Summary

Collider’s Steve Weintraub talks with Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol for Nirvanna: The Band the Show the Movie at SXSW.

The comedy puts a unique spin on filmmaking, combining documentary-like styles with an homage to Back to the Future.

Johnson and McCarrol discuss the legal challenges of pulling off parodies, fair use rights, and interacting with real people on the streets.

No, the new film by Matt Johnson, premiering at South by Southwest, is not about Kurt Cobain’s legendary grunge band. In fact, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, based on the television series, is nothing like you’ve seen before, making it a perfect fit for the festival held annually in Austin, Texas.
Every film by Johnson is a unique cinematic experience, thanks to his distinct creative language and sensibilities, and his new film combines documentary-like filmmaking with homages to Back to the Future. While the film’s title seems like a turn-off for audiences, the comedy, featuring stunts and gags taking place in everyday life in Toronto, will have you bursting out laughing.
At SXSW 2025, Collider’s Steve Weintraub, writer, director, and star Johnson, and co-star Jay McCarrol stopped by the Collider Media Studio at the Cinema Center to discuss Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. The duo talks about dealing with real people on the streets, securing fair use rights, and pulling off unbelievable stunts practically.
Don’t Ask What ‘Nirvanna: The Band the Show the Movie’ Is

“I’m so jaded with explaining this show now.”

Image via SXSW

COLLIDER: I’m thrilled to be here to be able to talk about Nirvanna: The Band the Show the Movie. The premiere was last night. I can only imagine that it played fucking huge.
JAY McCARROL: We’ve had some people who have been following our whole story for a long time, and so many people came from all over. It was really rewarding and heart-melting to see so many people, and deliver this to them.
As I said to you off camera, I was not familiar with the show. I saw BlackBerry and thought it was just so fantastic. I was like, “I want to see what they’re doing next.” I was really blown away by what you guys pulled off. A lot of people aren’t going to be familiar with the show or the movie. How have you been telling people about it?
MATT JOHNSON: Believe it or not, we actually stopped telling people what Nirvanna the Band was about eight years ago. We just don’t anymore. When people ask, “What’s the movie you made about?” We just say time travel. It’s so difficult to explain what it is that it’s so much better for them to hear from someone like you, “Oh, you just have to see it. I can’t explain it.” Because as soon as you start explaining what Nirvanna the Band is, it winds up almost defeating itself because the explanation is so obtuse and weird that I think that unless you’re really tuned into outsider cinema, you think, “Well, that’s something that is definitely not for me.” Our philosophy for us and all of our friends has just been to just not explain it.
McCARROL: I’m so jaded with explaining this show now, and I love it. Telling people when they ask, like, “What’s it called?” “It’s called Nirvanna the Band the Show.” “Oh, Nirvana? “It has nothing to do with Nirvana.” It’s like, “Goodbye.” I have to just leave.
JOHNSON: It’s always so disappointing. What’s great is that we’ve been doing it for so long that now we don’t even need to tell people about it. Other people are just being like, “I know it sounds stupid, but you should just watch it.”
You guys really, really made me laugh. You do something about an hour in that I howled. It’s in the Winnebago.
JOHNSON: That’s a crazy moment. We worked hard on that. Isn’t that wild?
I’m so happy you guys are here so I can talk to you about this, because I really want to help you promote this. So people, check it out. You do crazy stuff in this movie. You’re making a movie, you’re involving real people. It’s really incredible what you pull off. Because you’ve been doing the show for a while, and you do have fans, did you have any moments when you were making the movie where you were actually encountering people who knew you and ruined the shots?
McCARROL: All the time.
JOHNSON: Well, let’s be gracious. Because, for the most part, the people who know us know how we operate, so we had lots of people watching from a distance, but very rarely would somebody come in and ruin a shot because they know how we make the show.
McCARROL: We would say, mid-scene, “We’re shooting right now,” and they would go, “Oh yeah, okay,” and they would just go back to NPC mode.
JOHNSON: It very rarely ruined things. Because Toronto is such a big city and we shoot right in the major metropolitan area, there’s one in probably 10,000 people that we interact with, and I mean that pass us, or are in our frame, that actually knows who we are, and comes up to talk to us, etc.

