While Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol are on the path to becoming Toronto legends, their new movie Nirvanna the Band the Show serves as one of the best love letters to the city, to friendship, and to pop culture nerds everywhere that I’ve ever seen. This excellent film was one of my favorites of 2025, and with it getting a wider release here in Canada on February 13th, it will be a film I hope to enjoy with an enthusiastic crowd in the GTA.
The film combines documentary-style “prank show” footage with a cinematic narrative that many people will be familiar with. It’s a film where many of the stunts, conversations, and events seem so wild that you can hardly believe they happened. The two have mastered this style of guerrilla filmmaking through their show of the same name, and that approach translates in an amazing way on the big screen. They often talk about how they use their low-budget filming techniques and real locations with real passersby to capture the best moments in their work. As a result, sometimes they even change the narrative based on what happens in real life. This requires them to reshoot many scenes, resulting in a much longer shooting time than most indie films of their scale. In fact, Matt mentioned in an interview that filming the movie took over 200 days! With that much time, we figured Matt and Jay’s relationship must have grown a lot more intense over the course of making it. And with friendship being the core emotional element of the story, we wanted to ask them how their friendship shaped this movie and its creation. We had the amazing opportunity to talk to Matt and Jay about just that.
“Hey, Matt, Jay,” I said warmly. “I just want to say I’m a big fan of the show and the movie. I really loved everything you guys have done. You centered friendship as the universal emotional core of your story. Was there a moment while making this movie that really stands out to you, one that you shared with each other?”
Matt responds, “Well, it’s interesting because making movies is so difficult. Believe it or not, the moments that bonded Jay and me the most were when things went so wrong, but it wasn’t our fault.”
“It was when we had a common enemy that wasn’t each other,” Jay adds.
With a small crew, Matt and Jay reflect on how they often got tired of each other, but ultimately, they are connected by the experiences they had making this film and Johnson’s previous features. This bond makes the film a lot of fun and allowed them to capture scenes that wouldn’t be possible with a more standard crew. The result speaks for itself.
“The moments where we bonded the most were when Matt Greyson, the producer, made a huge mistake, or when they forgot our clothes,” Matt jokes. “And then Jay and I could just sit in this boiling hot RV on Queen Street in rush hour traffic and laugh, saying, ‘Well, at least it wasn’t our fault. Someone else screwed this up.’”
But mistakes are to be expected with Matt and Jay’s filming style. Their run-and-gun approach, which saw them filming incognito at the CN Tower, Budweiser Stage, Drake’s mansion, and Queen Street, produced some of the film’s best moments. Matt’s next statement will be relatable to filmmakers out there.
“We would laugh,” Jay remarks. “It was a joyous time because we realized, okay, we’re off the hook.”
“But we’re gonna suffer,” Matt adds. “Filmmaking is literally, it may seem like a joke, but it’s constant suffering. The joy comes when you’re thinking of the idea and how good it will be. You’re dreaming—‘Oh, it’ll be funny if we jump off the CN Tower, it’ll be hilarious.’ But then you actually have to do it, and it’s not fun at all. It’s like your stomach is in a knot, and you’re worried you’re going to get in so much trouble. It’s literally not a good time.”
That run-and-gun style makes their approach much riskier than most filmmakers would take on. The CN Tower scene is just an evolution of what they’ve done in their TV show Nirvanna the Band the Show, where they’ve jumped on the tracks of the TTC, stolen from the Royal Ontario Museum, snuck into Scotiabank Arena, attended Star Wars premieres, and explored Canada’s Wonderland. The guys may be used to it, but that doesn’t make it any easier.
“I’m very bad with heights. I had no interest in getting up on the Tower,” Jay mentions.
“And you can apply that to almost every single section of the movie,” Matt says. “It seems like a good idea, and then you actually have to do it, and it’s just pain. Yeah. It’s pain. But the friendship survives. Like, that’s the idea 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 forged—in 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 together.”
I chime in, “No, I totally understand. You guys put your characters in crazy situations, and it was a lot of fun seeing them navigate that. Thank you, guys.”
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is in theatres now.
