How to “Nirvanna” your way to fun and profit
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
Peter Howell
Movie Critic
Guerrilla pranksters Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol deserve their own verb by now: to Nirvanna. As in, to will yourself into anything through creativity and a flagrant disregard for the rules. You don’t wait for permission, you just do it.
For nearly two decades, the Toronto duo behind the mockumentary/multi-media provocation known as “Nirvanna the Band the Show” have made a career out of audacity. Friends since high school, Johnson, 40, and McCarrol, 43, began their shared mayhem with a web series in 2007 built on a single purported goal: to land a gig at the city’s Rivoli night club through increasingly absurd publicity stunts. Then came the TV show in 2017, which doubled down on their indifference to what you’re “allowed” to do in a public space.
All these years later, that magical Rivoli show still hasn’t happened. And yet, they’ve somehow Nirvanna’d their way into a feature film. “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie,” which premiered at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival and was recently chosen by TIFF as one of Canada’s Top Ten films of 2025, takes their DIY ethos to new heights — literally, opening with a leap off the CN Tower to the roof of Rogers Centre — without sacrificing what made the concept work in the first place.
The movie, which opened Feb. 13 to strong box office, is also a marvel for its smart mix of archival footage, new material and random bystander involvement, the latter including unsuspecting Toronto cops investigating a non-fatal 2024 shooting outside the Bridle Path home of rap superstar Drake.
The excitable duo, scruffily attired as if they’ve just been slapped awake and frogmarched to an interrogation room, manage to sit still just long enough for an interview with the Star during TIFF.
I’m honestly blown away by how you made this movie. How much computer generated imagery did you use?
Matt Johnson: We used CGI whenever something didn’t go the way we wanted, but not for everything you’d think.
You used it for more than just the CN Tower and Rogers Centre jump scenes?
Johnson: That stuff was very challenging because it’s impossible to make something like that look real unless you actually do a lot of it yourself. Weird things like interacting with the opening and closing dome — a lot of that we tried very hard to control and couldn’t. We were in the hands of the CN Tower. We were just guests like anybody else. So we were out on the thing and at the mercy of (the tower guide’s) head cam. We had to do all kinds of crazy s—t to make that work. And then later in the film too, we’re using our VFX (visual effects) supervisor Tristan Zerafa, who did the VFX on “Operation Avalanche.” He developed a lot of that crazy “put a character in a place where they’re not supposed to be” stuff: Jay being famous, being at the Oscars, that kind of stuff.
The scene outside Drake’s home — was that digitally altered at all?
Johnson: That’s all real. There’s no VFX. That’s completely legitimate. One hundred per cent real.
Was it filmed the same day as the shooting of a security guard there?
Jay McCarrol: Yes. We were filming Roz & Mocha, the radio guys. We finished working with them, walked out of their studio and heard on the news that there had been a shooting (at Drake’s mansion) and that there were a bunch of police there. We went right there because we’re like a fire hall. And we wrote the scene on the way there and figured out how we were going to get it into the movie. The whole movie changed.