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You shoot in the heart of downtown Toronto, in areas that I know very well from the Toronto Film Festival. You’re all over the place. Do you get permits, or do you just go for it?
JOHNSON: What’s so great about the scale of our films is that it’s not like we’re bringing trailers and huge crews. It’s Jay, myself, our cinematographer Jared Raab, either Luca Tarantini or Nikolay [Michaylov], and then Matt Greyson, and that’s our whole footprint. I mean, we interact with the police all the time, what it looks like is that we’re film students shooting a meaningless project for a class. We’re not stopping the flow of commerce in a way that a real film would.
McCARROL: We’ve also developed a lot of tricks to just de-escalate the situation. One of our favorites is when Jared was shooting a scene of Matt changing in a change room, and he was doing a scene, and the staff came up and said, “What the hell are you doing?” On the spot, Jared just came out with, “Oh, we’re shooting a bachelor video for our friend.” And he just melted, and he said, “Oh, anything you guys need!”
JOHNSON: Being from Canada helps a lot. We shot a lot of Nirvanna the Band in the States, and it’s weird, the differences aren’t that it’s more dangerous, it’s that people are actually more friendly in the United States to us, much more so. They’re less guarded, while at the same time, there’s so much more security here, and they really don’t want you shooting on private property, so it’s an odd mix. Whereas in Canada, nobody, so long as you aren’t causing a disturbance, really cares what you’re doing because Toronto is a huge city, it’s the biggest city in our country. The police have their hands full with the chaos of running an effective city—a bunch of people with smiles on their faces, shooting a movie that you just saw is really not a problem for them.
McCARROL: It’s little pieces that they’re seeing, too. It’s never looking too dangerous. It just looks bizarre. So, it’s like, “Is this wrong?” And by the time they’re figuring that out, we’re gone.
JOHNSON: But no, it’s not like we ever let anybody know that we’re going to be shooting there, ever.
‘Back to the Future’ Plays a Major Role in the Comedy

The duo explain how they managed this movie legally.

Image via Universal Pictures

Back to the Future is part of this film.
JOHNSON: We wanted to make a Back to the Future movie. We love Back to the Future. We love Robert Zemeckis. It’s obviously a major classic, but we love the beats of it, and we thought it was so suited to what we wanted to do, because we knew we had this Boyhood-style footage of Jay and I for 20 years, and we were like, “How can we realistically use this as a story?” Very quickly, we were like, “Why don’t we just do a one-to-one Back to the Future parody?” That’s what led to all the music being that way, which Jay completely composed himself. It’s what led to us building the time machine like that. That conceit really gave us the entire film.
You have Huey Lewis, you have “The Power of Love,” you have the Back to the Future main theme, the RV is your DeLorean. You have the Back to the Future controls.
JOHNSON: Kerry Noonan, our production designer, rebuilt it exactly verbatim from the real pieces.
You make a joke in the movie about when someone’s doing the theme, “Copyright.” My question is: How the F did you pull this off?
McCARROL: It’s easy when we love it so much. We get to be kids and just pretend to make Back to the Future. That’s what it really feels like. We just get to pretend we’re making a real movie.
Legally, how were you able to pull this off?
JOHNSON: You’ve seen BlackBerry, right? With BlackBerry, we were using all the same tricks. We have a really brilliant lawyer in California. His name is Chris Perez. He works for a firm called Donaldson, Callif, Perez, and he’s been doing our fair use legals since the beginning of my career, since I was young. He and I, and my producer, Matt Miller, developed a working formula for integrating fair use arguments into the belly of our movies. I talked with him before I wrote the script for the film.
You bring up two great examples. The first one was us recreating the DeLorean inside of our own RV. That was a conversation with him. “How exactly are we going to do it? How am I going to reference it?” You brought up this other point of Jay and I actually singing, and Jay playing on the piano the Back to the Future main theme. That was a big discussion with Chris Perez. How should we do it? How can we integrate it into the story? It’s not that sexy, because it really is almost like writing essays for high school. That is the process of fair use. You make legal arguments to a future judge, exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing. But I love it.
McCARROL: What seems to set it apart is that when you get that answer of where the guardrails are, then we can rewrite, and we will always be more malleable than the next script that is so artistically locked in place. We will just amend until we can fit it.
JOHNSON: Because we’re working independently, it actually gives us an opportunity to do things that if you were, say, building a movie inside the studio system at… Well, pick any studio you want—you’re a Warner Bros. film executive; you’re not going to begin with, “How can we make a fair use argument to compose a film?” It’s just never done that way. One of the great things about both modern American law as it stands, with respect to artists, but the fact that a younger generation of very media-saturated filmmakers are growing up right now means that I think that there’s not only a growing thirst for this kind of thing, to actually interact with our culture that made us the way that we are, but there are now the legal tools to do it properly. We love this reaction, which is, “How did you do that? It seems like you broke the law.” That’s so thrilling. It has the veneer of, “These guys don’t care, and clearly what they’ve done is illegal,” and that’s quite thrilling. That’s quite thrilling for an audience because it lets you know the movie’s out of control.
The Art of ‘Nirvanna the Band’ Is Not “Going In on Any Sort of Punchline”

“Our philosophy is not to mock people and not to make them look stupid.”

