Matt Johnson the Filmmaker the Profile

There’s a scene early in BlackBerry, director Matt Johnson’s breakout 2023 comedy-drama about the rise and fall of the titular Canadian cellphone, where a ragtag crew of Research in Motion programmers take five from revolutionizing telecommunications. They’re sitting in their dumpy Waterloo offices, and instead of working, they begin playing the 1990s real-time strategy computer game Command and Conquer: Red Alert. It’s a short scene and not especially memorable. But it was shot over several hours, producing enough raw footage for a whole new movie and its sequel.

Actor Jay Baruchel, who plays CEO Mike Lazaridis in the film, was perplexed. Baruchel is a veteran of polished Hollywood sets, where time is always someone else’s money. When he realized that the actors were engaged in an actual Red Alert campaign, which can take six to 10 hours to complete, he was apoplectic. “Jesus Christ, you know?” Baruchel recalls thinking. “We still had four or five pages of shit to shoot with, like, dialogue and stuff!”

Related:A surprisingly serious conversation with Ryan Reynolds on his new documentary, John Candy: I Like Me

Vexed, Baruchel approached the director. “Bro,” he said to Johnson, “why the fuck are you shooting this stupid computer game forever? You’ll never use that. You don’t need it!” Johnson’s response in that moment stuck with Baruchel. “I don’t know that,” the filmmaker snapped back. “I don’t know I don’t need it.”

This is how Matt Johnson works: free-flowing, improvisational, cameras rolling and rolling in the hope of capturing something real, or funny, or weird, or otherwise extraordinary. In this case, the director’s hope was twofold. Yes, he wanted to happen upon something unbidden. But he was also trying to needle his star a little bit. “I wanted to create a feeling in Jay of being left out,” Johnson admits. “So that required us to actually do it.” The frustration on display in the film is simultaneously that of Mike Lazaridis, the fictionalized technologist irked by his co-workers’ laziness, and Jay Baruchel, the real guy similarly irked by his co-stars’ slackness.

Baruchel’s frustrations eventually settled as he came to recognize the method to Johnson’s madness. “I’ve been on set since I was 12 years old,” he says. “Matt has a specific idea of how things should go. The logistical workflow shit doesn’t matter. It’s like when you’re a kid playing cops and robbers in the backyard with your friends. The only thing that matters is if the thing you’re doing is good.”

To that point: BlackBerry was released to near-universal critical acclaim. It was nominated for the prestigious Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, named one of the year’s top indie films by the US National Board of Review and awarded the Toronto Film Critics Association’s annual prize for the best Canadian film. At the 2024 Canadian Screen Awards, it set a record for the most-ever wins: best picture, director, editing, cinematography, adapted screenplay, costume design, sound editing and hair, plus Baruchel got best lead actor in a comedy. It was, on arrival, an instant classic of Canadian cinema, one that treated a story that could have easily been terminally dull (the commercial life cycle of a phone) with verve, creativity and humour.

Related: “Canadians suffer from this absolute refusal to see myth and romance in ourselves”—A Q&A with BlackBerry star Jay Baruchel

Johnson saw BlackBerry not as a movie about Canadian technological ingenuity but as a story of hard-scrabble, do-it-yourself creatives becoming compromised by corporate growth, scaling and sundry other complications that come with capital investment. “These guys were like independent filmmakers,” says Johnson of Lazaridis and RIM’s early developers, “who, all of a sudden, get in bed with entrepreneur Jim ­Balsillie, somebody who really does know how the business side operates. And that makes major cultural changes to the way that they’re going to work together as friends.”

Read between the lines, and BlackBerry is something of an accidental autobiography of Johnson. The film’s success, in Canada and abroad, marked a similar shift for the writer-director-actor and his own indie filmmaker pals, catapulting their homespun, DIY weirdness into the mainstream. In a world where Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie raked in more than $1 billion (US), Johnson’s ability to find irony and wit in the story of a gadget made him a hot commodity. Suddenly, he was fielding calls from producers eager to bring him in on all kinds of projects.

