Paramount Wins Warner Bros. Now What? Plus: ‘Scream 7,’ Heat 2,’ and ‘Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’ With Matt Johnson!

12:49Sean Fennessey:The God Butcher.

12:50Chris Ryan:The God Cooks and God Butcher.

12:52Sean Fennessey:Amsterdam's terrible. Pale Blue Eye is completely forgettable. He did do the voice of Shoichi in The Boy and the Heron in the English dub. Fantastic. Did you see that? No, I haven't seen that yet, man. And he will appear very shortly as Frankenstein's monster in The Bride. Are you excited about that? I'm seeing it on Monday and I'm looking forward to it. I've heard it's not good, but I want it to be good. It's Jesse Buckley and Christian Bale directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. I love Maggie Gyllenhaal's last movie, Lost Daughter. I hope it's good. Yeah. Heard it's not good.

13:18Chris Ryan:Saw Maggie Gyllenhaal and Ryan Coogler talking. It was a delightful chat.

13:21Sean Fennessey:Oh, what were they talking about?

13:23Chris Ryan:Aspect ratios. Everybody's all about that these days. We've gotten really technical. It's like the way all football talk is like, what, two high shells? Yes. Now everybody's like a lens guy.

13:33Sean Fennessey:I was listening to Nate Tice and Mina Kimes on Mina's show talking about draft prospects, which teams have the most to lose. Yeah. And it actually reminded me a lot of being in film class where the professor would be saying words. And I would be like, I've heard those words before. I don't know what those words mean, but I'm going to pretend like I do so that I can get through this class.

13:53Chris Ryan:And also then go out to a bar and repeat those words.

13:55Sean Fennessey:And of course, we've also premised our entire business on that. He too, man. Gosh, on the one hand, it gets me even more excited for this movie. On the other hand, it raises the stakes in a way that is tough.

14:07Chris Ryan:That's what I was saying initially, was that the floor of this movie with DiCaprio and Bale is now at like, it cannot be worse than 65%. In the CR, the CR tomato meter.

14:17Sean Fennessey:Give or take like J. Edgar, Leo hasn't made any bad movies. Right. You know, like even like Body of Lies, which would be lower on his list. I know you love it, but that's still a really entertaining movie. So his taste is historically borderline flawless.

14:30Chris Ryan:Yes, and I think that while he has obviously got a lot of affection for historically titanic figures, no pun intended, but he likes to work with extremely significant directors, and he's not afraid to work with directors who are in their 80s or in their late 70s. He's doing it right now. So he shoots this Scorsese movie. I imagine he would shoot sometime this year, maybe late this year. And it's not going to be a secret because I'm sure with the budget that they have, they're going to shoot in Chicago and they're going to shoot in the desert and we'll know about it. I'm trying to decide my level of engagement.

15:07Chris Ryan:What do you mean? Like set photo watching and stuff like that. How much do you want to protect the end point of this movie versus kind of like we went through with The Odyssey. It's like, do you want to see Matt Damon wearing Uggs and armor as he waits to get into a boat to do something?

15:25Sean Fennessey:Yeah, I mean, I usually don't, but I'll accept it. For something I really care about, like I didn't look at very much for one battle after another in the run-up to it. I tried to not look at any of those set photos. That's a really good question. You know, Warner Brothers, between this movie and finally greenlighting that Nancy Meyers movie that had been long discussed for two or three years now, they're doubling down on older filmmakers who are kind of, you know, One last job in it, it feels like. Well, it's not their money. Well, for now it is, but it may not be very shortly. We don't need to talk about that again.

15:59Chris Ryan:No, I mean, I saw the Ella McKay, Emma Mackey, dropped out of the Nancy Meyers movie.

16:04Sean Fennessey:And she was playing Ella McKay in that film. Yes, it was part of the McKay-verse. So it's going to be tough to replace her. It's going to be pretty tricky.

16:09Chris Ryan:Well, I keep too. Very similar. You know what I mean?

16:12Sean Fennessey:Yeah, I look forward to both of those films from those older filmmakers, and I hope they're wonderful. Let's pivot to Scream 7. Sure. so you've been on the show talking about Scream 6 and Scream 5 this series has recently been rebooted and it was rebooted with two young stars Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega neither of those actors are in this movie reportedly allegedly the reasons that they're not in the movie is because specifically Melissa Barrera expressed support for Palestine on her social media and reportedly the production company behind the Scream movies did not appreciate those comments and she was fired Jenna Ortega though she has not confirmed this it sounds as though Sort of did.

16:49Chris Ryan:Initially, it was like a scheduling conflict with Wednesday had come up and that she would be dropping out of the film. She later went on to talk about how between Melissa dropping out and the original filmmakers, Radio Silence, leaving the project, it was no longer really the project that she had signed up for. I thought it was interesting that there was not, despite Jenna Ortega's pretty significant fame, there was not a lot of, like, we're suing you to keep you into your contract. I don't know the vagaries of that. But they basically did a soft reboot of this franchise midway through what was supposed to be a new trilogy of films.

17:23Sean Fennessey:Yes. And I'll just say purely from a movie perspective, it's really unfortunate to lose both of those actors, especially for me, Melissa Pereira, because I think what the writers of those movies and the Radio Silence guys brought to that character. And those movies to me are mixed and I just revisited them and they're not as good as I had remembered and I was very positive about both of them on our episodes. But Melissa Barrera's character, who is the daughter of Billy Loomis, the killer, one of the two killers from the first film, has an interesting psychological dynamic where she is haunted by the fact that she is a serial killer.

17:56Sean Fennessey:And she's got serial killer bones and blood. She is extremely violent. And when the movie lets her rip.

18:01Chris Ryan:She's also got a body count by the end of the two movies.

18:02Sean Fennessey:She kind of takes care of business in an exciting way. And they don't have that energy in this movie anymore.

18:08Chris Ryan:No, it's really the only place for this franchise to go, and we'll get into Seven, is the idea of the final girl also being the killer. And that the scream ghost face gene is somehow passed down. And they have chosen to do different things in the movie. I revisited Six to get ready for Seven, was much more fond of it than I was when I first saw it. I think when I first saw it, I came out and was just extremely mad that it was not authentically shot in Dime Square. we were more flipped I really liked it because I think I went into it being like this is actually a great idea to put Scream in New York and then they shot it in Toronto and I was like this is just I can feel how not New York this is re-watching it and I think you actually mentioned this in a letterboxd note that you put up it is so stabby and it's so giallo in places and it is very self-consciously referencing those films and going into it without the expectation that I'm going to have this authentic Midnight Cowboy experience.

19:08Chris Ryan:I had a lot more time for it. And especially in comparison to Seven, it's like we didn't know how good we had it.

19:15Sean Fennessey:That is, I do feel a bit that way. I revisited Five and Six before seeing Seven and I was a little let down by Six in particular. But I think both of those films, like all Scream movies, they're whodunits, right? And if the mystery isn't strong and isn't fun to revisit and see the clues being revealed, then they don't stand up that well. The first film is still really fun because of the way that the mystery unfolds for us. And obviously it's the original, so it's got a different kind of weight to it.

19:39Chris Ryan:Yeah, I mean, when you're getting into Seven, now I'm likely an eighth film because of the box office. This movie's going to do really well, yeah. This movie will do. You start getting into, now you're repeating, it's almost like Force Awakens in the sequels, where you're like, now we can just remake the originals with a new cast and essentially play all the same notes. So what should have been happening here was a meta-textual... conversation about like the characters, but also the characters' fictional representations because that would have been modeled after Scream 3, which is the one set in Hollywood, where, you know, Lance Henriksen is this sort of old lascivious producer.

20:20Chris Ryan:We find out more about Sidney's mother, that this guy played by Scott Foley is the filmmaker. It's pretty, I actually like Scream 3. I do too. They're off track now though. So Scream 7. It's a reset inside of a reset. Kind of functions as Scream 1. There are scenes that are essentially recreations of Scream 1 with Sidney Prescott's daughter in this movie. We can get into the surveyories of this.

20:45Sean Fennessey:Yeah, let's talk about the details of it. You're right that the movie essentially moves from Woodsboro to Pine Grove, a very similarly leafy small-town America setting for a slasher movie. In this movie, Sidney Prescott has built a new life for herself in this town, which is in Indiana, until a new ghostface killer begins to target her daughter Tatum, named, of course, after Rose McGowan's character from the first film, forcing her to face her past to end the killings once and for all. That's the sort of logline that does recall the Halloween films, Jamie Lee Curtis's role in the Halloween films, and there is a literal reference to that from the Jasmine Savoy Brown character who returns from this film, as does the character who plays her brother, Mason Gooding.

21:24Sean Fennessey:They appeared in Five and Six. In addition to that, we have a number of other figures from the original trilogy of films, including Courtney Cox, who I thought had died in six and then had not died.

21:34Chris Ryan:She was six and five, but especially six, breaks a certain even extreme rule of plausible belief in that how many people get stabbed dozens of times only to live for the purposes of franchise continuation.

21:53Sean Fennessey:Yes, and that idea does resurface in this film as well. Something that is a little bit frustrating. If you don't want to have anything else about this movie, it's very difficult to talk about

22:01Chris Ryan:screen movies without getting into them. So you can save this till after you've seen it.