Image by Photagonist

There’s a fucking great moment where you’re looking to try to buy pliers.
JOHNSON: Oh, yeah, with that libertarian. Isn’t that unbelievable?
It’s amazing. When you’re in the moment, and you’re shooting that, and you know you’re in the middle of comedy gold, how hard is it to not break? You know he’s just amazing.
JOHNSON: It happens every once in a while where you meet somebody, and the term we have for it is, like, “This guy’s like lightning in a bottle. We have to get this.” But I’ve gotta tell you, after having done this—Jay and I have probably been in that exact situation 100-plus times—it actually isn’t that funny when you’re there. You’re more scared because there is a risk of humiliation with the individual that you’re talking to that if you were to laugh or smirk, it would almost be like you tore their clothes off. I think the feeling of that actually makes it anti-funny. So, what Jay and I try to do…
McCARROL: It’s not really trying not to laugh. It’s trying to stay on track, so that they don’t think that anything is going on and continue to give us that vulnerable, real self.
JOHNSON: They can keep being themselves. Generally, our philosophy is not to mock people and not to make them look stupid, which I think a lot of shows or a lot of content that’s shot in this style does. The joke is, “How could these people even believe that what they’re seeing is sincere?”
McCARROL: It slightly manipulates them, too. When I see other things, the way it’s edited, it will manipulate the situation to make them look even dumber or more interesting. We’ll just show it very naked and real, and I think that’s what makes it funny, because it’s not going really hard for a joke. We’re not really going in on any sort of punchline with them. They end up just, through spending just a few seconds with them, giving people this exciting feeling of, “Whatever this is, it’s real. There’s no acting.”
JOHNSON: What’s so great about this moment is that this guy just met us for the very first time, and within 30 seconds, he is sincerely trying to save our lives. He’s not doing that insincerely; he’s looking in my eyes saying, “I think if you do this, you’ll die.” He can tell he’s dealing with people who are slightly gone. “These guys might be crazy, and I’m the only person standing between them and a major catastrophe.”

Image by Photagonist

CN Tower is a big part of this thing, and you go in through the lobby.
JOHNSON: We go in through security.
When you’re going in through security, you’re wearing stuff on your back.
JOHNSON: It’s crazy! They didn’t ask about the parachutes.
You’re wearing stuff that could be, like, a bomb pack! It could be anything.
JOHNSON: They’re so focused on the pliers that they don’t even notice the parachutes. I’ll tell you the story behind that. We went in and did that, and we have a plan for what the movie will be, and we thought we were going to get turned away by security, and that would be the end of it.
McCARROL: And then we would write a story about another way to get in. Instead, now the movie is that we just went right in.
JOHNSON: The guy just let us. Every single time we watched that footage, Jay said, “How do they not bring up our bags?” Our only theory is that maybe he thought we were hunchbacks? Maybe. And maybe he thought it would be indelicate to say, “Your backs look quite big?”
You walk through the metal detector, so it didn’t set it off. If you’d gone through the metal detector, and it set it off, then it opens the door. Until then, “Maybe they have medical conditions.”
JOHNSON: Exactly. And we had a huge locus of attention in those pliers. That was the whole game that we just needed to talk about the pliers, and that’s all he wanted to talk about. When his boss cleared them, we were like, “Okay, here we go.”
McCARROL: Which is probably the most nefarious thing that’s gone through that metal detector, ever.

Image by Photagonist

It’s so crazy. There are so many shots in this that I’m like, “How did you do this?” I don’t want to ruin the movie for people, but I want to talk about specifics. You’re on the roof of the CN Tower. There’s stuff that I truly don’t understand how you got.
McCARROL: A lot of different tricks and sleight of hand went into that.
JOHNSON: That shot in particular was very hard to get. Extremely hard.
I know there’s creative ways of doing certain things
JOHNSON: But it’s great that you’re asking the question.
VFX nowadays are incredible.
JOHNSON: Our VFX supervisor is a genius. We’ve been working with Tristan Zerafa since The Dirties, and he’s extremely, extremely smart and careful. What we got to do on this film was basically combine what he’s great at with what our production designer, Kerry Noonan, is great at. I would say 50% of the time when people are guessing how we did things, not only are they wrong, but they have it exactly the opposite wrong. The things that look impossible, we actually did, and the things that you would never think are VFX are completely faked.
People are going to laugh their ass off.
There Was Debate on Calling the Movie ‘Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’ – Believe It or Not

“It is so anti-marketing in a way.”

