Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie is not a video game movie. It’s not based on a video game property, or even features video games in its plot in a primary way. But from its opening moments, it’s clear that its creators and its director, Matt Johnson, are video game fans, and specifically fans of 16-bit RPGs. Johnson and his creative partner, Jay McCarrol, are also the creators of the viral Wii Shop Update Day video where they run down an impressive list of classic video game titles set to the tune of the Wii’s Shop Channel music.
We spoke with Johnson about Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie (and one of its most technically impressive jokes) and his previous movie BlackBerry’s relationship to video games, his personal history with video games and his favorite game, the process of making the Update Day video, and lots more. Read on for the full interview.
Game Informer: To kick off, and maybe you’re tired of hearing it, but I loved Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie. I was not super familiar with Nirvanna The Band, but there was so much excitement surrounding the movie that I took my 14-year-old daughter, who knew even less than me, and we both loved it. We’re going to see it again together this weekend.
Matt Johnson: You’re not the first person who’s told me that they brought their daughter or their young son to it in a way where I would have thought… I guess, not that they’re not going to get anything, but that they may find it alienating and, like you, the kids had a kind of Saturday morning cartoon experience with it. In the same way that I’m sure you or I felt when we were watching shows on TV as kids. It’s so refreshing to hear. There’s no better compliment than if somebody, with no context for the cultural references occurring, are still able to follow and enjoy the misadventures of these two characters.
A great example of that is the movie opens up with a Chrono Trigger musical sting, which was very exciting for me, and I leaned over to my daughter, and I was like, “Hey! That’s specific video game music!” She was like, “Okay, dad. Great. I’m glad you’re excited,” was basically her reaction.
But I wanted to talk to you about video games because we’re a video game magazine, and video games seem to be an aspect of your comedy, for both you and Jay McCarrol. Are video games important to you? Do you play a lot of video games?
I would say that video games and game design generally has been the single greatest influence on my creative output at all levels, and I wind up stealing more and I think getting more out of video games that I then regurgitate into work than I do even out of movies.
It’s been my secret, and I won’t even think of it as a weapon because it’s happening unconsciously, but that’s been the thing that has inspired me literally – to use the term literally – more than anything else.
Final Fantasy I
What is your history with video games? What was your first console?
The Sutherlands up the street… no, it wasn’t the Sutherlands. It was Adam Forchay up the street, got a Super Nintendo day one of its release, and because of that, we inherited his NES. That was the first console I had. Before that, I would go up, and I would play Nintendo on a neighbor’s console. It was the first time I ever saw a video game. We were playing Mario. It was a house full of daughters, and I would see them playing this game, and I was like, “This is unbelievable. What is this?” The same experience that every young kid has of a video game, where they’re like, “How are you controlling the TV?” This is blowing my mind. And so my brother and I, we just thought this was a magical device. And the first real game that we spent a lot of time on, he and I – I was five, and he was three – we beat the original Final Fantasy.
We got the Nintendo Power [Player’s Guide]. I still don’t even know how. I think my parents wrote in to get it mailed to us, because before that, I don’t think I had a Nintendo Power subscription because I couldn’t read. And so he and I, using that guide, taught ourselves how to read and beat the first Final Fantasy. And then we were just kind of off to the races.
Then basically every single Square release we bought and beat. And I mean literally every single one. We pooled our money together to buy a Super Nintendo and then just played through every single, literally every single one of those games. Like start to finish.
And this continued… when we got to Nintendo 64, obviously, there were no real RPGs for that system, and so that changed. And then we were playing a lot of Mario Kart, which we play in Nirvanna The Band The Show a lot. And GoldenEye, which we did an episode about, but never really left.
EverQuest
The real transition was when I was going to a camp with my friends Jason, Sharon, and Ben Taylor, and we had heard right before we went away, and it was a sleepover summer camp. We were going to be there for about a month or something like that. And we had heard there was this computer game coming out that was like a role-playing game that you just kept playing, where you picked the class, and you leveled up, and it was you with a whole bunch of other players, and that game was EverQuest.
