If you love cinema, you have to see this movie

The main question you’ll ask yourself while watching Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie – Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s feature-length return to their cult web series-turned-TV classic, almost a decade since it last aired – is: how did they do it?

True to the Canadian duo’s guerilla filmmaking bona fides – their technique includes comic improvisation, on-the-street pranks with unsuspecting citizens, and intricately detailed pop-culture parodies – this is a film that opens with the pair (still on their Sisyphean mission to book a gig at Toronto music venue The Rivoli) attempting to smuggle parachutes past the real-life security guards at Toronto’s CN Tower with the intention of skydiving off its observation deck, 447 metres up in the air.

“I’m not lying when I say 95 per cent of the ‘how did they do that?’ moments are really what you see is what you get,” says McCarrol. Like the TV show’s verite aesthetics, the pair are always looking for the point where reality turns absurd. The hardware store clerk who politely cautions them over their lunatic plan, for example, but sells them some wire clippers anyway because he’s “a libertarian”.

“Only after running to the edge of reality, then yes, we can pull out different things in the toolkit – filmmaking tricks or whatever you want to call it – to try to get it over that last 5 per cent,” says McCarrol.

Another scene, filmed amid a real-life news conference that was taking place outside the Toronto mansion of rapper Drake on the day his bodyguard was shot in May 2024, highlights Johnson and McCarrol’s outlandish approach. Hearing reports of the police presence outside Drake’s home, the pair ran down to the site with their cinematographer Jared Raab and filmed a sequence that hilariously blurs fact and fiction.

Are they not worried that Drake might recognise his own home in the finished product? “Wow, I hadn’t even thought about that,” McCarrol says, laughing.

Johnson is less concerned. “I was actually talking with somebody who works with him about making a Being John Malkovich-style movie about him,” he says. “This was a while ago, so who knows. But I know there’s somebody at least adjacent to him who knows who I am and so, in some ways, you’ve got to imagine he’d see this and be like, ‘Oh, this is pretty bad-ass’.”

Much of Nirvanna the Band – both show and movie – feels like it could only be made in Canada. Do they think their particular brand of law-skirting prank comedy is easier to get away with in Canada because Canadians are so kind and eager to avoid confrontation at all costs? “Yes,” McCarrol says bluntly.

Does this also explain why Canada has such a fine tradition of cringe comedy – from Tom Green to Nathan Fielder – that mines laughs from the most uncomfortable of social interactions? “I think that has a lot to do with it, and it seems there’s a new court jester that gets born in this country every 10 years,” Johnson says. “It’s hard to explain but we’re all very well-behaved here. It’s not like in Australia, where everybody’s wild.”

Johnson thinks Nirvanna the Band the Show – which aired on SBS Viceland for two seasons – had such a strong response in Australia because his characters exhibit a particularly Australian sort of quality. “It’s ‘do not ask permission, just go do it’,” says Johnson. “Whatever Steve Irwin is, he’s the good boy example of it. And maybe Chris Lilley. There’s a sort of death defiance to Australian culture that doesn’t exist in Canada. And so when somebody has even a little bit of that here, it’s like being a class clown. If everybody’s behaving so well, then just a small variation in terms of your behaviour is going to get a huge response.

“And so it’s both permission for us to make this show and one of the reasons it stands out. We can shoot this stuff at the CN Tower because nobody in their right mind would ever believe that somebody would do this here.”

Johnson – both with and without McCarrol, a musician who when not part of Nirvanna the Band’s dastardly duo scores films – has refined his filmmaking process across several acclaimed films, including last year’s BlackBerry. Perhaps his most mainstream fare, the film – another uniquely Canadian tragedy about the sudden demise of the BlackBerry phone at the hands of Steve Jobs’ iPhone – was such a global success that it both bankrolled the Nirvanna film and fed Johnson right into the Hollywood machine: his next film is Tony, a biopic about Anthony Bourdain’s earliest years in the kitchen, starring Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers), Antonio Banderas and Emilia Jones.

Johnson agreed to make Tony after meeting Sessa in New York. “I loved him so much I was like, OK, I want to make something with this guy and I don’t care what. He’s the exact age that Bourdain was in this story of him starting his career as a dishwasher, so there were a lot of things that lined up.”