He turned down the opportunity (if that’s the right word) to make a movie based on Hot Wheels, the teeny die-cast toy cars manufactured by Mattel, the same company responsible for the Barbie doll and her namesake mega-blockbuster. But he signed on for Tony, a biopic chronicling the early years of cook, author and travel godhead Anthony Bourdain, starring Dominic Sessa of The Holdovers plus Antonio Banderas and Emilia Jones. It’s being produced by A24, the studio responsible for such indie-crossover hits as Lady Bird, Uncut Gems, Civil War and the Oscar-sweeping family fantasia Everything Everywhere All at Once. “There are so many people involved,” says Johnson, speaking over the phone from the tiny town of Dennis on Cape Cod, where he’s shooting. “The set isn’t nearly as chaotic as those of my previous films, in a good way and a bad way.”

As his star rises and he edges out of the backyard of Canadian indies and into the power centres of Hollywood, Johnson now stares down the prospect of losing the ineffable weirdness that made him great in the first place.

In conversation, Johnson, who turns 40 this October, zips around like one of those hyper-elastic Super Balls launched into a school gym. He picks up the phone mid-sentence and speaks with a manic quickness that demands the listener’s attention. He is sincere, thoughtful and funny, easily bouncing across topics from the evolution of language in Cro-Magnons (“They could talk to each other in code!”) to how the ravages of fame hypothetically afflict the legendary Canadian group behind Trailer Park Boys (“They’re Midas! They’ll never taste food again!”) to the cultural couture of ’90s school shooters (“Columbine basically inspired the fashion of The Matrix!”). My online transcription software offers helpful keywords from our conversations, which give a sense of their basic shape and scope: Cape Cod, collaboration, comic books, compromise, filmmaking, Final Fantasy, rebellion, rejection, Toronto.

Tony is the first film Johnson directed that he didn’t also write. The script, by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe, is based on the first few chapters of Bourdain’s 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential, capturing the cook as, in his own words, a “loudmouthed, useless little punk.” It’s a characterization that resonates with Johnson: a kind of privileged-white-kid rebellion arising not from hardship but from a total lack of adversity—a nonconformity born of conformity itself. Bourdain typifies a kind of character Johnson is consistently drawn to, what he calls “an iconoclastic rebel who feels like he’s smarter than the people telling him he can’t do what he wants.”

This same self-styled iconoclasm spurred Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, a long-gestating time-travel buddy comedy making its Canadian premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this month. For years, Johnson warred with Telefilm, Canada’s biggest film-funding bureaucracy—critiquing its business model and general risk-aversion in the press and from the stages of film festivals. When he was approached with BlackBerry, he recognized that the film might afford him certain political capital. “We tried to be good little boys so we could go back to making things the way we wanted to,” he said last year. As soon as BlackBerry premiered to applause and strong reviews, one thought popped into his head: “Oh, now we can make Nirvanna the Band the Movie.”

But what, exactly, is a “Nirvanna the Band” movie anyway? It’s hard to describe—an obstacle its co-creator is all too familiar with. “It’s the show’s biggest problem!” Johnson laughs. “Just like an inside joke, it’s impossible to explain.”

Here’s my attempt. Originally released in 2007 as a web series called Nirvana the Band the Show, it starred Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol as “Matt Johnson” and “Jay McCarrol,” two hapless wannabe musicians in an improvisational duo called Nirvana the Band. Their sole, dogged ambition: to play a show at the Rivoli, that (once) vaunted Queen West concert hall. They have no set list. They don’t even really have songs. What they do have is a series of schemes, episodically hatched in a bid to try to storm the Rivoli’s stage. The premise is both brilliant and extremely stupid: a thin excuse for throwing the characters into mayhem, shot guerrilla-style on the streets of Toronto.

Johnson and McCarrol met in the unforgiving forge of personality known as high school. Johnson attended John Fraser Secondary in Mississauga, an experience spent among like-minded video game and comic book nerds. He relished pushing boundaries, such as those enforced by parents, teachers and other looming avatars of hollow authority. A formative experience, he recalls, was lying to his family as a kid and getting away with it. “I began lying all the time,” Johnson says. “Realizing that rules are somewhat arbitrary and that breaking them was not going to end the world was a huge motivator for me.”