We printed out before we went to the camp – we didn’t have the game yet – we printed out all of the like Gamefaqs-style information we could about it. And that entire time at camp, we just read about the classes, the level-up system, what race gave what attributes. That was a big change because then I came home and was so obsessed with EverQuest that it basically dominated my entire identity for two years. And breaking free from that, like breaking free from a kind of true video game addiction with this one game, was another real turning point in my life, where I was like, “I can’t. I love this game so much. I love playing it so much.” But realizing, “Oh, I need to just stop playing it.” And that’s when I basically started taking my work as a filmmaker seriously, which would have been in grade 10 or 11, I think.
That’s young to recognize that.
Since then, I still play video games a lot. Whenever I hear about a title that I think is going to really be useful to me. Basically, every single game by Supergiant, a lot of the big release narrative games where I hear, “Oh, you should really see this game,” I’ll often check them out. I have a Steam Deck. I got very, very into the triple-A roguelike games that got released, like Hades and Slay the Spire. Calling them triple-A is ridiculous in this context, but you understand what I mean. I mean, like the top of the categories of those games.
I love them. And so does my brother. And I would say that this all kind of comes back to the idea that my brother and I, a lot of our friendship was formed around our common approach to these games. It is one of the things that he and I still get to talk about a lot, like playing Baldur’s Gate 3 was a big thing where he would kind of tell me what he was doing, and I would tell him what I was doing, this type of thing.
He also loves the Divinity series. My brother knows everything about these games, and so we get to talk about it together a lot, which I really appreciate.
Baldur’s Gate II
This is a generic question, admittedly, but do you have a number one, all-time favorite game?
Yeah, Baldur’s Gate 2.
That’s a game where I was playing it, and I was like, “I can’t believe how good this is.” I mean, I was a little kid, but I couldn’t believe it. Is that the game that had the biggest influence on me? I don’t know, but certainly there are references to Baldur’s Gate 2 in most of my movies.
In The Dirties, we’re literally talking about Baldur’s Gate 2. BlackBerry is very Baldur’s Gate 2-coded. Just the notion of what BioWare was doing with a story and voice acting and background acting and moving through this world.
You can include Baldur’s Gate 1 in that, as well, because they’re extremely similar. But there’s something about 2, like this great villain, Jon Irenicus, unsuspecting hero… there is so much in that game that had a huge influence on me that I still think about. And playing Baldur’s Gate 3 was obviously such a thrill because those people are clearly Baldur’s Gate 2 fans, and they were really doing their best to recreate, and in some ways, trump a lot of that experience. Although narratively, I don’t think I don’t think it’s quite as good.
I want to circle back to what you said earlier in that video games are the most influential media to you. Can you expand on that? What did video games teach you about storytelling, or filmmaking, or comedy?
In a bunch of different ways. I would say the most obvious one is that, outside of playing video games, I also, as a very young person, became an extremely, extremely dedicated [Magic: The Gathering] player. I stopped that, too, around the same time. But, understanding the min-maxing of deck design, or game design, or character design. And by character design, I mean as the player, where I’m trying to make the best, most powerful character. Like the min-maxing of that, for some reason, put me in a headspace that was so primed for the editing process of filmmaking, where you realize that so much of moviemaking, after you’ve shot it, really is gamified. You’re dealing with the footage you’ve shot, the seconds you have in a shot, how you’re cutting from this thing to this other thing. It’s not like this is a conscious act that I’m taking, but it feels like a game, and it feels like a game you can win when you’re editing your own stuff.
I think just having that approach to it allowed me, especially at a young age, to become totally lost in the process of post-production and editing and re-editing and rewriting things and redoing it, and redoing it, and redoing it in the same way you would a video game and viewing filmmaking like you would view playing a game where it’s like, yes – you die. But then you come back, and you get to play the level again, and you can die again, and then get a little bit farther, and a little bit farther. And that iterative process got drilled into me by playing these games where the difficulty was way beyond my ability to play them. That helped me to view filmmaking as that same exact thing, where if you go in and do it and it doesn’t work? That doesn’t mean you stop and put the controller down, or that you go, “Okay, well, that’s as good as I can do. So I’m just going to deliver this.” It’s like playing Dark Souls. The fun of it is trying to do it again, and again, and again, and again until you really have it right.
