One of the most anticipated films of the year, Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie will screen across the country this week.
Following on from a cult web series that started in 2007 and TV shows that premiered in 2017, the film tracks childhood friends and bandmates Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol as they continue on their quest to score a gig at their local venue, The Rivoli.
Only this time, their plan goes horribly wrong and they’re transported back to 2008 in a film that pays homage to Back To The Future and delivers some of their most daring stunts yet.
The Music caught up with Johnson and McCarrol ahead of release to unpack some of the biggest moments in Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie.
‘Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie’ The Reaction
Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie has had overwhelmingly positive reviews, which Johnson describes as “very surreal”.
“I think that both Jay and I have been stunned that the country that had the smallest reaction to this movie, and I mean this in a positive way for how big it is, it's been out-sized everywhere else, has been Canada,” he shares.
“It's like, everywhere we go to screen the movie, people go insane. In Canada, people like the film. I'm not trying to say they don't. We're so happy, and when we screen the movie here, it's awesome, but it's nothing like the screenings we did in America. Not even close.”
The filmmaker has tried to make sense of it the best he can, and thinks it’s largely to do with just how much NTBTSTM leans into Canadian culture.
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“I think because Canada is seen as a kind of, I don't want to say a ‘fairytale place’, but we feature it… you're watching us deal with firefighters, the police, security. I think there's something surreal about that, that you just don't normally see.
“To turn it on you, remember when, I mean, neither of us were alive, but when Mad Max first travelled the world, and even though that was not Australia, it had a kind of Australian ethos, that people were just like, ‘What is this?’ This is true for a lot of Australian, big-hit movies.
“Summer Heights High - I can almost guarantee that that is a bigger like, ‘Oh my God. What is this?’ when you watch that with a group of people in America, then what it's like for people in Sydney. It set the world on fire.
“It makes the whole country seem just crazy, in the same way that I think if you've never been to Canada or really met many Canadians, you watch our movie, and you think, ‘Canadians are like that? This is out of control,’ even though we aren't even necessarily playing on Canadian or Torontonian tropes necessarily, but we become the stand-in for our entire country, which means that, in a weird way, our movie is not just Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, it is like Canada The Movie.”
Jumping Off A Cultural Landmark
One of Toronto’s most notable landmarks is the city’s CN Tower, which plays a pivotal role in the film’s story, including a scene where Matt and Jay dive off it.
“The big trick of it is that we did not expect to get through security, right?” Johnson reveals. “And so, I think that is your first clue as to how it came together. We thought security was going to stop us because of our parachutes, and we had a whole other plan for what we were going to shoot, that wasn't that.
“We're like, ‘Okay, so now we actually need to go through with this in some way,’ and that took a ton of planning to figure out how.”
McCarrol adds: “The CN Tower was just this mecca. It's like the main landmark, literally, of the city we've set our whole universe in, so we knew we wanted to do something involving the CN Tower, but we weren't fully prepared as to how that was going to work. It was very difficult to shoot around. There's a lot of security, and we had to improvise.”
As for how they actually filmed and edited the jump itself?
“I don't think we'll ever tell anybody how we did that,” Johnson says. “Maybe one day we will, but one, it's so complicated, and two, who knows what would happen to us if we were to admit what we did?”
McCarrol chimes in: “Just personally, selfishly, I would love to hear someone or many people venture a good, educated guess to try to actually say, ‘This is how they did it, and I'm going to show you, and I'm sure of it,’ because that would just be so fun to watch.”
A Shooting At Drake’s Place
One of the scenes in the film features Jay being interviewed at a radio station in Toronto. During filming, the hosts got word that there had been a shooting at Drake’s place, which ended up driving the narrative for NTBTSTM.
“The way we write sometimes isn't always in specifics,” McCarrol says. “We know that we need certain building blocks to give characters, pushing them to their edge to force them to be motivated to do something that moves the story along, and Jay needed to have something happen there that needed him to go and return to Matt and have to use a time machine again. He needed to screw up bad.