McCarrol, meanwhile, attended nearby Erindale Secondary, where he was known as a gifted musician who dreamed of composing film scores and spent weekends making goofy movies with friends (“Pranks and hidden camera stuff,” as he recalls). The two were introduced by Johnson’s then-girlfriend, and the connection was instant. They tossed together some short student films and half-formed sketch comedy ideas. Johnson also made his own student films (“Repulsively pretentious,” he calls them now) that McCarrol scored.

One night, McCarrol and Johnson were at Jumbo Video, that mostly defunct Canadian video chain famous for its aggressively salty free popcorn, when they began riffing on the idea of two dumb guys who wanted nothing more than to play the Rivoli. “Matt came up with the name,” McCarrol remembers. “‘They’re called Nirvana! Nirvana the Band!’ Just to make it dumber. We had this one conversation, we laughed, then, boom. Forever.”

The show found an audience of stoners, hipsters and the extremely online. Curt Lobb, a film editor who would go on to work with Johnson and McCarrol, remembers watching the web series while he was a university student, in the basement of an apartment he shared with seven other guys. “I thought, What the hell is this? This looks like shit. Then it won me over,” he says. “You look at it, and it’s like looking at your own friends.”

McCarrol also recalls him and Johnson leaving their Queen West apartment sometime in 2007 en route to a York University house party. As they locked up, a stranger called out, “Oh, shit! Matt and Jay from Nirvana!” Later, at the party, he and Johnson were, to their continued surprise, again recognized as those dudes from that show. “All of a sudden, it was like, ‘Okay. We need to get serious.’”

Serious,” in this case, meant thinking bigger. As early as 2009, Johnson and McCarrol began workshopping the movie. Johnson wrote a script (a needless chore given that the dialogue is largely improvised), prepared a hefty production binder and submitted it to Telefilm. They were laughed out of the room. “We got told, in no uncertain terms, that it was never going to happen,” Johnson says. “The Telefilm model wouldn’t support something that was made in such a chaotic way. It was that rejection that led to all this independent work.”

“Spite,” Bourdain writes in Kitchen Confidential, “was always a great motivating force in my life.” Johnson doesn’t scan as a spiteful person, but he is driven by something similar: what he describes as an insatiable “I-told-ya-so-ism.” He gets his kicks proving people wrong. And he left that Telefilm meeting committed to making something disentangled from the purse strings of state funding.

He pivoted to a new idea with an eyebrow-raising premise: a school shooting comedy. The idea caught the attention of Matthew Miller, a York film grad who produced, co-wrote and directed the 2008 indie thriller Surviving Crooked Lake and, as a result, already had a measure of local credibility. The two were connected by cinematographer Jared Raab, who helped edit Miller’s movie and worked on the web series (and all of Johnson’s features, at least until Tony).

Miller agreed to co-produce the movie, called The Dirties, and they cobbled together a $10,000 budget, scrimping part-time job earnings (Johnson was then working as a guide at the Ontario Science Centre). Miller and Johnson also co-founded their own production company, Zapruder Films—a nod to the most famous home movie ever—with the company’s logo set in the TTC’s Subway font. More than anything, Miller just wanted to work with Johnson. “The energy, the talent—all that was there, even then,” he says. The Zapruder office also took on Johnson’s personality: one former intern recalls opening a filing cabinet to find it crammed with action figures.

Johnson directed, starred in and co-wrote the film (on the fly; there was no script). As in Nirvana, he played a fictionalized “Matt”: a tapped-in pop culture junkie and aspiring director making a high school movie about bullied kids shooting up their school. The sinister wrinkle in The Dirties is that the fictional Matt was also bullied in school, and his student film is merely a cover for his plan to exact revenge on his tormentors.

The Dirties earned a slot at the annual Slamdance Film Festival in Los Angeles. In an eerie bit of synchronicity, it premiered just a month after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut. Despite—or maybe because of—its confrontational, searingly of-the-moment subject matter, The Dirties won the Grand Jury Prize. Clerks and Chasing Amy director Kevin Smith, a DIY filmmaking veteran, distributed the film internationally. “It moved me immensely,” Smith said at the time. “Look what’s possible: anyone can take a camera and tell a gripping story.”