In its script Johnson saw the same male adolescent worldview that fuelled his early films The Dirties (2013) and Operation Avalanche (2016). “It’s a story about liars and how lying will affect you. It’s something that all my movies deal with a bit, even Nirvanna the Band,” says Johnson. “But I felt this was finally a movie where I could deal with deception and why I think young men are so attracted to lying.”

The shift from a cult project such as Nirvanna the Band to high-profile fare like an Anthony Bourdain biopic should be enough to give Johnson whiplash. Part of Nirvanna the Band’s unique appeal is how dangerous it feels; you get the sense that Johnson and McCarrol are making decisions on the fly; that spontaneity, flexibility and unpredictability are essential to their way of working.

In an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, the pair once outlined their top “rules for indie filmmakers”, which included such sage advice as “Failure is a tool”, “Exist right at the edge of chaos” and “Because it’s illegal, that means nobody’s done it”. So how does their traditional way of working translate to the mainstream model?

“The only thing Jay and I care about as filmmakers is time,” says Johnson. “We just want to have enough time to do what we want and go back and fix anything that we didn’t like. Of course, as soon as you start working with real actors, you don’t have the freedom to shoot the same scene over and over and over and over like we do, over the course of sometimes years. You cannot make movies this way unless you have as much time as you want.”

After years in Nirvanna the Band’s trial-and-error trenches, he’s adapted his process. “I’ve been in situations before where people have tried to tell me, ‘You have to stop making this movie now! It’s unreleasable!’ Thank God it’s never happened but I’ve been threatened because every movie I’ve made only becomes good in the last five days, and I mean that literally,” he says.

“It’s like a puzzle, where it looks like a bizarre mess, all the pieces are around, and even as you start to fill it in you still can’t really see it all. And yet once you’re at the end and you’ve only got 20 pieces left, it’s like, ‘Oh, of course, they go right here.’”

True to form, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie went through its own iterative process. What was originally a buddy road-trip movie between Johnson and McCarrol transformed into an anti-nostalgia meta-reboot that finds the pair travelling back in time to 2008 – an era when Bill Cosby graced magazine covers and people laughed at gay slurs in The Hangover. There, with the aid of some uncanny editing, the duo interact with their 2008 selves – the year the web series first launched – via a cunning parody of Back to the Future.

Ever since the show’s beginning, parody has been a key part of Nirvanna the Band’s arsenal. Episodes from the series included pitch-perfect parodies of everything from Jurassic Park to My Dinner with Andre to the reality series Wahlburgers to the Nintendo 64 classic, GoldenEye 007. Beyond mere irony, the pair treat parody with a gleeful sincerity that both deconstructs and celebrates their pop-culture obsessions.

For me, the weirder the better. For example, who even thinks of doing a parody of Toni Erdmann, the 2016 German arthouse film? “I’m happy you noticed that because everybody just thinks that’s a Mrs Doubtfire reference,” says Johnson. “I told our production designer, ‘Get me a set of fake teeth, just like in the movie, and I know we will figure out an episode around it.’ And sure enough.”

Before it settled on a Back to the Future parody, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie had another reference. “The big film parody was going to be The Talented Mr Ripley,” says Johnson. “We were doing a very close reading of that, with Jay and I playing both Tom and Dickie. We were using New Orleans as a double of Italy.”

Johnson says the footage will still see the light of day when the third season of Nirvanna the Band the Show – long-mired in purgatory ever since Viceland Canada folded in 2018 – gets its eventual release. What other parodies can we expect?

“We’ve got one episode that combines the world building of Stranger Things with the finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation, ‘All Good Things’,” says Johnson.

“We have an entire episode that’s The 400 Blows,” adds McCarrol.

“We did an episode that’s framed like an episode of The Office, which, you would think, ‘Well, wait a minute, isn’t the whole show shot that way?’ But what we did was pretty interesting,” says Johnson. “And we had a Catch Me If You Can episode, but I don’t think that’s coming.”

“But it still could,” says McCarrol.

For the cult of Nirvanna the Band, it’s enough to live on for another decade.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is in cinemas now.