22:04Sean Fennessey:There are mysteries and there are also appearances by actors who appear in the previous films who will give a bit away about what, where this movie is going and what it's actually about. So check the film out or fast forward to my conversation with Amanda and Adam about Nirvana and then later with Matt Johnson. Okay. So this is a spoiler conversation. In addition to Neve Campbell and Courtney Cox. Matthew Lillard is back for this film. David Arquette makes a brief appearance in this film, despite the fact that those characters are believed to be dead. Isabel May joins as Neve Campbell's daughter.

22:35Sean Fennessey:And there's a whole host of new young actors.

22:38Chris Ryan:It's like a Paramount Rep Theater thing going where Michelle Randolph, who's on Landman, is in the cold open. And Isabel May, who is on 1883, is essentially the hero of the film.

22:47Sean Fennessey:Which I think is actually quite clever on the studio's part to just plug in the Taylor Sheridan young blonde players into this world. You know, they have like a feeder system now for teenage actresses. Also, you've got Anna Camp, a familiar face. You've got Ethan Embry, a familiar face coming into the film. Hitmaker? Tim Simons, our boy. I'll just say right up front, not enough to Hitmaker in this movie for my taste. Could have used literally three to four more scenes.

23:11Chris Ryan:Release the Hitmaker cut.

23:12Sean Fennessey:Yes. The big headline on this is that Kevin Williamson was brought back to the franchise essentially to save this project, which had been so troubled, as we mentioned. And Williamson was the writer of the first film. You know, a hallowed figure in the 90s turnaround of horror writing. He obviously also wrote, I Know What You Did Last Summer, which rebooted last year. And I think in a somewhat similarly messy way. Attempting to be contemporary and kind of failing to be contemporary. So just tell me off the bat, did you like this movie? Did you hate it? Are you somewhere in the middle on it?

23:49Chris Ryan:It's my least favorite Scream movie. Interesting. Okay. It brings me no joy to say that because obviously it's a franchise that I've drawn a lot of enjoyment from. I think one of the major things that I had a problem with was the filmmaking. I felt like this was an incredibly flat, incredibly self-serious, borderline looked like a TV show and that's usually your insult to lob, but it just felt like I was watching something on Paramount+. It has no life. And then that translates into a lot of the performances, especially from Nev Campbell, who was giving a very, very stoic, emotionless, despite all of the emotional things that are happening, turn as Sidney.

24:38Chris Ryan:Look, and so the same way that Halloween belongs as much to Jamie Lee Curtis as it does to Michael Myers, you can make an argument that Scream belongs as much to Neve Campbell as it does to Ghostface or Wes Craven.

24:51Sean Fennessey:This movie certainly announces that. It is insinuating that.

24:55Chris Ryan:This film played way more like a vigilante justice movie than it did like a slasher or a fun horror movie. And I don't think it found the right tone or it kind of settled on the easiest common denominator tone. Watch her go through what her character goes through in this movie. You would never know it given her reactions except for like a few brief moments. Like her daughter is essentially being stalked by a series of ghost face killers who may or may not be ghosts from her own past. Her husband is brought into harm's way. Pretty much everyone around her is either killed or almost killed. And she kind of just like rolls through it like it's another day running her coffee shop.

25:36Chris Ryan:So there was something really off about this one and it really didn't have the things that I go to screen movies for.

25:43Sean Fennessey:Yeah, so you made an interesting point there, which is that it does play more like a vigilante justice movie than it does like a horror movie. The movie's not scary. It doesn't really have any scares. It has a couple of jump kill moments, but we come to expect those in Scream movies, so there's nothing exciting. I did find that there were two, maybe three, clever kill set pieces. Sure. There's one in a bar that I thought was very good that features a tap.

26:10Chris Ryan:But as a Ghostface originalist, I like knife work and they get away from that a little bit

26:16Sean Fennessey:it is more 80s slasher kind of presentational horror where it's like let's stop the movie so the killer can do something extravagant that will get a chuckle out of the audience which is not really what these movies do and I guess I'm not totally sure why they went in this direction now there are parts of the movie that I think are classic Kevin Williamson who is also the creator of Dawson's Creek and has worked on a lot of kind of pre-fab YA over the years. And the relationships between some of the young actors, I think, is totally fine and serviceable. It's kind of like placeholder-y, but you get this tension between Isabel May's daughter character and Neve Campbell and something that I expect to see in my life, like a mother and a daughter kind of disagreeing about what they are and are not allowed to do.

27:02Sean Fennessey:And I think some of that stuff could have worked well if there was a little bit more time spent on it, but there's all of this worry in Scream movies about building out the rep company because you have to introduce all these potential suspects. So there's not enough time to forge real relationships in these movies. So then when you get to the point where like someone might die, Joel McHale, perhaps, the husband character, I was like, oh, he died. Okay. Like I didn't care. It was not that big of a deal. But he lives. But he lives, which is even worse. He gets stabbed dozens of times

27:35Chris Ryan:and loses a lot of blood and is wrapped up in a piece of plastic in the addition that they're building on the...

27:41Sean Fennessey:Also a huge Giallo move there, the sort of like wrapped around and you can see through the cellophane there's literally a perspective shot through the...

27:48Chris Ryan:Here's a way of looking at this entire thing. I don't think they wanted to make a Scream movie. I think Neve Campbell came back for like almost... I'm not supposing why she did this, but like one of the reasons why she apparently didn't go to Scream 6 or she says the reason why she wasn't in Scream 6 is because she felt like she wasn't being paid adequately or what compared to the value she brings to the franchise. Yes. Um, you know, there are actors in this film, like, uh, like Hitmaker, like Joel McHale, who are quite funny, who are not given a lot of funny material to work with or even given space to ad lib or riff or create any kind of like light to the dark.

28:30Chris Ryan:and all the teens are acting like they know they're about to die in the second act anyway so that you don't really ever get invested in Tatum, Tatum's boyfriend, Tatum's friends, anybody. Whereas like if you go back to those Scream movies, man, like you're like, I care about what happens to Sarah Michelle Gellar. I care about what happens to Rose McGowan. I care about what happens to Parker Posey. And even through four, like it's a pretty good ensemble of people having like a ton of fun and acting like teenagers. And that's just really not, they're all like, we're meat puppets, man. We're about to get stabbed to death.

29:09Sean Fennessey:There's no way to get around that though because the whole premise of the movie is around this idea of Sydney being a person for whom trouble is always found. You know, like she can't get away from the fact she's defined, even though she's working in this coffee shop in Indiana, as a target. And so everyone, any drifter who comes in, any true crime-obsessed teenage boy who comes in knows she's a knife magnet. And that's just a, it makes the story hard to tell because the only thing you can really talk about is, oh my God, you're Sidney Prescott. And so it's just, there's like a flaw in the design of the series.

29:42Sean Fennessey:And I hope Neve Campbell got paid. That's cool. And I think the movie is going to do really well because they're just slapping Neve Campbell right in the center of the poster. And they're like, Scream is back. And you're 30 years older. And so am I. And so are you. and don't we all love that feeling we had when we saw Neve Campbell get terrorized in 1996.

29:58Chris Ryan:But there are some things that I want to grow old with and there are some things I want to keep me young. And Scream is just something that I think should belong to younger people. And the pivot that this movie, this franchise made and especially the last two, where it's like way more about this kind of like, I don't really, kind of a non-existent bond that would have been between these characters over the course of these movies where now there's a lot of the time spent in Scream 7 where people sat in static positions talking about the trauma that they've experienced, but also how close they are.

30:32Chris Ryan:Whereas it's obvious that these characters are not interacting were it not in a Scream movie. And I like David Arquette too,

30:40Sean Fennessey:but we're acting like the last American Eagle was assassinated.

30:45Chris Ryan:And it's just this really weird sentimentality that comes out of that kind of Fast and Furious like One More Time, Brother, and like looking at all the ghosts on the beach. It's like, this isn't what I come to these movies for.

30:57Sean Fennessey:It's also not really what legacy horror is about, and it's different in that way. Fast and Furious is a much better comparison where it's like you're back with your old friends and they'll always love each other. You know, Friday the 13th, 7 is not about that.

31:13Chris Ryan:The whole premise is like the person you are having sex with is actually a killer. Like there isn't supposed to be trust and relationships. But not in this movie.

31:21Sean Fennessey:Sure.

31:22Chris Ryan:And, you know, I think one of the things that's been really interesting over the last three films is the steadfast presence of the twins. It's Chad and Mindy. Chad and Mindy.

31:35Sean Fennessey:Two super horror fans who are obsessed with the history of also the Woodsboro murders. Yes.

31:41Chris Ryan:And they are present in the town that Five is set in. They're friends. They're kind of like, you know.

31:47Sean Fennessey:They're Randy's, uh, Randy is their uncle. That's Randy, Jamie Kennedy's character from the first film.

31:53Chris Ryan:And then they follow, uh, Tara off to college in New York and now have hooked up interning for Gail Weathers as Gail tries to rebuild her journalism career by going back to her crime reporting roots. And these two have been stabbed dozens of times now, like, upwards of a hundred times. Mason Gooding's character

32:11Sean Fennessey:has been annihilated. I can't believe he's walking.

32:15Chris Ryan:where he is, like, stretched out as two ghost faces stab him, right?