But that’s just one slice of that answer. The other answer is that thinking about game design and thinking about game designers. Have you seen Indie Game: The Movie?
Yeah, I’ve even talked to some of those folks about the movie.
Jonathan Blow’s philosophy on creativity vis-à-vis video game design – it changed my life. And I’m not even sure if this is his central philosophy, but the speech he gives about when he was first developing Braid, and he says, so much of my career, my fundamental belief was the deeper you dug – this is using an analogy – the deeper you dug, the more gold you will find, right? The gold was buried underground, and you had to dig to get it. And by that, he’s saying you had to spend a lot of time coding a level so the level was really, really clever. Or you need to come up with very complicated game systems where it would take you as the programmer days, and days, and days, and days, and days to have these mechanics were just so and perfect.
And it was like the effort you put in was equivalent to the gold or the experience the player got out of it. And he said, with Braid, just coming up with that simple idea that I hit one button and Mario goes backwards in time, brought all the gold to the surface, and he realized all he needed to do was bend down and pick it up, and that he had been making video games wrong his entire life. It was a contextual change of how he approached video game design that was more important than expending more effort on the way that everybody else was making the games. And that was fundamental to the way that I organized my creative work. I will never be able to put in more leveraged effort on one of my films than an American in Hollywood would be able to do.
Like, Steven Spielberg is the ultimate example of this, right? He kind of has infinite leverage, and he could have the best in the world working nonstop on his movies. The latest [Paul Thomas Anderson] movies. Another good example of this, where it’s like he has the absolute best at the budget of that movie, $150 million…
A slightly higher than the budget of Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie.
Yeah, and it shows because it’s why everything in that film is so perfectly executed. And the film never drops you because they worked so that you would never drop you. Whereas someone like me, I need to find a contextual change that is going to allow me to make movies that can’t necessarily compete with these movies, but will be able to hold audiences’ attention for different reasons. And it is that Jonathan Blow thing. That’s exactly what I’m looking for. A situation where, because the movies that I’m making are contextually different, I don’t need to expend the same effort. I know the analogy blends these words into totally different meanings, because, of course, it’s an insane amount of effort to make a movie like Nirvanna The Band, but it is not the same as 300 people on your crew working tirelessly for months to create, like, flawlessly, perfect camera motions, following the best actors in the world, delivering brilliant dialogue. This is just something different.
Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie (2026)
I think it’s fascinating to hear you refer to editing as playing a video game, because I had a similar reaction myself to Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie. When my daughter and I walked out of it, we said, “I don’t know how they made that. I don’t know how they got all those pieces to line up.” It does seem like you basically had to solve a gigantic puzzle. And you managed to get all the pieces together like you would solving an environmental puzzle in a Zelda or something.
That’s what makes it so fun. And I gotta’ say, it is also the thing that motivates my friends and I to make these things, because it doesn’t feel like we are covered in mud trying to climb up a mountain, which is the way I think a lot of production often feels with us. It truly is a game where you… an example would be we find this great piece of footage of us as kids, where I say, “You know, Jay, I think things are going to work out okay for us.” And then in the same shot, we walk down the street, and we say, “Hey, does that guy look like me? No, that guy looks like me.” And that’s the starting piece that we got. We found that piece. And so we go, “Oh, isn’t this fun? Now, what does this piece lead to?” In the same way that we have this huge box of puzzle pieces that are all turned upside down, and it’s easy for us to imagine, “Okay, now we need a piece to slot into this of old Matt and Jay,” because that’s obviously who we saw. “Okay, so why are we on Queen Street?” And then it’s like you get to build it backwards, and it fits so well, it encourages you to keep playing.
All the best games – they’re fun. And the reason games work and endure is because the player wants to return to them. So I’m trying to make all of my projects similar in that way, where it is exciting for my friends and I to approach it. And it’s not like, “Oh God, I’ve got to go work on this movie that’s going to kill me.” It’s so painful, which still happens all the time…
It seems like you suffered some literal injuries on this one.
