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February 18, 2026

A BITESIZE CHAT WITH

NIRVANNA THE BAND

Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol talk about bringing Nirvanna the Band to the big screen, the editing process, and making a truly Canadian film.

BB: So, this film is filled with tons of [Toronto] Easter Eggs. How do you go about creating a film that is so unabashedly Canadian, yet something that worldwide audiences are going to be able to embrace?


  • MJ: We have good role models in that sense. In other Commonwealth countries like Australia and England, the BBC and ABC have a lot of super hyper-local content, whether it's The Office or Chris Lilley's Summer Heights High, where there are references to such bizarre local culture that you'd think it's completely unintelligible to outsiders. But these are some of my and Jay's favorite things ever made. So, I don't think that we thought about it as something that was going to repel audiences. We saw it as a feature. If we can do something in Canada in the same way that these other guys made shows about their particular cultures, then we'd be in good company.


  • JM: Just working backwards too. Like, we don't put on any costume really, or we don't really venture out to try to manifest a set that we thought and we wrote. We're just using literally what's in front of us. So, we're able to do it because we really are what you see. This is where we live and this is what we know. It's all we know.


BB: Let’s talk about the editing. You've really made the unbelievable so believable. What were the biggest challenges you faced in the editing phase of the film? And maybe tell us a bit about some of the struggles because it looked like a lot of work went into it.


  • MJ: The real struggle is actually not what you'd think. And this is what's so fun about making movies in this format. The struggle with editing is when the editors get a better idea for what our scene should have been than we had. And, so, we'll shoot something... a great example would be, I'll use a very obvious one, okay? When we tried to sneak through security at the CN Tower and we on the production team were expecting to get stopped. We thought that they were going to say, “hey, you can't bring parachutes in here. You can't bring wire cutters in here” and stop us. So, when they let us through all of a sudden, we are, like, okay, so now what do we do? We send that footage back to the editors and we're, like, well, do we use this? Like, what can we do? And they confront us with the idea that they love this footage, so let's see where it goes. Now, you have to go and actually shoot what you said you were going to shoot. That is, I think, a big example, but every day we were hearing alternate versions of what we had shot from the editors as they said, “don't do that, do this instead.” That said, it means that we're really working for them. Like, we're trying to shoot as much content as we can, do as much crazy shit as we can, so that they have enough clay, so to speak, to really mold something interesting. But we trust them completely. Curt [Lobb] and Bobby [Upchurch] are more or less in charge of the movie.


  • JM: It's very fun to be presented by them. We get to perform for each other. So, Matt and I, there's no script. We know kind of where we want to go, but we improvise a lot of stuff, and they play with those ingredients and concoct something and show it back to us. But, often, they're not just doing that to make it funny. They're trying to find some better writing, as well. And often, what happens is that we go back to shoot again because the editors have discovered a way to punch up the writing, make something make more sense, to help a storyline. So, we're constantly going back and forth between the people on the field and the people in editing. We're making it all together.

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BB: There’s a scene where you head back to your apartment in 2008 and you inadvertently interact with your younger selves. How did you plan out that scene? Because that footage you have in that scene, it's almost as if you filmed it back then perfectly to fit with what we get in this film.


  • JM: Well, when we made the webseries, we were really figuring out things as we went. We didn't know how to shoot with a lot of intention. We would just improvise, and our camera guys would just shoot us trying a lot of different things. We eventually made a webseries and cut it all down, but we saved all the little mini-tapes in a drawer because we're, like, maybe one day this will come in handy. Years later, we found ourselves sort of still figuring out what we wanted to do with this movie, and we realized that enough time had gone by that we could string together this crazy idea of a time travel plot using the old footage. So, the real heroes of that sequence are our editors that went through all that footage and all the stuff that didn't get into the web series, which is so many hours of things, and found little pertinent moments that they could develop a little narrative to. Then we came in and were, basically, just being directed by them as to how to fit in how we were interacting with ourselves. Through a series of tricks, it all came together.


BB: You guys really centered friendship as the emotional core of your story. Was there a moment you guys shared with each other while making this movie that really stands out to you?


  • MJ: It's interesting because making movies is so difficult that it would be... believe it or not, the things that bonded Jay and I the most were when things were going wrong, but it wasn't our fault.


  • JM: We had a common enemy and it wasn't each other.


  • MJ: Yeah, it would be like when Matt Greyson, the producer, made a huge mistake or Ben Shane forgot our clothes. Then Jay and I could just sit in this boiling hot RV on Queen Street in rush hour traffic and laugh and be like, well, at least it wasn't our fault that this got screwed up.


  • JM: We’d just laugh. It was a joyous time because we realized, okay, we are off the hook. But we are going to suffer.


  • MJ: Filmmaking is, literally—it may seem like a joke—but it's constant suffering. It's like the joy comes when you're thinking of the idea and how good it will be and you're dreaming, “oh, wouldn't it be funny?” Like, we'll jump off the CN Tower, oh, it'll be hilarious. Then you actually have to do it and it's not fun at all. It's like your stomach is in a knot. You're worried you're going to get in so much trouble. It is literally not a good time.


  • JM: I'm very bad with heights too. It's awful. No interest in getting up there.


  • MJ: And you can apply that to almost every single section of the movie where it seemed like a good idea, then you actually have to do it and it's just pain. It's pain, but the friendship survives. The idea that in some ways, thematically, it's important that these characters go through such adversity only to realize that the most important thing to them is their connection to one another. Because I think that's how great friendships are formed. Like, at war or in school, in places where you have to do something extremely difficult. For some reason, you can't get rid of those people because you went through something hard.

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BB: Since the show has wrapped and, you know, there have been so many different movies and TV shows that have had big impacts and big moments, has anything come out in that time that you guys think, we could absolutely riff on this in the Nirvanna the Band universe?


  • MJ: This is such a smart question. It's like asking Weird Al what songs have come out that he wishes he could do a version of. It's weird, I would say that the obvious answer would be like a kind of Barbenheimer, like Oppenheimer-style parody. But you never really know what's going to work and what's not going to work. I think that if we were ever going to do a more modern movie and do a straight one-to-one ripoff of it, the best would be Whiplash, because we have this kind of dynamic between us already and there's a musical element to it. I could see us doing an entire Whiplash episode of the show. But it's funny because we've never been asked that before, so I imagine that we could probably come up with a hundred.


  • JM: It's usually what moves us and if we have a lot of gas in the tank to talk about it. If we end up… if we're just on our own as friends and with our whole crew, if we're talking a lot about something and we have a lot of ideas, that just means that there's something there that we can explore.


  • MJ: I'll say the shows that we thought about making but never did... They're a little bit dated now, but we tried doing a Westworld episode of the show. And we also had another idea for a time-travel episode where we go back way, way, way far and it was kind of going to be like a Game of Thrones-style episode. Go to, like, not prehistoric, but a medieval time.


BB: Well, hopefully there’s more to come, and I can’t wait for audiences to get to check this thing out.


  • MJ: Thank you, Nick.


  • JM: Thanks, Nick.



Make sure to check out Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie now in theatres.


Interview conducted on February 4th, 2026 by Nick van Dinther.

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