32:19Sean Fennessey:All through the stomach for some reason, never in the heart.

32:22Chris Ryan:And I always laugh when we do this, when we're just like, that's against the rules. But it's the combination of the extreme trauma that they've experienced, how maudlin most people in this movie are, and they yet still are trying to do the glib, winking.

32:43Sean Fennessey:Yeah, Randy. They're Randy. They're the Randy surrogate. You kind of like chit chat. Here's how this world works.

32:48Chris Ryan:Here's what a requel is. That really like, it just shatters. It shatters it for me. It does. Except I'm like, if you guys want, just make them the stars of the movie.

32:57Sean Fennessey:That's what I was going to say. I like them and I think they're fun. And I think the only time the movie has fun is when they're like nattering at each other. And for a movie that, as you say, is not very funny, I don't know that I needed more of them. They felt very tacked on. The idea of like them teaming up with Gale is just like very overworked in my opinion. but I think they're both charming. I think they're both fun to watch on screen.

33:18Chris Ryan:They're the only two people having fun in this movie. But if that's the case, just make that the movie because you can't also have them, they would just be physically deformed at this point and also like, I'm never going near a knife ever again in my life, right? Like it's sort of like a silliness to it that I think kind of takes me out of the movie.

33:39Sean Fennessey:I totally agree with you. One of the components of the movie that is somewhat similar to, as I said, I Know What You Did last summer, reboot last year, is the idea of true crime obsession and in this movie's case, what AI and deep fakes can do to horror movie storytelling. Sure. And I thought that, I thought the first stroke of Matthew Lillard's reveal on a phone call was pretty effective in the movie. Now, I knew it was coming because I knew Matthew Lillard was in this movie and he's been doing press and been getting quoted around. I wish they hadn't done that. I wish it would have been a surprise.

34:14Sean Fennessey:If it had been a surprise, I think it would have been even more effective. But this idea of a character who we definitely thought was dead could be back. Would be hard to accept, but was exciting in a way. And then the movie attempting to use the impossibility of that to show you like maybe the nefariousness of deepfakes or AI. But it kind of shows it to us and it has some characters be like, fuck that shit, man. But it doesn't really follow through on anything kind of thematically or intellectually. And so it's just a dangling thread.

34:46Chris Ryan:A straight up question. Did I miss something? It's like Tatum's boyfriend, Ben, has been creating these AI videos of Stu Mocker, Matthew Lillard's character, FaceTiming Sydney and harassing her. And Tatum figures this out. She sees Ben's laptop open and he's been making these videos. Is he just trying to see if he could do it?

35:08Sean Fennessey:No, my impression was that he was not responsible for sending those videos, that the two killers are the ones who sent the videos, but that when he heard that Stu Mocker was alive, he was like, and he heard the possibility of could it be deep fakes? He, because he's interested in computer science and is going to be, you know, where is he going, Stanford to study? They talked about this. Right. He was like experimenting himself to see if it could be done.

35:31Chris Ryan:Okay.

35:32Sean Fennessey:But he is, as far as I could tell, and maybe I'm wrong about this, but as far as I could tell, he wasn't responsible for sending those videos. He was just kind of hanging out and also left his laptop open in his truck for some reason.

35:41Chris Ryan:Well, because the movie is kind of like tonally flat, it doesn't feel the way lots of recut or rewritten movies would usually feel. Like that will usually suggest a massive tonal shift. This is pretty consistent in its tone. I'll give it that. But it does feel like there are plot lines that they were like, no, we can't. We got to stop doing this. And whether or not this guy Ben was supposed to be Billy Loomis reincarnated for Tatum, who was the stand-in for her mother, and they reenact Billy coming to her window and everything like that happens in the first film. I was like, oh, I wonder if they just pulled the plug on this.

36:19Sean Fennessey:My read on it was that it was always an intentional red herring. and then that in fact the two people who were revealed as killers who we can talk about now in an utterly bizarre choice are Ethan Embry's character who plays an aide at a local mental facility.

36:36Chris Ryan:Who's also used to work for Google.

36:37Sean Fennessey:Who used to be a security officer for Google apparently and it has an interest in AI. And Anna Camp who plays Sidney Prescott's neighbor and it turns out is a person who is obsessed by her and read her memoir and used it as a launch pad for her own killing spree.

36:56Chris Ryan:Really, but first to kill her abusive husband. But then because Sydney wasn't in New York in Scream 6, essentially, took that as like a betrayal of what Sydney's ethos is and went on to start killing people in Pine Grove in order to reactivate Sydney as a character in her life.

37:17Sean Fennessey:Yes, as the real final girl.

37:18Chris Ryan:This also, just for, as a note, marks like I think three or four shots that this movie takes at Scream 6 which made me like enormously defensive of Scream 6 that I thought was like kind of dirty work and weird to do that. It's like for a movie, for a franchise that is so at pains to be like thank you to all the people who have made this what it is to like piss all over something because Melissa Barrera spoke her mind. I think that's what I totally agree.

37:47Sean Fennessey:I think that's exactly what it was too. It was a very pointed, like, see, this is the real star of these movies. And I didn't enjoy that. Now, I do think that this movie commits an extremely similar sin to number six, which is when Anna Camp shows up in the movie. I'm like, Anna Camp is way too famous to not be the killer. Way too famous. Just like with Dermot Mulroney. I'm like, why is Dermot Mulroney playing a cop with nothing to do? Yes. Like, they can't keep doing that. It's somewhat similar for Ethan Embry, but we're 90s kids who are familiar with Ethan Embry being a borderline movie star.

38:17Chris Ryan:Yeah, I was like, oh, that's cool. they're just Ethan Embry happens to be in this film. I thought it was weird that he was on the poster. And I was like, I guess I doubt it's Mark Consuelos. And it doesn't seem like it's Tim. So I suppose like just by deduction, now that you've killed all these people, although they've started messing around with like, you thought I was dead, but I was actually faking my own death so that I could then join my father in the killing spree.

38:38Sean Fennessey:Yeah.

38:39Chris Ryan:Here's the problem with screen trilogies. There's really only two films worth of story. The first film, there is somebody close to Sidney or whoever is the killer. So in Scream 5, it's Jack Quaid's character. In Scream 1, it's Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard. Then Scream 2 is the revenge of that character's friends, family, whoever. Yes. You took this person away from me. In Scream 6, that's what sort of happens with, well, I mean, I guess in Scream 2, it's Oliphant is obsessed with it and then Laurie Metcalf is Billy Loomis' mom. Okay. I love like trying to make sense of these. Scream 3, the reason Scream 3 works for me is because Scream 3 is not about Ghostface.

39:23Chris Ryan:It's about how would you tell this story? It's about the stab movies. It's about all this stuff. This should be, Scream 6 did this where it was like Dermot Mulroney and his daughter were Jack Quaid's...

39:37Sean Fennessey:Father and sister. And also the other brother. Right.

39:39Chris Ryan:And so, what's Scream 7 about? Like, Like, they almost need to make these sets of two.

39:47Sean Fennessey:It's why maybe even more so than the previous films, this movie is a giallo, because you'll get to the end of a giallo sometimes and be like, it's actually that guy who's down the hall in minute 38. And you're like, who the fuck is that guy? And I like that in giallos, because they're so grisly.

40:02Chris Ryan:That was like, for me, for some reason, like, then you need a more contained space. Like, it needs to be a little bit more Agatha Christie, where it's like, even in Hunt for October, you're like, oh, it's that guy? Yeah. In this, you're like, why is she doing this?

40:16Sean Fennessey:She has to explain so much in that final scene, so much of her motivation, that it is on the tip of camp. Pardon the pun there. It's really ridiculous. And she's playing it kind of funny. I really like Anna Camp. I think she's a really good actress. I think she's a really funny actress. And she's definitely going for crazy Pilates mom.

40:36Chris Ryan:Everything she does in that last scene is everything the rest of the film is missing. It doesn't have. That's exactly right. It's kind of like what I like about Four, which I know you don't like Four.

40:45Sean Fennessey:Yes, the Amber Roberts one, yeah.

40:47Chris Ryan:Is Mikey Madison and the Culkin brother kind of, and that vibe of that weird unhinged energy that that movie has. And you know, that film is trying to do a lot with like catching up with smartphones, which was always going to be a difficult element.

41:02Sean Fennessey:This is the issue is a lot of these movies, part of what's so great about One, to a lesser extent, Two and Three, but also in Two and Three, is those are movies about movies. The Randy character is this kind of surrogate explainer. Yeah. It's a video store movie. Quentin Tarantino in the video store

41:18Chris Ryan:telling you what the rules are.

41:19Sean Fennessey:They're watching Halloween while the movie is happening. In two, it's film class and it's all these references to sequels and learning about them. In three, it's we're actually making a movie and we're in Hollywood and here's how it works. I think they're as effective in that order personally. I think it's Scream, Scream 2, Scream 3. Some people think 3 is better than 2. Whatever. We can disagree. After that, it's all kind of like people who are not as obsessed with movies as they are being in true crime stories. Yes.

41:54Chris Ryan:And Reddit and pods. It becomes the internet.

41:57Sean Fennessey:It becomes smartphones. It becomes true crime documentary. It becomes podcasts. That stuff's just not as interesting to me.