The film’s success piqued the interest of other American indie producers and distributors. Johnson’s 2016 follow-up, Operation Avalanche, saw him play another character named Matt Johnson: a CIA spook who infiltrates NASA in the 1960s to fake the moon landing. To actually shoot scenes inside the US federal agency, Johnson and his crew posed as student filmmakers shooting a documentary about the moon landing.

This mix of thrift and grift—the very real sense that both the characters and the filmmakers are getting away with something—energizes so much of Johnson’s work. Miller sees Johnson as someone both inspired and compelled by challenges. Tell him you can’t surreptitiously shoot inside NASA or submit a sado-comic school shooting mockumentary to a film festival, and he’ll figure out a way to do it. “That’s never gonna work is manna for Matt,” Miller says. “It really drives him.”

In 2017, the Nirvana web series was adapted for television as Nirvanna the Band the Show (note the extra, lawyer-foiling “n”). It aired on Vice’s now-defunct cable channel, Viceland. The network leased a 2,500-square-foot Victorian home at 107 Shaw, in Trinity-Bellwoods, that acted as both a set and a studio, where episodes were conceived, filmed and edited. The whole circle of friends—Johnson, McCarrol, Miller, Raab, Lobb and others—worked and practically lived out of what became known throughout Toronto as “the Nirvanna the Band House.” A clubhouse atmosphere prevailed.

The budgets were bigger, but the premise was always the same: book a gig at the Rivoli, by any means necessary. In the pilot episode, Matt and Jay manufacture an enormous banner advertising their band and unfurl it across the street from the venue—only to realize that Jay’s penis is exposed in the banner photo. In another, they purloin a map of Toronto’s underground sewage system from the Royal Ontario Museum, a hare-brained scheme that sees them smashing a glass display case, evading ROM security and scurrying down the tracks at St. George station.

Johnson adheres to the defiantly un-Canadian notion that it’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission. In reality, his productions are a lot more controlled than they appear, with a whole creative and legal team that regularly begs both permission and forgiveness on his behalf. “Matt has a certain power where he can get away with things,” says Vicki Lean, a filmmaker and producer who’s worked diligently to ensure the safety and legal clearances of Nirvanna. “But there’s a whole team behind him. I’ve paid a lot of lawyers.”

The ROM stunt, in actuality, involved crew members sneaking pieces of a fake display case into the museum and surreptitiously assembling it when no one was looking so that Johnson could smash the breakaway glass without actually damaging museum property (or himself). The “escape” was staged, using paid actors as security guards (their faces blurred to give the impression that they were real museum employees). And the duo’s daring subway getaway uses careful match cutting and camera movements to make it seem as if they’re jumping onto a live train track when they’re really running down a length of the abandoned Lower Bay Station, which the production had rented out.

It’s hard to think of a Canadian filmmaker, at least since octogenarian David Cronenberg, who has inspired not just critical adulation but a legitimate cult fandom. For all its eccentricity and hyper-local Torontoness, Nirvanna has found devotees as far afield as Ireland, Finland and South Africa.

On Reddit threads, Discord servers and fan sites, Nirvanna fans converse in quotes from the show, share memes screen-grabbing practically every frame, painstakingly index minute changes in jokes and camera movements between different cuts of episodes, and compile shared Google Docs with titles like “Masterlist of Nirvanna the Band References.” The level of obsessiveness calls to mind the wisdom of Jerry Garcia, who once compared his Grateful Dead to licorice: not everybody likes it, but those who like it like it a lot.

While Nirvanna is, in comedic terms, a classic “two-hander”—relying on the chemistry between Johnson and McCarrol, with the two credited as co-creators, producers and writers—Johnson’s character resonates more deeply with fans. He’s a recognizable kind of guy: pop culture obsessed, hyperactive, terminally adolescent. Johnson’s Nirvanna character even sports a fedora, the go-to headwear associated, rightfully or wrongfully, with a certain strain of entitled, sexless masculinity that is, if not outright noxious, then certainly obnoxious.