“This ended up being such a gift. I can't remember, but I think there was something about, ‘What if I would murder someone?’ but we didn't know how yet. We hadn't written the details of this. We heard that this shooting happened, and that the entire police squad was there and all the press was there, and we jumped on it like we were tornado watchers.
“We were all in the van, had all of our stuff, and it very well could have not worked… we're very honest with ourselves to just throw it out if it's not working.”
is drake now feuding with nirvanna the band pic.twitter.com/P6OnB2nMHV
— stella (@stelperry) May 8, 2024
What’s Old Is New Again
The film sees current-day Matt and Jay transported back to 2008, which is when the original web series was filmed. Its Back To The Future homage meant that the time travellers were always going to come face to face with their younger selves. Filming scenes that would cut together with content filmed in 2008 required a little more planning.
“Our editors, Curt [Lobb] and Bobby [Upchurch], were the ones who scoured through those old tapes and then kind of wrote all of that 2008 [story],” Johnson explains. “All the back and forth, they'd kind of come up with on their own, and then we were just sort of filling in the blanks, so we got to be an audience to it in the same way that you were, where when we watched it for the first time, we were like, ‘This is unbelievable. I can't believe you guys have figured out how to do this.’
“On the Blu-ray, that I'm sure is being released in your country as well, there is an extensive 35-minute edit of Curt and Bobby's original 2008 storyline where you see everything that they did, and it goes into everything, but in terms of our participation, we had very little to do with that. I mean, we were there, obviously, when the footage was first shot.”
“We made an animatic together,” McCarrol adds. “And we were drawing what we were going to shoot against this footage, and again, as this behind the scenes will show, we were light on our feet with making a lot of edits there, and they allow us to have a lot of meat left on the bone to improvise around that stuff, because we'll establish certain key things that we need to say to move the story along, but in an animatic, those are put in there as just one line.
“That gives us the freedom to just colour outside the lines like crazy when we shoot it. Then, in the end, it goes back to the editors, and they still make more changes, and it turns out just bizarre, but the skeleton holds it together through all the testing.”
Back To The Lawyers: Avoiding A “Copyright Nightmare”
While directly referencing Back To The Future in the film, there’s a point where Johnson turns to the camera and says to the audience, "This is going to be a copyright nightmare." He then notes: “If you’re watching this in theatres, then thank your lucky stars, because this is going to be the only screening of this ever.”
But as Johnson reveals, it wasn’t something they were ever really concerned about.
“The real trick with that is that most of the copyright infringement, if you want to use that term, has kind of been worked out with our lawyer, Chris Perez, before we even go to shoot,” he says.
“So, as soon as we knew this was going to be Back To The Future, I was immediately talking with our lawyer and his whole team, really, about how much was too much, what I could do. I knew I was bowling with lanes where it couldn't go in the gutter.
“So, in some ways, you're watching me mock a reality that I knew I was totally in control of. That said, I recognise that if you don't understand fair use law, it does seem like, what the hell is going on? How is this even legal?
“But the more dangerous story, I guess, would be like, ‘Oh, yeah. What we couldn't do or things we wanted to try to do that we just couldn't,’ but there's so many hundreds, maybe even thousands of examples of ideas we would think of and be like, ‘Ah, no. We could never get away with that,’ so it looks more dangerous than it is.”
From A Cult Web Series To Global Film Screenings
From humble beginnings in 2007 as a web series that developed a cult following, to a TV show that ran for two seasons from 2017 (with a third coming), Johnson and McCarrol are in disbelief about how far Nirvanna The Band has come.
McCarrol says that 2008 Matt and Jay “wouldn't believe it”.
“I don't think that we would believe that it would be so unfiltered, unedited, just the same as it always was,” he shares.
“I mean, there's so much of this web series. I think the movie starts with the same shot as our web series. We would think probably, ‘Okay. Well, and for us to believe that we had made a movie that went on the big screen, we would've had to have changed a lot and bent to the will of what a real movie needs.’
“And the real fun and surreal thing is that we didn't change a thing about how we made this from the very beginning of when we started. We just got a little better at making it, but the exact same way.”
‘Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie’ is in cinemas Feb 20.