42:04Chris Ryan:Kind of interesting. I think one thing that would have been, and you know, this gets referenced a bunch in five at the Jenna Ortega cold open, which also sort of introduces the idea of someone getting stabbed a lot and living is Jenna Ortega is talking about elevated horror. And there's like this conversation with ghost face about like whether or not elevated horror movies like that is probably where, and maybe that's sort of what five and six, maybe that's what radio silence were sort of thinking is like, what we now have to lampoon or talk about is the need for horror movie characters to be self-aware about how traumatic what they're experiencing is yes no i think i think that's overt and i think

42:43Sean Fennessey:the the idea of the mindy character is very much like explaining how things changed and here how here's how horror movies work now they still love movies but the movie is still stuck on cell phone technology like the dylan manette character like everything being like just a a near miss with like your mom gets killed and you could have avoided it but because the technology didn't work as well and it just doesn't it doesn't hit as hard and this movie in particular the the ai stuff is like it's not insidious but it's not interesting and so it's just kind of nothing but i think also like

43:16Chris Ryan:in com in concert with if you go back and watch scream one it looks like the conformist compared to this. I know. Well, Kevin Williamson

43:24Sean Fennessey:is just not a great filmmaker.

43:25Chris Ryan:Wide screen, beautiful, like Wes Craven shooting these scenes with such incredible awareness of space. And Kevin Williamson, I think, was like, yeah, we're going to put the camera there. They're going to have this conversation. It's shot like an episode of television in a lot of ways.

43:40Sean Fennessey:Yeah. There's a book that came out last year by Clark Collis called Screaming and Conjuring the Resurrection and Unstoppable Rise of Modern Horror. And it's basically a compendium, a pocket history really of horror movies from the 90s through today. And there's a big chunk of time in the beginning of the book spent on the Scream franchise and the original Scream movie. And a lot of the choices that Craven made and the ways in which even the cast were like, I don't know about this, but he's like, I've been making horror movies for 25 years, trust me. And how he had to navigate the Weinsteins and he had to navigate the script and the sensitivities of the actors who were involved in the movie.

44:14Sean Fennessey:And then I believe in that movie, they talk about basically everyone going to a friends and family cast screening of the movie. And they're like, holy fucking shit. Like, Wes did it and he was right. And I thought of that moment in the book when I was watching this movie and there is a, as has become standard, montage of the town shutting down and going into a kind of quarantine set to Nick Cave's Red Right Hand, which to me is like one of the more iconic recent horror movie sequences in the Wes Craven film. Sure. Where it's like end of the first act, there's a killer that that killer has just not just killed a teenager but it's town before sundown yeah and i remember being in the movie theater at 13 years old and having chills at that moment i'd never heard that song before i'd never seen horror movie making that felt that um elegant right and we overrate these things because we saw them when we were younger we also

45:07Chris Ryan:overrate them because not even overrate them but i think the level of i mean if we saw another average slasher that was shot like a TV show that was just coming out on a Friday. We probably wouldn't be talking about it 30 minutes into it. But Scream's Great Magic Trick was this idea that in the sequels, there is also a series of films called Stab that people are going nuts for and that Sidney has become this iconic figure whose life has been documented by these actresses and she's played by Tori spelling and all this stuff. And even when you watch the cold open for two, which is the Jada Pinkett Smith, Omar Epps ones, and everybody's going so crazy at the movie theory, even when I was rewatching two the other day, I also was getting hyped up where I was like, that's right motherfucker to scream.

46:01Chris Ryan:And I was like, I'm 48. Why am I doing this? But I've been watching these movies for such a long time that its own, its echo chamber of enthusiasm has worked for decades.

46:11Sean Fennessey:It's true. we didn't talk about the cold open of this movie too much where Jimmy Tatro and who's the actress

46:17Chris Ryan:Michelle Randolph

46:18Sean Fennessey:Michelle Randolph from Wayman I'm not familiar with that show but you are

46:22Chris Ryan:yeah she does great work she's a TCU cheerleader and daughter of Billy Bob Thornton and Ali Larder

46:28Sean Fennessey:interesting great genes that sequence where those two characters are visiting a I couldn't tell is it actually Stu Mocker's house that has been refashioned Stu Mocker's house

46:39Chris Ryan:has become an experiential Airbnb be where you go in and it's like an animatronic ghost face is like, I'm going to get you. And there's still body tape on the ground.

46:48Sean Fennessey:The problem with that sequence is very similar to a lot of the most recent Scream movies. It's just like, these people are going to die. And the another ingenious act of Scream is you would have no idea that Drew Barrymore would ever die in the opening scene of the original film. It was a surprise. And we're no longer in surprise territory. There's nothing that a movie that has seven films into its franchise can do about that. But we're hard on the things that we love.

47:10Chris Ryan:Well, I still think 4 is my favorite cold open, which is the Russian nesting doll of girls watching stab movies and then getting killed.

47:19Sean Fennessey:The cold open of Scream 4 is very fun. You haven't seen Nirvana the Band, the show, the movie? It's to my great chagrin.

47:26Chris Ryan:Do you have any relationship to those guys? You know about those movies? No, I don't know about this series that they're doing. I can't wait. I've really been enjoying Matt's interviews that I've been seeing online. Huge BlackBerry fan, so I'm excited to check it out.

47:40Sean Fennessey:This episode is brought to you by Volkswagen. There is such a thing as becoming too comfortable in your day-to-day, but our favorite films, with stories that make us change the way we think, they weren't made by people content to just sit back and watch the world pass by. This is your sign that you shouldn't either. From us, from VW, and the other drivers out there, grab the wheel. Do what you love, even if it means taking the road less traveled. Learn more at VW.com. Anything else you're watching out there that you want to recommend?

48:08Chris Ryan:I would just heartily recommend industry to any big picture watcher just because I think Mickey Down and Conroy K who are the creators and often times directors of the show are doing some real cinematic shit this season and this concludes on Sunday so it's really cool

48:26Sean Fennessey:this new season is turning into and or season 2 for me where I'm like bobbing and weaving to avoid any information about it and I'll see it next year I'm sure hopefully no I will see it I'll see it when I go on spring break with my family are you going on spring break?

48:38Chris Ryan:Yeah, with my family. It's a fun show to watch with the fam, for sure.

48:42Sean Fennessey:You think my five-year-old's going to be into it? Probably not.

48:45Chris Ryan:If your daughter became like a big Harper stan, I think you'd have a lot of problems.

48:50Sean Fennessey:Yeah, we'll see. She's very independent-minded, as you know.

48:52Chris Ryan:I know, man. She was directing me when I was reading the Star Wars book to her. She was just like, read that and read that and then don't read this, but read that. Yeah, welcome to my life.

49:00Sean Fennessey:All right, CR, thank you very much. Let's go now to my conversation with Amanda Dobbins and Adam Naiman.

49:10Sean Fennessey:Okay. Joined by one special guest and one co-host. Amanda's here and Adam Naiman is here making his Netflix debut. Hello.

49:19Matt Johnson:Well, this is going to be on Netflix. That's great. I love that.

49:25Sean Fennessey:I love that. You know, you're part of the Borg now, my friend. I'm very sorry, but this is how it works. No, I love it. Hi, Netflix.

49:36Matt Johnson:We have Netflix in Canada. You know, in both languages. Yeah. And I do think that this is on the Netflix in Canada. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Not all of them. So congratulations, Canada. This is great. I'm going to tell all my friends to watch their Netflix. Can't wait. Yeah, I'm good.

49:58Sean Fennessey:You're here because we are going to be talking about a Canadian product. Yes. That is called Nirvana, the band, the show, the movie, which is a very normal name for a movie for a very normal movie we've all seen this movie I've been talking about this movie for six months Adam I think you've been talking to me about this movie for over a year yeah I think

50:20Matt Johnson:I like to check in or make sure you check in on what's happening in Toronto and often you're like what's happening in Toronto and I say not much and then sometimes things happen like this film which carries a lot of local pride and the long history of our relationships, our national cinema's relationship to the United States, which is pretty one-sided. So it's interesting to see if and when and how and to what degree things cross over. And I'm sure you, you know, I know you talked to Matt, who's just so shy, and he has no thoughts to share about anything. He needs to really work on his interview technique.

51:03Matt Johnson:You know, if only the guy could do some interviews and talk about what he does, there'd be a real chance of him and his collaborators breaking through, you know?

51:13Sean Fennessey:I've never seen a person will a film to success by sheer force of their quality of podcast interview, but Matt is trying to do that. So, you know, all three of us have had a chance to see the movie, as I mentioned. And Adam, I think you'll be very helpful in setting some of the context around the movie. But I thought it was just an absolute marvel of a movie comedy. And Amanda, I was so excited when you told me last week that you just you went out to go see it of your own volition. You were like, I checked out Nirvana.

51:42Matt Johnson:Yeah, I was influenced by you and by Adam and by the will of Matt Johnson and the way it makes its way across the Internet and the different Internet's that we're all on. Yeah, I just went to the Lamley on a Friday afternoon and started laughing. and I had the experience that I haven't had a long time in the theaters where I was laughing at things and then random strangers were also laughing and then the laughing kind of compounded. It was genuinely very, very funny. I have a lot of questions for you about what Matt Johnson said to you during the interview. Okay. Because I wasn't there and there is a real like, how did they do this element to the movie?