Some Nirvanna bits, from Johnson’s imitation of a homophobic Ugandan preacher to McCarrol’s use of a stereotypical “Chinese voice,” display what Johnson calls “edgelordism.” The movie features a major plot point built around the homophobic “F-slur.” These jokes may seem a little juvenile (or just tasteless) nowadays. But Johnson attributes them as much to his characters’ detachment from the wider world as to his own desire to push buttons. “They’re completely politically disconnected,” he says. “They have no sense of the consequences of what they do. But they do come by it innocently, in a way.”

Both Johnson’s films and his characters exhibit many of these same tendencies. The real-life computer genius he plays in BlackBerry, Douglas Fregin, feels very much like a Matt Johnson character, right down to the headband. (Johnson even wanted to rename the character “Matt Johnson” but opted against it as he was, ostensibly, playing an actual person). Matt and Mara, a 2024 romantic indie from Toronto director Kazik Radwanski, casts Johnson as another “Matt Johnson.” This time, he’s a bro-lit fiction writer who lectures undergrads on the perils of artistic “sanitization.” It’s tempting to confuse the real Matt Johnson with the various Matt Johnsons populating the expanding Matt Johnsonverse. “I think he likes creating a persona and a mystery,” Radwanski says. “There are so many Matts over so many films. What’s the real Matt? It’s a hall of mirrors.”

For others in his orbit, the lines seem a bit clearer. “The space between on-screen Matt and the real-life Matt Johnson is wider now than when I first met him,” says Miller. “Time and again, I’ve seen people meet Matt and be surprised. On-screen, he’s often a clown. He’s not really like that in real life. He’d hate me saying this, but as he’s gotten older, he’s gotten more mature.”

Johnson now talks about his Nirvanna character, whom he describes as “a naval-gazing, self-obsessed lunatic,” not like an extension of himself but almost like a free-wheeling younger brother or weird cousin. “I love that guy,” he says. “He’s like me but feels much more passionately about things than I do.”

The porous boundaries between person and persona are key to the movie. It’s a warped reflection of the real Johnson and McCarrol behind the scenes. After travelling back in time to 2008, in a camper van powered with a bottle of the vintage Canadian fruit beverage Orbitz, our duo returns to an alternate 2025 where Nirvanna the Band has split and Matt is floundering. While real-life Matt ducks out of Toronto to direct a buzzy biopic in the nest of American WASPdom, the Matt of the movie must struggle with an alternate reality in which Jay becomes the most famous musician on the planet. In one of a thousand meta-references, the superstar Jay’s hit single is “Never Come Down,” a Canadian indie rock radio staple by Brave Shores, a band the real McCarrol used to play in with his sister, Stefanie. “The movie leans in to me,” McCarrol says, “and my ego and desire to become famous.”

In the film, a stunned Matt wanders through Sankofa Square to see billboards plastered with his best friend’s face. It’s as if the characters are facing an inversion of the real duo’s fortunes. The movie is, Johnson reckons, “one for Jay.”

Johnson’s work abounds with the sort of rare energy to which the word “genius” is eagerly applied. It’s a thorny term, in part because it suggests a kind of creative omnipotence, casting the director as some all-powerful ur-creator. (Similar assumptions, it should be said, are baked into the idea of the glossy magazine profile.) An early interview with Johnson in another magazine referred to him as a one-man band. “We all laughed at that,” says editor Curt Lobb.

A cruel kink in artistic success is that it risks sabotaging the very things that bred it. On Tony, Johnson has been forced to buckle down. People told him no, and he had to listen. One day, Johnson noticed the sun setting over the Cape. Inspired, he wanted to move star Dominic Sessa outside to film him against the backdrop. Previously, he would have just done that: shuffle the actor to his mark, flag down the cinematographer and get the shot. But it wasn’t quite so easy with such a large, regimented production not used to working on the fly. Johnson worried he was losing his great strength as a director: that ability to shift at a moment’s notice when a more compelling opportunity or image presented itself. “I’ve been introduced to so much stuff that I was, in some ways, allergic to, both as a film student and as an independent Canadian filmmaker,” Johnson says. “One of the dire realities of making my first movie within the American system is that my own literal power is diminished so greatly.” (He did, however, end up getting that sunset shot.)