Image by Photagonist

You’ve had this title for the show for a long time, and now you’ve added “the movie” to the end. How did you decide on the title? Was there a thought about, “Well, this is a pretty long title?”
JOHNSON: You’re asking all the right questions. It was an internal debate with us for probably a decade, truly, about this exact title. It’s so hard because, for us, it’s an inside joke, because it is so anti-marketing in a way. You hear this, and you’re like, “You need to change that title,” yet we keep coming back to the idea that you do need to buy a bit of a ticket to get into this world, and that ticket is [that] you’re basically agreeing to enter something that is somewhat confusing off the beginning, and know that you’re entering something confusing, because that’s how you really get paid off. It seemed exactly what the movie should be called because of the show and because of who these characters are, but also it is the kind of test or the barrier that an audience must pass through to get to the gold on the other side. While maybe our distributors are thinking, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” for us, I think it’s very useful for audiences to be like, “Oh, I’m in the club. I paid the ticket. Now when I talk about this movie, I’m going to sound like an idiot, but I want to be a part of that club.”
There’s stuff that you do on Queen Street involving, let’s say, rope.
JOHNSON: That was a crazy sequence to shoot.
I don’t want to spoil it. I will just say there’s just again crazy shit in this movie. How did you do that? Then you have a girl laughing and smiling. People are just letting you do that.
JOHNSON: The girl from France? That was pretty wild. Yeah, she was helping me. [Laughs]
How is this happening? Canada is a weird place.
JOHNSON: Well, it’s a multicultural city. There are so many visitors during the day. I think about half the downtown population are people who don’t live in Toronto. It’s a little bit like Washington, DC.
With that rope, and other things, how did you do all that?
JOHNSON: When we’re running that wire across downtown Toronto, 50% of what you’re watching is just completely real. You’re just watching Jay and I do it.
McCARROL: You’re not seeing off-screen sometimes. There are some elements of trickery.
JOHNSON: There are a lot of things going on there. What we love is having people react to it, because that’s half of it. There’s that scene where Jay’s watching a news broadcast, and the other people around him are also watching the news broadcast and reacting to what’s happening on the CN Tower. That’s another great example where it is just happening for real. Jay is there watching it. People are watching it.
McCARROL: As far as they’re concerned, because we have control of those TVs, they’re thinking this is really happening.
JOHNSON: Which is the kind of stuff that is free, but other movies just can’t do.

Image by Photagonist

Let’s talk about editing real quick because I always love talking about editing, just because it’s where it all comes together. You have a cut of the movie that you are pretty happy with. You start showing it to people. What did you learn from those screenings that impacted the finished film?
JOHNSON: I should interrupt and say that we don’t have a cut we’re happy with even now. Our process is that we make films that are constantly evolving, and we screen them in public for people that we don’t know, knowing that they’re going to give us answers to what we need to fix. Last night, we were extremely happy, and the film is “done,” but the idea that we would have a cut we’re happy with that we screen and learn from, that’s not our process. We screen very amorphous versions of the film for large groups of people, and then we see how we feel with the audience as it goes, and that informs how we change it. We do that a lot.
Have you screened it before SXSW?
JOHNSON: Many times.
What did you learn from those early screenings that impacted the film? Did you make any big changes?
JOHNSON: We made millions of changes. They’re completely different movies. That is our process. We test our own movies because we love the testing process. It’s not like we’re looking for feedback either. We don’t ask for feedback from the audiences.
McCARROL: It’s the magic thing where, even if you’re watching it, knowing that somebody that hasn’t seen it is sitting next to you, without them even saying or reacting to it at all, you are seeing it vicariously through them, and then you get the new perspective. You know what to do. We look at each other in those screenings, we’re like, “Well, of course this is gone. We have to change this.”
JOHNSON: We even get new story ideas. The great story with Peter Hall is that he watched a cut of the film that was so early that 50% of the film had not been shot before he had accepted it for SXSW. We changed it so much, but by the end, what was so great is that we really hone in on something that we’re all really stoked about.
Special thanks to our 2025 partners at SXSW, including presenting partner Rendezvous Films and supporting partners Bloom, Peroni, Hendrick’s Gin, and Roxstar Entertainment.