52:25Matt Johnson:But, you know, Adam, you highlighted that this is a Canadian export and a major film of significance to your community. I did have... There are 30 million of us, you know, Amanda. Well, I just wanted to say that I, watching this film, having quite literally never been to Canada, which I don't know how that's happened, did feel like I was also part of the community. And I didn't get all of the Canada references probably. And if you want to do a TED Talk on that, I'm excited to listen. But there was something about watching this movie. And I think some of it is, it's a great buddy comedy. And I think the sense of humor, and it is very founded in pop culture references, both of 2008 and now.

53:19Matt Johnson:So the language was familiar to me, but there was a real just like one of us, one of us vibe to watching these guys make this happen on a on a big screen and and feeling like. Knowing what we would want to see. And also, I just I felt included. I was like, oh, these are these are my buds. This is part of like I'm a part of this movement, even though I'm fairly new to it. And once again, I'm not Canadian. So. So, great energy. Amanda, can I ask? It's a Canadian to an honorary Canadian. Yes. Very important question. How much longer was the line in the men's washroom at the Nirvana screening? I was the...

54:01Matt Johnson:Ratio was like 95. I was the only woman in the screening. That's okay.

54:07Sean Fennessey:You know, it's funny that you saw it at the Lambly because I saw it a second time at the Lambly in Glendale as well. And there were quite a few women in there. And it was the exact same thing that you described. Everyone was laughing. And we used to do this as a community. There have been a couple, you know, The Naked Gun, I think, was a recent example where, like, people went to the movies and they laughed. And that was a unique experience for us. But this movie does tap into a very specific experiential quality of movie going that has as much in common, I think, with maybe when everyone saw The Hangover together in 2008, which is referenced in this film, as seeing a jackass movie in theaters.

54:39Sean Fennessey:And that's sort of how did they do this quality and this sense of the real and the metafictional and the fictional all meeting. I'll just very quickly set up the movie, Adam, before you give us both your insights into it and kind of the broader context that exists inside of. But as I said, directed by Matt Johnson, screenplay by Matt and Jay McCarroll, his co-star and co-conspirator in this project. They've worked with a very small team for a number of years on what was first a web series and then was a television series and is now a feature film. Matt has directed a handful of other features, including 2023's BlackBerry.

55:14Sean Fennessey:He was on the show for that. Easily one of my five favorite conversations in the history of the show. And he is a great showman and a great character. He's created a great character in the world. And he and Jay together are great characters operating off of each other. and even though people may not have seen the web series or the television series or maybe they didn't see the dirties or Blackberry or Operation Avalanche or any of the other things that he has done over the years it took me 30 seconds to know exactly what the movie was doing and to find a way to love it and that is an amazing magic trick and something that I just kind of want to get off my chest before anybody who is listening to this and thinking like should I see this?

55:54Sean Fennessey:Can I see this? Am I going to understand it with all this lore? Like Adam as somebody who's you know known Matt for a while and is much more versed in the history of this project. You know, how do you how would you set it up and what did you think of it?

56:05Matt Johnson:Well, there's a big, big picture, which is that the long history of filmmaking in Toronto is always people running around without permission. And because I can feel that Netflix subscribers canceling as I say this, I won't do a long history of filmmaking in Toronto. But the short version is that you have movies like Nobody Waved Goodbye or Going Down the road, which are shot kind of illegally and on the cheap and about what an alienating city Toronto is. Like most of Canada hates Toronto. That's the job. So they're like watching movies about what a crappy place it is to be. That's the plot of going down the road.

56:38Matt Johnson:And Matt is not unaware of this. I think he's very aware of this. He talks a very good game, seeming unaware of everything. And he makes it seem based on his references that he's completely enthralled to Hollywood. But if you watch his movies from the beginning, like The Dirties, it's an ambivalent relationship to American film and a really funny idea about Canadian success. So, I mean, the Rivoli, which is the nightclub in the film, is a real nightclub in Toronto and playing it means nothing. I mean, the great joke of the show is that in 20 years, they haven't played the Rivoli. You would almost have to like be trying to not, you know, the Rivoli is a symbol of success that's really disproportionately big to them and recognizably small to anyone who lives here.

57:20Matt Johnson:And also, if you live in toronto you're very used to seeing the city play other places like if the cn if the cn tower shows up it's an editing mistake or like it's set here you know so this whole idea of local iconography is important to a lot of toronto filmmakers and nirvana like it doesn't i don't think it exoticizes toronto but it doesn't hide it it turns the cnt the cn tower into a prop and like the closest canada is going to ever get to a mission impossible scene but it's like also a jackass scene. They've fused Mission Impossible and jackass in a way that I've always thought made sense.

57:57Matt Johnson:The idea of stunt takes on a triple meaning in the work. But this is like the third iteration of the Matt and Jay thing. And the way I read the film, I've written about it a little bit, is I find it a very interesting movie about getting older because they are literally chasing their 20-year-old selves. And I think chasing the freedom and to some extent the irresponsibility of not doing this professionally. And they put an awful lot of talent and resource to try and erase any progress they've made. Like Nirvana is about not making progress and having to escape that progress and disguise it by replicating the camera types and shooting style and then recreating Toronto in the image of 2008 and trying to fit into their old clothes and Matt just wears the same hat.

58:44Matt Johnson:There's a meaning there. It's just like a lot of things that are kind of meaningful and about something. Superficially, it's very stupid. and the stupidity is like expertly done. The highest compliment I can pay to this movie is if someone watches it and said, those guys seem really stupid, I would be like, absolutely. It does seem that way.

59:00Sean Fennessey:It's part of the design of it for sure. I think there's also something in like the technical approach that they take to it where you've got a lot of things that feel very 2008 culturally, like into camera, fourth wall breaking, or like the whiteboard idea generation format of the series and the movie, where they're constantly like flipping down a whiteboard to write down one of Matt's schemes or the black and white flashbacks with the slowed down audio that are all these like callbacks to early YouTube culture and early like handmade stuff that is in the lineage of what you're talking about with the Canadian stuff.

59:37Sean Fennessey:Plus, the movie I think is kind of, I'll speak for myself, appropriately as you're like in your early 40s and you're looking back at your longtime friendships and the ways in which they change and the ways in which they don't change and the ways in which you become annoyed with your friends, but you're like, I will never leave this person. And it's a pretty soulful movie. I thought about that, even though it is very silly and very kind of stupid at times. It felt very genuine and very sincere while also being like an episode of Scooby-Doo. And I think that that's great. It felt very unshackled by like expectations or irony or, you know, a lot of stuff that I think kind of gets in the way of a lot of American comedies, a lot of American movies about friendship.

1:00:20Sean Fennessey:It was just these guys kind of getting up to trouble at scale. And I don't know, it was very invigorating for me as a movie watcher. I really was moved by it.

1:00:29Matt Johnson:Yeah, I was surprised by the scale as well because it does, because of the format and using the older footage. And there is two guys in a shitty apartment with some orbits, you know, quality to this. And like, what mischief can we get up to? And that is the major appeal. And then they are suddenly on top of the CN Tower, which, Adam, I do know what that is, even though I've, you know, never been. And it's not prominently featured in most media made in Toronto. So it. Can you name another? Can you name another building in Toronto? Yeah, of course. The Rivoli. The Rivoli. And then Drake's house.

1:01:14Matt Johnson:Drake has three. Yeah, that's three. But I've seen a lot of Architectural Digest features on that one.

1:01:21Sean Fennessey:You've also seen it in this film. I know. Well, yeah.

1:01:24Matt Johnson:But so it has this like these dueling, you know, it feels very small and intimate. And then it is also just suddenly when they're the scene of the security entrance to the CN town. yes i just a mix of i can't believe this is happening and also he needs to cut a hole in his pants like the explanation and is so weird and funny and also as you know the jackass of it all is like very apparent um a magical chemistry i really i really enjoyed it but it is like the

1:02:00Sean Fennessey:big and the little simultaneously that make it so exciting yeah i totally agree they when they

1:02:05Matt Johnson:made operation avalanche famously they like kind of broke into nasa and to like not just the characters but the filmmakers there's always a kind of one-to-one ratio between like what the characters get away with and their crew gets away with and what the actual actors and crew get away with because there's really no distance between them i think the difference now is in the past they would have to lie and prevaricate and cheat to get into these places and now they can do that and then cgi themselves doing something impossible like that's that's putting the money on screen while still hiding it a little bit.

1:02:37Matt Johnson:But I mean, in Operation Avalanche, the thing I think of as a Canadian viewer, I've written about this before when that movie came out, he doesn't just break into NASA. I mean, he films himself Matt at one point as Matt Johnson shaking hands with Stanley Kubrick, which is not just a good joke about Kubrick faking the moon landing. That's really forward thing for a Canadian filmmaker to do. We have this kind of cinematic inferiority complex here where it's like we either sneak into the american pipeline or we assume that americans don't care a couple of years ago you know they did a list of the best canadian films of all time and because they were worried people wouldn't read it they put like titanic on it because technically james cameron is from here you know i mean i mean denise villeneuve is not a canadian filmmaker anymore either so you have you you know it there's a lot of cultural baggage that we're talking about here but within toronto the stuff you're talking about they were doing this stuff forever, but the CN Tower represents the leveling up of where they're trying to break into these days.