---

“I love Toronto, and I’m unambiguous about it. So many young filmmakers are told they have to leave the city to succeed. I’m never leaving”

---

Notably, Johnson’s cinematographer, Jared Raab, who played a key role in defining the look and feel of Operation Avalanche, BlackBerry and Nirvanna, was not hired to shoot Tony. The choice changed Johnson’s whole approach to the production. “Nobody was more depressed about that than I was,” Johnson says, before catching himself. “Well, no. Actually, Jared was. But I was a very close second.”

Johnson can sound a little trepidatious about whether Tony will be any good. But he also worried that BlackBerry—the movie that supercharged his career—would totally tank it. He has already been tapped to direct a big-budget adaptation of the collectable fantasy card game Magic: The Gathering. This sort of high nerdery is terra firma for Johnson, who jokes that he learned to read while playing Magic as a kid, trekking from Mississauga to 401 Games on Yonge (back when, as real nerds may recall, it was still “401 Convenience”). It also means he’ll be more beholden to other forces: producers, studio suits, Hasbro execs and generations of fans with their own deep and very personal relationships to the Magic franchise. “Of course I’m not going to be able to do all the same things,” he laments. “I’m trying to challenge myself to do things that are outside of what I’ve learned to be good at.”

Johnson’s hard-won success has made him something of a mascot for newer generations of local directors. “Historically, you look at any scene of independent filmmakers, and there’s always someone who breaks out first,” says Chandler Levack, a Toronto writer-director whose latest feature, Mile End Kicks, was co-produced by Zapruder Films and will also premiere this year at TIFF. “That’s what Matt did for this specific moment in Canadian film. I’m lucky enough to be part of that constellation.” At the same time, Levack says she can’t help but laugh when she sees Johnson at premieres, dressed down in schlubby sweatpants, a beat-up Blue Jays tee and his trademark headband. “This is our guy?!” she says. “You could afford a suit. But, okay.”

Related: Chandler Levack on her new movie, Mile End Kicks, and her love-hate relationship with Toronto

Johnson’s career is interesting in part because it inverts the standard polarities of the US-Canadian creative industries. We are taught that Canada is a place one gets out of, as if it were a dilapidated middle school. Canadian directors distinguish themselves with smaller features here in order to get the opportunity to play in the big-budget sandbox of Hollywood. But Johnson has learned that Canada is the sandbox. His big-ticket American movies about bad-boy cooks and fantasy card games will afford him the capital and political goodwill to keep messing around with his buddies back home. Where else could a filmmaker get government money to make a Back to the Future parody about the magical alchemy of male friendship? He’s also rallying the Zapruder crew for a new shot-in-Toronto film based on the tabloid true story of the Vice Canada cocaine smuggling ring. “I love Toronto, and I’m unambiguous about it,” Johnson says. “So many young filmmakers are told they have to leave. I’m trying to dispel that. I’m never leaving.”

When Tony wrapped filming shortly after Canada Day, Johnson headed back to the city. Speaking outside Reunion Coffee Roasters on Roncesvalles, he was feeling reflective. He compared being back to swimming up from an undertow and finally being able to breathe again. As soon as he touched down, he met up with his old gang to tweak Nirvanna at a post-production facility in the east end, bearing the brunt of their burns and zingers as he got persnickety with last-minute changes before the film’s TIFF debut. “I’m surrounded by the same people I was in my 20s,” he told me. “It’s so good to be afforded these chances to be with your best friends, in an eternal slumber party where all you’re doing is trying to make each other laugh. It’s so rare to be like that when you’re an adult.”

Accounting for his own career, Johnson is fond of surfacing a reference not to movies or video games or comics but to Mesopotamian myth. The Sumerians tell the story of Gilgamesh, the angsty demigod-king who flees his home of Uruk, endures countless trials in the fruitless pursuit of immortality, and returns to find the home he had forsaken radiant and beautiful. “I understand the need to change my circumstances because I feel like I’ve outgrown a place,” Johnson says, “only to realize that I have an infinite capacity to grow myself. The more I grow, the more renewed my world is. Right?”

This story appears in the September 2025 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.