Right. Well, you know what? The physical injuries are nothing compared to the emotional injury of having to face how badly the footage turns out. Like, if you ask [Curt Lobb and Robert Upchurch], my editors, they’ll tell you I’m notorious. I will not watch things. It’s a blessing to curse. They have so much time to edit before I can even watch something, because I find it so painful to face all the failures. You can have a real problem.
Wii Shop Virtual Console Update Day, your viral short. I think that’s what video game fans know you from.
I think 95% of people who’d ever even heard of us is explicitly from that. And it was never made more clear than when I was in an interview, and somebody said, “Wow, so you make this one video and then this film. Why did you decide to just expand that Update Day clip into a movie?” They had no idea that I had ever made anything else. It was like I made that 20 years ago, and now I’m making this movie based just on Update Day, which I took no offense to. I actually found it quite charming. I wish it were true. But yes, I appreciate your point that most people know Nirvanna The band from that.
How do you feel about that? Is it a good thing? Is it a frustrating thing? Do you wish people would watch BlackBerry instead?
No! The idea of begrudging an audience for however they found things? Look, I think it’s a miracle that anybody in the world has seen anything I’ve done. I was content. I remember when we finished the fourth or the fifth episode of the web series. I was such an angry young man. I was so resentful and negative when I was young, and it was in Toronto when 40 or 50 people started watching that web series that I finally relaxed, and I thought, “Okay, I can die. I feel like I’ve contributed something to the canon of media that I loved so much.” Everything after that, it’s just been like a bonus.
For me, it was kind of an early internet video where I was also a person who would check the Wii Virtual Console shop every Wednesday.
Yeah, it was great.
It blew my mind that what I thought was an obscure nerdy thing was a shared experience with others. It didn’t occur to me that there were other people doing this. And then on top of that, it’s just a hilarious sketch and a funny bit. How did that come together? What was the germ of the idea there?
We were making one video every single week in our apartment, in some ways, for fun. We tried to put something on our website every week, and I think we put something out every Friday or Monday. I don’t know what day, but that day, I had this idea to write a song. I didn’t even know where I got the idea from, if I’m being totally honest. It’s so weird, I’ve never been asked this before. Where did the germ of that come from? I love that song and that quote that I say, it’s a very danceable song, I’ve stolen from a friend of mine named JM McNabb, who is actually quoting a Toronto music booker who used to book a place called The Silver Dollar.
And I guess those ideas of like, this is a very danceable song with the fact that the song was somewhat bizarre, that bossa nova song to it… I don’t know. I remember sitting down with a pen and writing what games rhymed with one another, thinking like, “Oh yeah, Jay is really going to love this.” It’s going to be like in some ways… that and still what motivates me to this day is like things I think Jay will laugh at, or things that he will like. And then he got home, and we sort of finished putting the song together, and then we just shot it with one camera.
Jared came over, and we just shot it. It took us a while, and then I just went upstairs and started editing it, I think, almost right away. And it was so great because unlike most of the things that we make, it edited itself because we had to stay on the click track, you know what I mean?
We didn’t have any sophisticated technology. That song was playing in the background of everything, so it all had to match. It was the easiest thing I’ve ever edited in my life, which made it somewhat pleasant. That’s it. And I got to tell you, when we first made that and released it, it was, again, for these like hundred or so people who were watching the show in Toronto, and it wasn’t until literally five, maybe even ten years later, people started picking it up. It wasn’t on YouTube. It was an FLV file on our own website. I really had no experience of it being like, “Oh wow, look at this. This is good. It’s become something.
Chrono Trigger
It bums me out that since the Wii, moving to the Wii U and now Switch, there is no more shop music.
I remember the day it was announced that they were going to stop the Wii Shopping Channel. It is sad. I have a Steam Deck, so I get to experience that same kind of thrill through that. But there was really nothing like Nintendo all of a sudden selling these Sega games that you could play with an old school controller, like it turned that first Wii into, like, the very first, like romulation system, which I just loved. Oh my God. Playing the old classics. I remember, I don’t know if it was like Zelda: Link to the Past or maybe Secret of Mana, but like some old title that we opened it up and we were like, “This is insane!” The fact that I get to play these games without any of the modern retouching that they do now, like when they’ll put out a 3D Chrono Trigger or something like that. God, that would be awful. That was a very special time for me, because it was all these games that I deeply, deeply loved. And you see in the show, we play so much Mario Kart 64. That was all because of the shopping channel.