1:03:36Matt Johnson:You know, it's a wonderful metaphor for the vertical integration of their project. It's like, well, at this point, it's not enough to just like, you know, sneak into some all weekly office, you know, they got to breach the CN Tower. Yeah.

1:03:51Sean Fennessey:I think the whole thing is an escalation in so many ways. I am. I think there's also something really really clever about the time travel quality of the story these two guys who are trying to play a show are always hatching schemes to attempt to get booked at the rivoli and by some magical orbits infused circumstance they both travel back in time to 2008 and that allows them to explore how our social mores have changed over that time and like what we would what we would accept and not accept there's like a lot of great really obvious but very clever visual sight gags that feature figures who are no longer welcome in acceptable society these days.

1:04:32Sean Fennessey:The hangover gag in particular is kind of amazing because it's a reminder that 2008 is actually not that far away. And that joke and that being the inciting incident for Matt's character to have the dawning realization is just like, I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard in a movie.

1:04:49Matt Johnson:I'm torn because, and I've talked to Matt about this, I'm not going to say who it was, but there's a well-known Canadian media personality who was at a screening of The Hangover in 2008 for real, which I was at because I reviewed that for one of those alt-weeklies where you see the boxes turned over in the movies. They identify 2008 by the fact that there's an overturned Now magazine box. And I used to write for the other Toronto alt-weekly. I mean, there was an early screening of The Hangover where that joke that you're referring to was laughed at for about five straight minutes in real time, by a character, by a media figure who's like a paragon of progressive virtue in Canada.

1:05:27Matt Johnson:And at the time I was like, give me a break. And seeing that joke in the movie, I had to ask myself, I was like, were they at that screening? Was Matt Johnson or the producer at that same screening because it's so specific? The way they use 2008 to tell jokes about that period and this one, I'm going to levy a little criticism here, analysis, without actually saying the joke themselves. It's very slippery. They kind of let the period tell the joke. They still want to tell the joke. They're just letting the period tell it. But it's very funny.

1:05:59Sean Fennessey:You know, so when I talked to Matt, I didn't ask him as many questions. And I know you spoke to him too. And I thought you guys had a great interview. And I used some of the things that you spoke about in it. But when I spoke to him, I didn't ask him like, how'd you get up in the CN Tower? It wasn't really about, I wasn't, I was more interested in what I think Adam is describing, which is the kind of edgelord quality that is infused in the Nirvana project, where they're sort of like, kind of if you look at the show too in the past always kind of nosing up to the the edge of what is going to be socially comfortable and matt i thought was very insightful about that and like why he explores it and why he's interested in it and why it's almost like this act of re-examining what they made 20 years ago by making a movie about going back 20 years ago but they can use the other cultural artifacts that are exposed in the movie to show like maybe this is why what i did back then was kind of like that because this is kind of what comedy was or this is what to some people this was a good idea again a very kind of labyrinthine psychological concept inside of a dopey movie right about time travel um that i think is really really successful the other thing that is sort of meta textual in that way that i love is that you know jay mccarroll who this is really his movie he's really the star of this movie in many ways um he is a musician in real life.

1:07:16Sean Fennessey:He's a composer. He's written film scores. He's worked with Matt for years on film scores and he's a pop musician too. And he has managed to retrofit music that he wrote in the past to show how he could be a pop star in this alternate reality that is portrayed in the movie. And they use one of the songs that he wrote in 2014. And now I just looked at that song on Spotify and it has like 10 million streams. And I'm like, I wonder how that happened. The whole thing is such a clever Jenga tower of reconstruction of their lives. His fake Weekend song.

1:07:48Matt Johnson:I love that Jay writes a song that would have like, you know, he like beat the Weekend to the punch by like three years for that kind of production. I mean, Jay, Matt thinks that the movie is not, he agrees with you, not just that it's about Jay, but I mean that Jay's the main character and that Jay's dilemma is being yoked to this person who cannot shut off.

1:08:09Chris Ryan:Right.

1:08:09Matt Johnson:You know? What must that be like for you? yeah which one of you is the map and which one of you is the come on is the jay but but i should say for the people who are you know learning about these small canadian movies through you know netflix uh the dirties i don't know if you guys have watched it or watched it recently i've seen it yeah it's a very troubling movie because it's really close to some of the stuff that sean's talking about i mean it's close to it in a way where it's not mediated by cuteness or by nostalgia or by jokes. I mean, it's really about an aggressive strain in male cinephilia that's not attractive and that can manifest in incredibly ugly ways.

1:08:49Matt Johnson:And I say that's a compliment to the movie. The highest compliment I can pay to it is even after 10 years of Matt's stuff, you know, here in Toronto. I watched The Dirties last fall at U of T. He came into the screening of it and I was watching and I was going, it's quite a frightening movie. I mean, it's good and it's funny, but it's not nice, you know? And it's very interesting to consider with each iteration of Nirvana, the band, the show, as they're getting more self-reflexive, is it also kind of gentrifying themselves too? Because they're recreating their early twenties and this cheap jack way of doing it with more and more resource.

1:09:22Matt Johnson:And that'll probably drive them crazy to have people say that because I think by a lot of standards, this is still a small movie. And when you're opening in the U S against, you know, project hail Mary or something, this movie is like something you hold up on a toothpick but it's not the same thing as when they were truly broke making this show but man for people in toronto that show was legitimately a big deal and now it's not available on any streaming service i know it sounds like that's going to change um based on my conversation with that yeah i'm sure it will but people but i but my my social media feed in the last three weeks it's all clips from the show i know and i promise you i'm not looking for them i've seen this already.

1:10:02Matt Johnson:I don't need to see it again, but it's there.

1:10:04Sean Fennessey:There's even like a wonderful thing in the movie where if you haven't seen the show, it doesn't really matter. But there's a sequence when they go back into the past and they go to encounter their younger selves or they don't purposefully encounter them, but they go back to that apartment to get something that they need. And it's a box of Orbitz. Yes, a box of Orbitz, which is super powerful. And they're hiding in their own closet at the time. And through the closet, you can hear them doing bits from episodes of the show, you know like the video game song that Jay sings which is like iconic on the show but just to give you like 20 seconds of that in the movie is fan service but it's also like a reflection of this whole arc of creativity that they had together um I think all that stuff is really wonderful but what you're saying is really interesting too which is like Matt now I heard a rumor about a gig that Matt interviewed for 18 months ago and I was like wow that would be quite an elevation he didn't actually get that job and I don't even know if it was really true I didn't ask him but he's he just made a movie about Anthony Bourdain for A24 and now the next movie he's making is an adaptation of Magic the Gathering the card game that is that is he's now really on the kind of step ladder of Hollywood ascension those are two big steps and they're very different they're going to be very different I presume from what he has done previously so we did talk a bit about that but I'm so interested in his where he goes Do you feel betrayed by that, Adam?

1:11:29Matt Johnson:No, but I mean, it's business as usual, right? I mean, the Canadian Film Center was founded by Norman Jewison. And Norman Jewison won an Academy Award for Best Picture for In the Heat of the Night, which has nothing to do with Canada. It's about American race relations. The filmmakers who've stayed close to home have done so either out of excessive pride or practicality or some combination thereof. I'm contractually mandated to mention David Cronenberg. you know, who's a filmmaker who made it work, even with international money, making movies here. But all these Canadian filmmakers get tempted towards Hollywood.

1:12:04Matt Johnson:Some of them like it, you know, some of them don't. And I think Johnson is someone who, with Blackberry, that's the movie where this all seemed possible. I have a standard for certain kinds of movies where I'm like, what does a normal person think of them? And our definitions for normal people might change, but you know, I know a lot of abnormal people and I also know a lot of normal people. I have a pretty normal life outside of my movie writing. And I would ask normal people, like friends, parents, you know, or other moms or dads in the playground, be like, you guys watch Blackberry? Like, oh yeah, I saw that.

1:12:34Matt Johnson:And that's because the Matt Johnson-ness of that movie is compartmentalized into Matt's own performance, which has less than nothing to do with the story of Blackberry. But because there's a cipher in that company, no, the whole story of the way they They make movies and the Blackberry is a startup. Those two things are allegories for each other. But like Jay Baruchel was playing a kind of real person. And Glenn Howerton, who is dead frigging brilliant in that movie, is playing a version of Jim Balsillie. Matt's just there because that's what he does. And it's funny. He can't do that with Anthony Bourdain.

1:13:08Matt Johnson:You know, he can't do that with a prestige drama or something. So that's what I'm wondering is how will we let go or how will he let go? Like, is there going to be a Matt Johnson, Magic the Gathering character? I know, but another project he's working on, which I won't talk about, which also has this possibility for sort of, you know, bridging these things. This is what I wonder, because I can't think of too many other Canadian filmmakers who are as visible as he is in the work. I can't think of too many filmmakers, period.

1:13:35Sean Fennessey:Yes.

1:13:36Matt Johnson:God forbid. Like, who are we talking about? Are we talking about Jerry Lewis? You know? I mean, it's like quite, it's quite, it's really, it's really essential to the work. And I wonder at a certain point if that's going to bump up against some practical thing of like, you can't do this anymore.

