National Post (National Edition)
Friendship gets unreal in new time-travel film
Nirvanna The Band hits big screen
It's at the end of a Zoom interview with Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol when the two start bickering about whether or not Johnson accidentally kicked McCarrol in the foot.
The two are in downtown Toronto doing publicity for the time-travel mockumentary Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, a film that has them playing fictionalized versions of themselves. They had just finished discussing their real-life friendship while eating submarine sandwiches from Lambo's Deli when a slightly exasperated McCarrol tells Johnson that he kicked him, which prompts a short-lived debate.
“I didn't realize you were still there ...” Johnson says to the interviewer after the matter is put to rest. “We are just saying our goodbyes ... you can cut all of this out,” McCarrol adds.
This mildly amusing exchange seems to suggest the comedically heightened friendship at the heart of the Nirvanna The Band franchise has echoes from real life. The film version, which follows the original 2007 web series Nirvanna the Band the Show and the 2017 sitcom of the same name, opens in theatres Friday. If any deeper ideas are coursing beneath its endearingly goofy time-travel plot, they may revolve around the thorny dynamics of a longterm friendship. Is the offscreen relationship similar to the onscreen one?
“No,” says Johnson, who also directed the film and co-wrote it with McCarrol. “We know each other, we work together, and we have a long-standing professional relationship, but that doesn't really bleed into our personal lives, I would say, at all. There are parties we'll be at or things like this where we're having Lambo's subs together.”
Whether that's true or not — and it likely isn't — Nirvanna The Band began life when McCarrol and Johnson lived together on Queen Street West in Toronto. The premise of the web series, which ran from 2007 to 2009, was to chronicle the pair's obsessive attempts to get a gig at the Rivoli for Nirvanna the Band, their comedy-music duo. The Rivoli is an iconic venue famous for hosting early shows of The Kids in the Hall, among other things. Rather than work on their act or simply contact management for a gig, the fictional Johnson and McCarrol concoct elaborate publicity schemes in hopes that the attention will land them a show. Needless to say, the schemes usually go awry.
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie picks up the action in 2025, 17 long years after the two first began their Rivoli quest. They are still at it. Johnson is the idea man and, as the film begins, he has come up with the most elaborate stunt yet. They will go to the CN Tower with parachutes and wire cutters and make their way out to the EdgeWalk. Then they will snip the safety cables and parachute into the SkyDome while a Blue Jays game is underway, thus giving them a captive audience that will be encouraged to check out their show at the Rivoli that the band has yet to book.
The sky-jumping scene is near the beginning of the film and adds a nice flash of movie-magic spectacle to Nirvanna the Band's first entry into cinema. As with most of the film, the scene was shot guerrilla-documentary style with one camera and a “let's-just-see-whathappens” attitude.
“You're watching it happen in real time,” says Johnson. “You're watching Jay and I make decisions as we get through security because we had thought security was going to stop us with the parachutes and the wire cutters. We thought there is no way we're getting in. Once we got in, we just had to keep going. You are watching us improvise that on the fly.”
In the storyline, however, the stunt does not go well and leads Jay to question his future as part of Nirvanna The Band and to secretly plot a solo career. Meanwhile, Matt moves on to another wacky scheme inspired by Back to the Future in which he tries to weasel a Rivoli gig with an elaborate tale about time travel. Somehow, the fake time machine becomes real and Matt and Jay find themselves whisked back to 2008 in the RV they live in, forcing them to engage in a Marty McFly-like quest to get back to the future. There is a significant twist to the narrative that we won't reveal here, but it continues to broaden the rift between the two friends.
“We had shot a road-trip movie that felt very much like our TV show, that was the feeling that it had when we were watching it back,” says McCarrol.
“We had always stayed away from doing stuff that was too unreal. We always liked to keep the Nirvanna the Band world pretty rooted in reality. But we sort of indulged in an idea when we got home and were confronted with this footage that felt like the same scope as our TV show. We just started to riff on the idea of a big, huge, classic adventure movie time-travel thing, and we got so caught up in it that, within a day or two, we thought, `You know what? We have to make this movie.'”
According to Johnson, it was a huge, time-travel movie with a $150,000 budget. This is why it is done documentary style, with Matt and Jay roaming downtown Toronto with their one cameraman in tow. The 2008 footage of Queen Street — which includes disgraced CBC Q host Jian Ghomeshi's face on the billboard — was drawn from footage the pair had from their original web series.
“In Canada, that's basically the only way you can make an independent movie like this: smaller crew, you don't need lights, no makeup, no strangers,” says Johnson.
“No actors, they're all strangers,” McCarrol intervenes.
Still, the film had a successful launch back in September at the Toronto International Film Festival. Now that Nirvanna the Band has conquered the cinematic world, what's next?
“We're trying to get a show at the Rivoli,” says McCarrol.