Olivia Chow won’t be sending by-law enforcement after Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol
The mayor said she loved Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie despite the many, many rules that were broken to make it
Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol had to break some rules to film Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, a lawless Toronto-based comedy in which the pair play fictionalized versions of themselves who accidentally travel back in time trying to book a show at the Rivoli.
You might think they’d be in trouble for causing chaos all over town—without permits!—in the name of cinema, but Mayor Olivia Chow said this week that she won’t hold it against them.
Chow recently attended the premiere for Hulu’s The Testaments, where a reporter from The Movie Podcast asked her what she thought of the filmmakers’ stunts. “Oh, I loved it!” she said of the film, which came out last year. “That was hilarious.”
As for Johnson and McCarrol going rogue to film it, Chow said, “I don’t know how many by-laws they broke, but that’s okay.”
The interviewer asked if she had a message she’d like to relay to Johnson. She encouraged him to “keep creating” but also said she doesn’t want them to get hurt.
“And stay off those light boxes,” she added. “In case you get zapped.”
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Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