1:13:50Sean Fennessey:Yeah. Or you do it in perpetuity. No, it's like Woody Allen or like Melvin Van Peebles. Like there's like a very short list of people who are like, the way that they look and communicate organizes and informs what the movie is. And a lot of tours don't have that. I'm so interested in Tony. I'm fascinated. And, you know, it sounds like that was a complicated movie in some ways. and he did talk about it a little bit, but just for him to not be in the movie, representing his point of view and his energy is different. But, you know, I'm just so happy that people are seeing this movie and that they like it and that it is, you know, you've given us this wonderful gift.

1:14:29Sean Fennessey:Once again, Canada has blessed American movie audiences. We salute Canada. We will annex you soon, but otherwise we salute you.

1:14:38Matt Johnson:Yeah, we've been feeling really great about the relationship lately. The Olympics were really the chair. Yeah, I was going to say. You guys watch that? You've not lived until you've been waiting like on a pool deck while your kid is doing swimming lessons and 18 moms and dads are watching the hockey game on their phone and just collectively you just hear, fuck! It was great. It was the exact opposite of my household, I got to tell you. It was 7.53 in the morning. We needed that. but uh yeah i i think it's i'm always interested in how these things that wear their torontonian on their sleeve get received and this seems to be a successful incursion you know this this is like a backdoor entry into to taking over some version of the the hollywood film cultural uh establishment

1:15:27Sean Fennessey:yeah and i mean designed to be an instant cult classic right like it's it's not gonna make a hundred million dollars or anything.

1:15:33Matt Johnson:But even as I was just looking around today of where it's showing and it is, you know, at my favorite theaters here in Los Angeles, but also like the Music Box in Chicago and the Coolidge in Boston and all of these like the other like great local community like vibes theaters across the U.S. where we've done events and where, you know, it's like what real ones know to go see what's at that. So it is definitely, I mean, it's very, very highly rated on Letterboxd. Oh, yeah. it's found its people. Yeah. Hypothetical Toronto walking tour with you guys if you ever deign to visit here. You know, I'll show you all the spots.

1:16:09Matt Johnson:I'll be like, and that's the place where they also didn't get in somewhere. That's also the most Torontonian moment in the whole movie, of course, is when he runs across the raccoon and freaks out.

1:16:21Sean Fennessey:Oh, I wrote that down in the notes. Watching that the second time is so fucking funny.

1:16:25Matt Johnson:Well, because there's a great, there's a movie by someone who's collaborated with Matt a lot, Kizik Ravinsky, in his first film, Tower. Or it's the only movie in history that builds to a confrontation with a raccoon. And it's like, you know, Nirvana only has the raccoon as a kind of throwaway moment. But, you know, they filmed the Resident Evil movies here. You know, Paul W. Sanders and Mila Jovovich were often seen in Toronto because Resident Evil was set in Raccoon City. And Toronto, you know. But also the movie that hasn't come up on this pod that I just want to mention maybe in closing or in passing.

1:16:55Matt Johnson:I mean, it is so funny how close this movie is to Scott Pilgrim to the point where they are actually traveling back to roughly when Scott Pilgrim was happening.

1:17:05Sean Fennessey:Yeah.

1:17:05Matt Johnson:Because indie rock and that indie rock insular culture, and particularly the critique of the whiteness of it and the edgelordiness of it, if you're going to give the movie the benefit of the doubt, where it's not just symptomatic, but it's like a critique. That's the way Scott Pilgrim looks 15 years later, too. and I think that there's a great piece to be written or a great series of thoughts to be had about the dialogue that those movies are having. I don't mean that Scott Pilgrim is an influence but I can't think of the two things separately. Maybe because Scott Pilgrim was the last time that a global audience had Toronto shoved down their throat.

1:17:40Matt Johnson:Totally, that's what it is.

1:17:42Sean Fennessey:Yeah. It is such a deeply Canadian movie and we don't get a lot of those through the Hollywood system. Sag mal, hast du bei der Steuer auch diesen Schulfashback? just tell something and hope that it's true?

1:17:54Chris Ryan:No, at all. WhySewSteuer is my safe space.

1:17:58Sean Fennessey:You mean everything is safe?

1:18:00Chris Ryan:Yes, exactly. WhySewSteuer is the app that understands you. No matter whether it's a job, a job or a job.

1:18:08Sean Fennessey:That's right. It doesn't feel like it's like it's a tax.

1:18:11Chris Ryan:Tax done?

1:18:12Sean Fennessey:Safe.

1:18:13Chris Ryan:With WhySewSteuer.

1:18:16Sean Fennessey:Adam, what a delight to see you. When will you be back on the show? I don't know. When will I be back on the show? I wait by the phone for you. What do you want to talk about? What is it you want to say to the people? What is it I want to say to the people?

1:18:28Matt Johnson:I'm so grumpy, you know. I want to talk about whether the Raptors are going to get home court in the playoffs. I would love to talk further about Toronto. Who knows if that will happen? We'll see. I'm around. I'm around.

1:18:43Sean Fennessey:We'll see. Maybe we will at some point in the future. Fingers crossed. Adam, thank you so much. You can read Adam on TheRinger.com and in many other places. And you can hear him on this pod. I don't know. We're going to find a really good topic soon. Yeah.

1:18:59Matt Johnson:And, you know, you guys take care of yourselves. Nice to see you guys. Okay.

1:19:03Sean Fennessey:Congrats on all the Netflix, Adam. Bye. Bye. Okay. Let's go now to my conversation with Matt Johnson.

1:19:13Sean Fennessey:Back by popular demand, Matt Johnson. So it's three, not quite three years ago that I saw you.

1:19:19Matt Johnson:Yeah.

1:19:19Sean Fennessey:And as I just said to you, one of the most requested return guests in the history of the show. I think people were touched, moved, thrilled, amused by your last chat about BlackBerry. And you're here for a movie that started as an inside joke. And I've heard so many people ask you, how did you make the movie? But I don't know if I've heard too many people ask you why you made the movie.

1:19:42Matt Johnson:Yeah, which is, it's funny. the secret of everything is behind that because right after you and I had spoke, it was like, it was really my first time being in Los Angeles where people were, were talking about that film, which also was a small Canadian. The fire alarm went off.

1:20:00Chris Ryan:I was, I was warned of this. Zara Larson is shooting a music video and they're using a fog machine. There's not an actual fire. We should leave this in the episode. Seriously.

1:20:09Sean Fennessey:Zara Larson.

1:20:11Matt Johnson:Damn you, Zara. You couldn't have picked a better name, but that, that the success that came from that, I think I was for the first time faced with like the opportunity to make movies in Hollywood. And I was so maybe not worried, but I kind of felt, you know, this, a German term Torschlisch panic. No, it's an amazing, an amazing, the Germans have this great, great ability to combine a bunch of different words to create a new kind of idea. and what it means, it translates to gate closing panic. And it's the type of fear that you only feel when an opportunity is about to be gone forever. It's like the feeling of rushing towards a door before it closes.

1:20:51Matt Johnson:And I was feeling that about being able to do something completely on my own where I was in charge of it all and could do essentially anything. And so I was like, okay, maybe this is my last chance to make a movie where I make it only with my friends, only in Toronto, and we do whatever we want. And so I took the opportunity to make Nirvana the Band the show, the movie, as opposed to doing something else.

1:21:15Sean Fennessey:It's funny because I feel like the instinct of most people would be, I have to race toward the gate closing on my big Hollywood movie. And not, I'm going to stay local, stay personal, make that choice that you, like, what do you think informs that?

1:21:29Matt Johnson:I think the fact that I had been making movies in Canada for so long that there wasn't, there was no novelty behind the opportunity of doing a bigger movie. And I don't mean to say that I was inured to it because I've been offered so many opportunities. I've been offered zero. But I was like, well, I've been making movies for no money by myself with my few friends for whatever, 15 years. It's not like another year of people waiting to make a movie with me is going to change. Do you know what I mean? I think a lot of filmmakers that I know specifically are so in their own heads that even the opportunities they do get given take two, three, four years to manifest anyway.

1:22:10Matt Johnson:So also, I mean, the truth is I thought it was going to take me like two and a half months to make this movie and it took two years. So that is another big thing with it.

1:22:18Sean Fennessey:Was a factor, I know that Blackberry had some American financing in it and this movie didn't, right? No. This movie was entirely Canadian. So was that a factor too of like kind of going back to just that style?

1:22:27Matt Johnson:No, I just knew that it would be impossible to pitch this movie to anybody, right? I mean, you've seen it, and I think there's a kind of survivor bias with it where you watch it and you're like, oh yeah, this is marketable in a way. I can see giving this a few hundred thousand dollars to make, but before it's done, it really is like trying to buy a jar of chaos. How am I supposed to pitch this movie to you?

1:22:52Sean Fennessey:Well, okay. So I want to pitch something to you then. So I just, I wrote this down last night as I was thinking about what you guys have been doing together. And so like, it's kind of an aesthetic semiotic question around this project. So there seems to be some concern. And I've gotten this even just from people who have heard me talking the movie up that the uninitiated seeing the movie might be confused about what it is, right? That like the context of the web series or the TV show, if you haven't seen it, you're going to be confused. But the movie works, I think, because you and Jay are not just charming and the movie is not just really entertaining and well-made, but it's like you're using archetype comedy characters that are so instantaneously legible in the first scene that it's like, I know exactly what this is.

