This weekend, get ready for a wild tale of two unlikely heroes who travel to the past in a souped-up vehicle and must find a way to return to the present day.
Sound like “Back to the Future?” Well, that’s by design.
“Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie,” the latest mockumentary collaboration between director Matt Johnson and composer Jay McCarrol, probably shouldn’t exist. The film features extended parodies that carefully skirt copyright law, a stunt that sees the duo literally dive off Toronto’s CN tower and at least two dozen more moments that will leave audiences asking “How the hell is this legal?”
It’s a miracle the film made it to screens at all.
“People who are watching in theaters had better thank their lucky stars, because it’s probably the only time it’s going to be screened, ever,” Johnson tells Page Six Hollywood. “This movie is a copyright nightmare. We’re trying to use American Fair Use law to write to the very extent that we can. We’re always trying to make parodies of things, and this is just the biggest one we’ve ever done.”
To pull off the Nirvanna schtick for the past two decades, Johnson and McCarrol have become de facto experts in fair use. They created a guide for aspiring filmmakers on “How Not to Get Sued” for TIFF back in 2018, and famously keep a copyright attorney on speed dial, carefully plotting legal arguments justifying fair use for each one of their stunts.
The film picks up the story of the duo’s niche Canadian series “Nirvanna the Band the Show,” which follows two down-on-their-luck musicians with one dream: to play at Toronto venue The Rivoli.
“I don’t know how this happened,” McCarrol says of landing Neon as the film’s distributor. “We feature ourselves so unfiltered. We’re not really playing that much of a character. We just tapped into an aspect of our personalities that we’ve been doing for our whole lives, so that feels a bit naked to be getting this sort of platform.”
Aside from McCarrol and Johnson, who also scripted the project, there are no actors in “NTBTSTM,” which relies heavily on off-the-cuff interactions with strangers on the street. They used “Back to the Future” as the “scaffolding” for their story, but largely allowed those improvised moments to dictate how they’d get from Point A to Point B.
That may sound like a stressful shoot to most, but not to the “Nirvanna” guys. “I can sympathize with that feeling of, ‘I don’t know what’s going to be on camera, or what we’re going to shoot, I’ll still stress about the outcome,’” Johnson says. But he and McCarrol have been at this for so long, they thrive in the chaos. “As soon as you realize that the outcome is actually going to be determined way after you shoot it by editors, you can let go of your preconceived notions of what you want.”
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