Over the past decade Matt Johnson has moved from Toronto’s underground scene to international recognition. The writer, director and actor’s last feature, BlackBerry, chronicling the rise and fall of the eponymous mobile device, became an unlikely favourite with critics and awards panels.Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, this summer’s funniest, scrappiest movie, marks a return to the characters and world that established Johnson and his collaborator Jay McCarrol as cult favourites.The film builds on their low-budget web series Nirvana the Band the Show, from 2007, with its long-running comedy about two aspiring musicians – played by Johnson and McCarrol – whose determination to secure a performance at Toronto’s renowned Rivoli venue repeatedly leads them into increasingly nutty schemes.The opening gambit of the new film (which, as well as using a legally sensible second N in Nirvanna, features footage from that original web series) involves a plan to publicise their gig at the Rivoli – where they haven’t been booked to play – by skydiving off Toronto’s CN Tower into a Blue Jays baseball game.Unlike their scheming alter-egos, they didn’t plan for any of this, the duo explain over Zoom. “People ask whether we thought this footage would end up in a movie one day,” Johnson says. “Absolutely not. We couldn’t see further than the ends of our noses. The idea that, 20 years later, we’d still be playing these characters and releasing a film as them would have seemed completely absurd.“The web series was just us experimenting and finding our footing. It was much closer to Monty Python: bizarre situations, these characters acting ridiculous, and us seeing what happened.” Nirvanna’s story of the hapless musicians dates back to high school in Toronto’s neighbouring city of Mississauga, when Johnson, looking to score his student films, teamed up with McCarrol, a budding composer. They can’t quite recall their first conversation about Nirvana the Band, although McCarrol came up with the name during a trip to a video store. They have, Johnson notes, been working on “versions of these characters since school”.The feature film retains the central alchemy of the web series and the Vice TV series that followed. We are among fictionalised versions of Johnson and McCarrol, friends and aspiring ill-defined performers – who, crucially, have never written any songs, and whose creative partnership is inseparable from the fantasy they have built around themselves.The movie, Johnson says, is evidence of “us getting lucky over and over and over again”.Ingeniously, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie incorporates its earlier incarnations with a cheeky parody of the Robert Zemeckis film Back to the Future: Matt accidentally spills a rare bottle of Orbitz, a discontinued Canadian soft drink from the 1990s, on to a model flux capacitor. The chemical reaction short-circuits the console and actually sends them back to 2008 – when the younger Matt and Jay are, of course, attempting to play the Rivoli.The stars and creators are pleased that their editors had to comb through old footage of their characters’ early years to find sections that could work as part of the movie.Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie: Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol in their film “To me, it’s the mark of a great artist if you can look back at your old work and feel embarrassed by it,” Johnson says. “If you’re not embarrassed, it’s evidence that you haven’t grown. What I always tell film students is: make the thing in front of you as though it’s the most important work you’ll ever do, while simultaneously understanding that in three years you’ll probably think it’s terrible. Holding both of those ideas in your head at the same time is the secret.”The pair needed a lot of lawyers to make their film. [ BlackBerry director Matt Johnson: ‘We had to shoot secretly as we were making the film without the company’s participation’Opens in new window ]In common with Marty McFly, Michael J Fox’s hero in Back to the Future, the pair must hit 88mph for their vehicle to become a time machine; McCarrol’s music fiendishly reworks Alan Silvestri’s score; and a 2008 newspaper alerts the time-travellers that they have returned to a date when Bill Cosby hasn’t been cancelled. Fair-usage legal principles played an important role in all this.The guerrilla shoot, which took place on the streets of Toronto over 200 days, involved numerous impromptu encounters with members of the public. Release forms were essential.“We had different lawyers for different things,” Johnson says. “The legal exposure and the approach to filming in public is completely different than the approach to filming in private, which is to say on the CN Tower. “That is a totally different conversation, and using different lawyers, than the fair-use argument, which is what brings in Back to the Future and all of these other cultural references that we have.“By the time we were making this movie the legal stuff was second nature to us,” he says. “We weren’t even really thinking about those as problems. Our big issues were the story issues. Like, how do we write this so that it makes sense, so that it’s a real movie?” You spend your life becoming who you think people need you to be, and then you spend the rest of it trying to find your way back to yourself— Matt Johnson“Back in the day we would just improvise and go anywhere and talk to anyone. It was a lot more like jazz in the old days,” adds McCarrol. “We’re much more story driven now.”Incorporating occasionally baffled Toronto bystanders into the final cut of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie wasn’t nearly as challenging as shooting on the fly in a Nasa facility, a stunt that makes for one of the most memorable sequences in Operation Avalanche, Johnson’s second film as a writer-director (and star).Using many of the same crew as Nirvanna, Johnson secretly filmed at Johnson Space Centre, in Houston, by posing as a student documentary maker. In reality he was making a comedy about a CIA agent who infiltrates the space agency to expose a potential mole, only to get caught up in a conspiracy to fake the 1969 moon landing.“I would rather shoot Nirvanna the Band 100 more times than relive that five minutes of Operation Avalanche,” Johnson says. Yet the earlier film’s audacious guerrilla style has become his trademark. The Dirties, his edgy 2013 debut, similarly used the mockumentary form to blur the lines between dorky high-school antics, teenage fantasy, film-making and real-world violence. It is comedy that mines the gap between the performed self and reality.“I came from a big family, and I loved that I could be one version of myself at school, another at summer camp, another with certain friends,” Johnson says. “Eventually all my films became extensions of that idea. You spend your life becoming who you think people need you to be, and then you spend the rest of it trying to find your way back to yourself.”[ The 25 best comedies of the past 25 years – in reverse orderOpens in new window ]Johnson and McCarrol are at the vanguard of a new wave of Canadian cinema, a loose but increasingly influential movement that has produced film-makers such as Chandler Levack, Kazik Radwanski, Sophie Dupuis, Matthew Rankin and Caroline Monnet. “When you’re actually making something, it never feels like a movement,” McCarrol says. “It feels like you’re in your own little world, trying to make yourself and your small crew laugh. Then every so often you have the privilege to show up at an awards ceremony and remember that all these other people are doing the same thing.” Johnson says, “The good news is that we’re all in Toronto and we do all know each other.” It sounds like a blast: the two guys and a posse that includes the likes of the cinematographer Jared Raab and the multidisciplinarian Luca Tarantini.“In that sense, yes, it’s a scene. But we’re two friends trying to entertain each other and scandalise Jared and Luca into saying, ‘You can’t do that.’ And then we do it anyway.”Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is in cinemas from Friday, July 3rd, with previews from Canada Day, on Wednesday, July 1st