Matt Johnson knows his way around the law protecting fair use and parody.
Johnson’s “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” opens in theaters Friday via Neon, and it’s a true labor of love. The lore of the film goes back to 2007, where Johnson and his real-life best friend Jay McCarrol debuted the web series “Nirvana the Band the Show,” in which the pair play fictionalized versions of themselves, and documents their hapless attempts to perform at the Rivoli, a local venue in their native Toronto. The story continued in 2017 via the Viceland series “Nirvanna the Band the Show,” which aired for two seasons.
Now, the film adaptation of the cult hit is here, and despite the fact that Johnson has also directed films unrelated to the “Nirvanna”-verse, including 2023’s critically-acclaimed “BlackBerry,” “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” is his biggest swing yet.
From its first screening at last year’s South by Southwest, audience chatter has centered around how this film even exists. First off, the elephant in the room is that “Nirvanna” is largely a “Back to the Future” parody, reappropriating many elements from the ’80s blockbuster in order to tell the tale of the duo going back in time to try to play the Rivoli. So many parts are lifted and remixed into the fabric of the film that it’s hard to believe that “Future” parent company Universal Pictures hasn’t sent a fleet of lawyers to stop distribution.
But Johnson says he worked diligently to make sure he stayed safely in parody territory by partnering with someone who knows the law inside out.
“I’m very lucky in that my career began with a movie called ‘The Dirties,’ which I made in 2013, which is making a movie full of infringement with no plan for how to fix it,” Johnson says. “I had to learn in releasing that movie how to navigate fair use law. I did that with a lawyer named Chris Perez, who works for a firm in California called Donaldson Callif Perez. Ever since then, I’ve worked with Chris to write most of my movies. And by that, I mean I triple-checked everything that I’m putting in these scripts against his counsel. So there was nothing that got put into this movie that I was worried about from a copyright point of view, because we’d figured all of that out before we even shot it.”
Because of his self-editing, two dream jokes didn’t make it into the finished product.
“I wanted to do a much bigger joke with the score of ‘Back to the Future,’” Johnson says. “Right now, we only play a split second of it after I’m talking about the copyright nightmare that the movie is going to be. The other one, weirdly, is also a ‘Back to the Future’ where I wanted to use the song ‘The Power of Love’ as the song that plays while Matt is building the time machine, instead of ‘Johnny B. Goode.’ But we couldn’t create a fair use case for using that song, so it’s why that’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and not the opening credits song of ‘Back in the Future.’”
Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol in “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.”
Courtesy Everett Collection
The other legal challenge? Much of the movie is filmed on the streets of Toronto around unknowing subjects, shooting guerrilla style to capture unscripted gold and genuinely shocking moments.
“Everything you’re watching is happening for real with people who don’t know what’s going on, except for the obvious moments where we’re working with our friends,” Johnson says. “And we are just shooting as though we’re shooting a student film, without any sense of permits or permission at all.”
The run-and-gun style did create some difficulties when shooting, as certain elements would be out of their control. One specific scene, in which a character drags an extension cord around town, took a month of shooting on and off in order to get the perfect minute of footage.
“‘Nirvanna the Band’ is the most time-intensive project that I’ve ever been a part of in my life,” Johnson says. “We shot this movie for 200 days. It was something that I thought I’d be able to finish in two months when I first finished ‘Blackberry,’ and it wound up basically taking over my entire life.”
Because of the time commitment, Johnson says he’ll forever be interested in making new adventures with Matt and Jay — but the idea would need to be incredible.
“Anytime the idea of making anything like this comes up, it always needs to be an idea that’s so addictive and has so much gravity that I can’t help but want to do it,” he says. “So if we are going to do more … I mean, Jay and I have thousands of episodes that we talk about all the time of things that these characters could do, but what those will be, I have no idea. It’s very much a Matt from Nirvanna the Band-style plan, which is he’s gonna do something, but what that is, God only knows.”
Watch the “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” trailer below.