You mention Chrono Trigger. The music cue at the beginning of Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie is Chrono Trigger. Did you have to get in touch with Square Enix for that?
The truth is, it actually is just Jay playing piano, and it sounds like Chrono Trigger, but it’s not. It’s just very similar in the same way that all the Back to the Future music he plays is reminiscent of Alan Silvestri’s score, but it isn’t. We’ve been doing that throughout the entire history of the show, where we’re trying to evoke the feeling of these things without actually doing them because that’s just Jay in the living room playing something that sounds like that. That sound from when you first turn the cartridge on.
The end of the movie, then, is also a Chrono Trigger homage without using the actual music?
We wanted to basically give the audience the feeling that, “Oh, was this what this whole thing was?” Two kids at home who just played through Chrono Trigger, and we’re talking about it as if they did. Do you know what I mean? What if we got in that ship, and what would we do if we could go back to this time?
So much of Nirvanna The Band has that dual experience of yes, this is all happening clearly, because it’s happening in the real world. But is this also just two kids on a sleepover in the 90s imagining what it’s going to be like to be an adult?
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)
I don’t know if this aspect was intentional, but it also made me think of seeing Scott Pilgrim in theaters with the Zelda music kicking off that movie.
When I first saw what Edgar Wright was doing with video game music in [Scott Pilgrim vs. The World], it blew my mind. I thought, “I’ve never seen anything this appropriate before in terms of melding video game aesthetics with a film.” It is, to this day, unmatched. It’s a tragedy of its story, I believe, that it didn’t become a worldwide phenomenon. I think that, and I’ve talked about this many, many times, because aesthetically it may be in my top five favorite films ever made. I think it’s unbelievable what Edgar Wright did. Every two minutes in that movie, there’s something that had my jaw on the floor. But I think that it made an error in cleaving so closely to the Bryan Lee O’Malley story. Obviously, it is a beloved comic, and Edgar was a huge fan of it, clearly. I think that keeping with that narrative structure of these seven evil exes and Scott Pilgrim gets with Ramona in basically act one, break into act two of the movie. That worked very well in a comic book series. And in a feature film, I think it made it so that it was very difficult to root for the protagonists, so you were kind of watching an episodic journey. Even though it was done better than probably anything I’ve ever seen in terms of action comedy. Truly. Like it rivals Jackie Chan movies, but it just did not catch on. And I think that it’s a disgrace, in some ways, but it’s also a bit of a blessing because it left those amazing video game aesthetics around for all of us indie filmmakers to pick up and use because they didn’t become widespread, which they should have because all of that stuff, the Street Fighter stuff, everything, it was incredible. I loved it.
Should all Canadian comedies open with referential video game music?
Look, that’s more generational than regional. Again, I love video games, and I think that more movies can reference them. We’re starting to see that in anime because anime and video games, especially coming out of Japan, are so closely meshed with one another. Capcom, as a company, is already stealing so much from anime already, and so they kind of feed into one another. So that’s already happening.
You’re involved with a Magic: The Gathering movie?
Yeah. I’m writing and directing it.
That’s probably all you’re able to share about it at this point, right?
I can’t tell you anything. It’s badass. I can say that. It’s, like, the best project I’ve ever been a part of in my life.
Were you excited about the Final Fantasy Magic: The Gathering cards?
It was the first prerelease I’d been to since 2005 or 2006. I took a break from shooting the Anthony Bourdain movie and went with this guy, Jeremy, in Massachusetts to the Final Fantasy prerelease, and we had a blast.
It’s Zelda’s 40th anniversary this year. Is that an important series to you? And if so, what is your favorite Zelda game?
It is. Although I think I have, I would say, a fraught history with it. So, my story about starting with Square titles – I think the reason is that those original action-based RPGs were not as interesting to me as the true, turn-based RPG systems that my brother and I kind of started on.
