true friends that long, you're exposed to such a long path of ups and downs, and we've been through it all together.

“It's really not that challenging to access this stuff when we're writing it or when we're improvising with each other. And what helps is that even though we're acting, we know who we're playing and we've been doing it for so long.

“It's the way that when you interact with a sibling, you can't code-switch or put on any mask because they'll know. And we have that vulnerability with each other, whether it's how we are with each other or what we've been through. And so it's all very cathartic to put it all into this and let it all hang out and just be vulnerable with ourselves.” 

And as for what they filmed in the US before pivoting? Will that ever see the light of day?

“In true Nirvanna The Band fashion, every failure is also a victory,” Johnson declares. “I won't tell you all the details, but I'll tell you two very interesting things. The first is that, yes, what we shot is a part of Season 3 in a very big way, and two, one of the other iterations of this movie puts the timeline back together of what this movie shows. So, there's a Season 3 episode that has the exact same opening scene as the end of this movie.”

See Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie at SXSW Sydney on Oct 15 and Oct 19. To view the full program, visit sxswsydney.com.