And also, this was just happenstance, we had Zelda II. We had the gold cartridge. And so that was my first experience with Link as a character in that game. It is so different than the rest in the series. And I think if I had had the original Zelda, the isometric top-down view Zelda, it would have been different. And this notion of, you know, tool collecting and adventuring across this map, is very Baldur’s Gate, right? Like, it’s very similar to what those original fog of war exploration, Baldur’s Gate games were like. I know not really, but just in terms of how they’re, how they’re absorbed by a kid. So I think I really would have loved it.
And so not only did I not get into Zelda, I didn’t even get into Link to the Past. My uncle played it, and I think that made me feel like, “Oh, this is a game for adults. I shouldn’t play this game.” And so it wasn’t until, obviously, the 64 and Ocarina that I was like, “Oh my God.” That game my brother and I played, and we thought, “This is unbelievable.” And so strangely, that was the first Zelda game that I played. And from there I went on, and we played Link to the Past, and we’re like, “Well, this game is just incredible.” But I will say that the Zelda game that I think I loved the most, that my brother and I had the most fun with, is actually Wind Waker, which is, to this day, I think is just gorgeous. I just really loved Wind Waker. Then I forget the title, but I was a huge DS guy, and the one where you go into the paintings, what’s it called?
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
Link Between Worlds?
Yeah, I love that. I love that gameplay. And then most recently, my cousin brother-in-law – that’s a long story – they got me into the homebrew roguelike Link to the Past game. Have you played this game?
I am familiar with it, but no, I have not played it.
You have to check this game out. It’s unbelievable. Do you remember when IceFrog created Dota? So this guy did that with Link. He basically took all the sprites and the game mechanics from Link to the Past and created Hades. It’s unreal. It’s an undisputed masterpiece. But it’s completely illegal. You can’t get it anywhere. You need to download this guy’s specific, like, downloader. There’s no way to get it other than through illicit means. But it is as much of a revolution as IceFrog’s Dota was to creating the MOBA. It is that same thing, and I imagine we’re going to see a lot more of these super-tuned, super challenging, like Meat Boy-style, super creative level design using ancient properties from that era, and I’m sure this is just the first. I think we’re going to see a flood of similar games.
It’s a cool idea. Those IP holders should take their old games and do something interesting with them like that.
Blizzard embraced it. I think it worked out for them. It led to Warcraft 3 sales.
I enjoyed reading the Reddit AMA you and Jay McCarrol did recently, which was really fascinating, and you said you have literally never heard anything from anyone in terms of legal issues related to copyright infringement. Is that true?
Yes.
You guys skirt the edge with the band name Nirvanna, and there are all the musical cues, but it’s never been a problem?
Look, the fact is that any type of litigation would have led to either an injunction or us having to take the episodes or the movie down. It seems like it is done so chaotically and without care, but we work with our lawyers closely to make sure that we’re well within the boundary of fair use law. And so if, I think, anybody who inquires – let’s say that you’re a lawyer representing, you know… pick somebody. John Williams or something like that, saying, “Hey, I notice that my client’s music is in this episode of the show, and you didn’t seek out permission. Can you explain why you did that?” And our lawyer will just forward our fair use documents to their legal team, and we would never hear anything ever again.
That’s great. That’s awesome, frankly.
Well, that’s the way it should be, because we are not intending to infringe on copyright for the sake of enriching ourselves. Ever. We are not trying to print Nirvanna the band t-shirts with the intention of confusing the public so that they are buying things from us and not from the estate of the band Nirvana. We’re trying to make a cultural point, and all of this is being done for the purposes of creating a new piece of art that is meant to laud and deify all of the things that we put in, whether it’s our movie or TV show. We’re worshiping them, in a sense, to show you that all of these pieces of work had an influence on a generation of kids. And this is how those people are living their lives now. If anything, we think of all the things that we do as advertisements positively for these brands.
Maybe an odd final question, but I wanted to ask you a technical question about one of my favorite jokes in the movie – the woman from Brazil outside of the CN Tower. How did you do that? How did you manufacture that joke?
It was secretly one of the hardest things in the whole movie to do. We shot 30 different… well, maybe not 30. I shouldn’t exaggerate. We shot that 15 different times with 15 different people to try to get it right. It was next to impossible because the way we do it – I think kind of obvious that we just shoot it backwards, where the thing you see at the end of the film is actually the first time I met her. That’s why she gives a sincere reaction, which is, I’ve never met you before in my life, and she’s telling the truth.
And that’s so important because obviously it’s very difficult to act something like that. Whereas if we just hired an actor to do it, it would just get screwed up. And so what you’re seeing is… the behind-the-scenes of that is I, holding that wheelbarrow, or Jay’s pulling the wheelbarrow, and I’m covered in those gigantic ropes, we go up to her, and I say that line, “Oh, hey, I remember you.” And so even though I’ve never seen her before in my life. In real life, I’ve never seen her before. And so she reacts, and then we continue the scene. And then literally within seconds before she gets up and leaves, before the conditions around her change, before that Spider-Man that we show twice moves, we run back as fast as we can, ditch the ropes, ditch the wheelbarrow, and walk up super casually as though it’s the very beginning of the movie and I just casually ask her for directions, knowing that the more casual this exchange, the better. And the reason that I say such a nonsensical thing to her, and we might have even changed this with ADR, but I say, “Oh, I need to jump off of this tower.” It gives her permission to give me this reaction, like, “What are you doing?” Like… you just came up to me. All these things that need to go right. The person we’re talking to couldn’t move. The world around them couldn’t really change that much. Jay and I need to run back and forth to these two starting points, like within seconds of one another. We needed to finish a dramatic scene where, in the first scene, I run up the CN Tower. In the second scene, we join a line to go sneak through security, and this person that we’re acting with needed to not say, “I just saw you. What are you doing? What are you filming this for?” And so getting all of those things to line up was impossible. Impossible. Impossible. But somehow we did it.
I was about to say, I saw it in the movie. I don’t know that it was impossible.
Yes, but again, when you watch somebody speedrun a video game, you go, “Oh my gosh, how did they do it?” It was the same as us doing a task. Nirvana The Band is basically a tool-assisted speedrun of a movie where you are seeing us do something. It didn’t work. We stop, we do it again, we do it again, we do it again, we do it again. We do it again. And so when you see us play at AGDQ, you’re like, “Wow, oh my God. It’s magic! These guys are incredible! How did they do it?” And the fact is, we just did it hundreds and hundreds of times.
To continue to compliment you, the way I’ve been pitching Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie to friends is, it’s the first time I’ve seen “special effects” in a movie in years. I haven’t walked out of a movie wondering how they did it like this in a long time. That’s a really rare feeling for someone who loves movies and has been watching them his whole life.
We can both thank Jonathan Blow. That is how we did it. We found the context by which all the gold is just in our feet. And it is not more complicated than that. Thank you, video games.
We didn’t talk about it much, but I also love BlackBerry.
That’s another very video game-driven movie.
That’s the thing I like about your films a lot is you are a person who grew up with video games, and it is clearly a part of your lexicon, it is a part of who you are, and that infiltrates your storytelling in subtle ways. You recognize the value of how video games work. And then there were just the myriad subtle video game things in BlackBerry that are not front and center that I just appreciate. Like having SungWon “ProzD” Cho in a great role and the voice of Sam Fisher. And even separate from all that video game stuff, BlackBerry is a great movie. So I’m a fan. You’ve got a fan for life. I’m going to see all your movies now. Congratulations.
One of the things that really helped me with BlackBerry was reading a history of… I don’t know if it was a history of PlayStation development or if it was a history of Naughty Dog Studios specifically, but so much of their early engineering problems that they solved trying to create Crash Bandicoot, I took and used as problem-solving techniques that the engineers in the movie used. It really helped me to understand how engineers can solve a software problem using hardware, which is so much of what the BlackBerry engineers did. They solved very, very complicated software problems using hardware solutions.
Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie is currently in theatres and Matt Johnson’s next film, Tony, a biopic about the life of Anthony Bourdain, is currently in post-production.