1:23:34Sean Fennessey:And it doesn't matter if you don't have that context.

1:23:36Matt Johnson:Do you agree with that? I'll take this a big step further. I think the movie is twice as effective on people who have no idea what's happened before. my experience is that fans who see the movie love it but they always have a kind of but you guys really went crazier in the tv show which of course we did because i'm on a tiny network in canada and it's television so the same rules don't apply i think that the ideal situation for this movie is watching it from a place of complete ignorance being like how did this ever happen there's more layers that you have to crash through. Whereas if you've seen the show or you know anything, even if you've seen Blackberry, I think it gives you a bit of a nod to the, not the surreality of it, but to the way these characters speak.

1:24:24Matt Johnson:I think Jay and I specifically, but in all my films, 90 % of the comedy is the intonation of the English language. I find that funnier than almost anything. And so if you've just never been exposed to that in this type of work, then I think you're really being like, whoa, what is this? But I'll address your point directly. Yes, Jay and I are basically playing versions of adults in the way that children think of adults, right? Like whenever I'm thinking of Nirvana the Band, I always, that image of Brain from Pinky and the Brain when he gets inside the robot of the president's suit, like that's really what this is.

1:25:01Matt Johnson:If Calvin and Hobbes could put on adult clothes and go out and have an adventure, that's what it is. And so that archetype that you're talking about is so fun to play in because this is the way prepubescent boys see adulthood. Our band's going to get a show. Well, how do we do it? Well, we've got to trick them. Well, we've got to climb up the big tower in the city. Well, we've got to lie to everybody because of course we're kids. They're never going to let us go do it for real. We're six years old. And so I think that without ever stating that, it makes it so that the audience gets it without even needing to, I heard somebody say something so great.

1:25:38Matt Johnson:Nirvana the Band the Show is, it's the kind of movie that you cannot explain, but if you watch two minutes of it, you could write your own episode. Right. And that sums it up beautifully.

1:25:49Sean Fennessey:Do you and Jay intellectualize it in this way when you're coming up with ideas? No, not at all. You are like uniquely articulate about the process and you're willing to engage with complex intellectual questions about what you've made. This is a very silly, fun movie that you've made. But it does feel like sometimes you've really labored over something and other times it feels like you just thought it would be fun and you just did it.

1:26:11Matt Johnson:I don't know that there's any difference between those two things because, well, one, it's not like we are ever, I heard this great quote, I forget who said it, but like work that's trying to be clever first often sabotages itself. You wind up getting hamstrung by the fact that you tried to lead with clever. And so it's not like my friends and I are sitting in a room being like, okay, so what would be like a smart way to do this? Really, the process, as silly as it seems, is like we're all trying to remember the same dream we had. like that's how all the writing happens we're like oh it'll be a time travel movie where we go back to 2008 and then we change something and then the future is different and that's like the beginning idea and then somebody would be like oh and in the future jay's famous and then everybody in the room just goes yes that is what happened not that's what should happen it's as though we're remembering a dream we had the night before and that's every single detail of it.

1:27:09Matt Johnson:So it's not like we're saying, oh, that's so smart. It just, it just all feels right. Which is again, getting into this archetype thing you brought up.

1:27:18Sean Fennessey:It's really interesting. You called movies an American religion recently in an interview, which I'm obsessed with. And it's certainly how I view them and how kind of how I've organized my life in many ways. And I was wondering how you filtered that through the movie. There's the obvious like back to the future aspect of it, but what about the other ways you thought about that concept inside the movie? Well, one,

1:27:37Matt Johnson:in the same way that religious language was, it's funny to think of it this way, but was pop culture throughout most of human history where when you would talk with people, when you read old books, oftentimes they are quoting or relating things to scripture casually in conversation with one another because it was the kind of common culture. Everybody knew it. Everybody knew. like you have you seen that star trek episode uh um dharmok and jalada tanagra have you heard this i don't know you'd love it i'll teach it to you in a second so captain picard is sent to a planet and you know how they have the universal translator where everybody can speak the same language it doesn't matter well he's on a planet with this alien creature and they are both speaking english but the guy that he's with only speaks idiomatically so the things that he's saying are intelligible, but it's all idioms from his own culture.

1:28:35Matt Johnson:So no translator can get through them. It doesn't matter what Picard says, they don't understand each other because this guy's talking an idiom. And the episode is about Picard learning the idiomatic history of his culture so that they can talk to one another. And anyway, that's what the Bible was to us. And so the idea that now instead we have all of these movies that we quote has totally replaced that. And so these characters in Nirvana the Band, again, this isn't the kind of thing that my friends and I talk about. In a million years, it would be like, but it's not interesting really to us. but but that's what these guys are doing they're kind of speaking in the new religious language that's why the movie is about back to the future and they're talking about back to the future as though it is in the way that a kid thinks that the force is real it back to the future time travel is real to these guys so long as they can get their toys to move in the right way do you think that

1:29:32Sean Fennessey:that is just a micro generational experience or something that has legs it's funny as you walk

1:29:38Matt Johnson:around in Los Angeles, you'll notice that a lot of the old movie theaters are being converted into churches. And so who knows, maybe it's going back. But the references may change, but again, it's exactly like that Star Trek episode. We have no choice. We are going to speak in the stories of our culture and that's never going to change. In fact, I think it's a tragedy that in some ways that we all don't have to sit and watch the same TV channels like we used to when I was a kid. Because even if those shows were bad or even if like it didn't matter, it was so great having this like common muck that we could all make inside jokes about to one another.

1:30:20Sean Fennessey:I feel like the show and the film and a lot of what you've made is kind of like bound by nostalgia, not defined by nostalgia. And a lot of what you're describing here is how much of it is the affection we have for things that we experienced at a young age and maybe can't even really see clearly because of the time that we saw them. Is there any part of you that was like worried about that? Because the film is kind of about that, right? About going back to a time when things seemed more innocent or more fun or more like possible, more open.

1:30:51Matt Johnson:Well, you're just describing childhood for everybody.

1:30:53Sean Fennessey:Yeah.

1:30:53Matt Johnson:Right. Like if we were here with somebody who was born in 1950, they would feel as though they had more options in terms of what they could do when they were a kid than when they were in their 30s too. I think that that's a universal feeling that I don't know if it's going to go anywhere again. It's, it's sad that we don't have the same universal references, but you know, it's strange. Like I'm, I've done so many Q and A's for this film now. And it's like people who are 19 and 20 years old are watching this movie being like, Oh my God, it was so great. I love all the references. And so, I mean, how do you explain that?

1:31:27Matt Johnson:Like there's a, there's a big nine 11 reference that, I mean, I suppose that's such a major cultural moment, but we thought that would only be funny to people who had lived through it. So yeah, I don't know, but that's a hard question to answer because I'm not an anthropologist. I have no idea how these things work.

1:31:45Sean Fennessey:I know, but I feel like you're kind of doing that work, even if it's not academically by making these projects. They do seem like these kind of socio-historical explorations of yourself.

1:31:54Matt Johnson:Well, I am very interested in the things that I went through when I was a kid, and I'll keep making movies about it until I, I don't even mean to like Blackberry. My favorite part of that film is in the nineties when I'm in that engineering room with those other guys. Like I look at that and I'm like, that is what my childhood was like. I wish I could live in that world. And, and obviously black, I mean, Nirvana, the band, the show is exactly that. It's me recreating the sleepover culture that I had when I was a little boy, but I don't have an intention behind it other than to say that I'm attracted to those things.

1:32:28Matt Johnson:right?

1:32:29Sean Fennessey:Yeah. I've, I've, it's, as I've, I've talked to so many filmmakers over the years, last time Greta Gerrug was on the show, I was like, okay, so, you know, you made, uh, Lady Bird, a movie about your adolescence.

1:32:38Matt Johnson:And your favorite toy, then your favorite book.

1:32:40Sean Fennessey:And then your favorite toy and then your favorite book and little, and your other favorite book, Little Women. So it's like all of these explorations of like coming of age girlhood. That's what a lot of your stories are about. And she was like, I hadn't thought about that, you know, common interviewer question though, of just like trying to find centrality thematically around what you do. And you are kind of describing something similar, but not intentional. Just like, this is how I feel.

1:33:00Matt Johnson:But what's intent? Like, why do you love somebody? Like, why do two people look at a painting and one person says, I love it, the other says, I hate it? Would you call that intent? I mean, that's just, that's the soul you were given. In a way, right? I don't pick my eyes.

1:33:17Sean Fennessey:I think I'm looking for the middle ground between neuroses and artistic intention, you know? Or sort of like the things you keep getting drawn to back to why, like looking into why that happens?

1:33:27Matt Johnson:Well, I mean, I think the best feeling I get, either when we're writing something, my friends and I together, or when I'm watching a movie, it's not where I'm like laughing hysterically or when I like love something. It's when a little light in my head goes on and says, that's true. Oh, that's true. Like I watch a movie, like I mean, I'll pick anything. Like I'm watching the movie Whiplash and I'm seeing all this terrible stuff and I go, yeah, that's true. That's real. And when I say that's real, I mean, it doesn't matter that it didn't happen. It's real.

1:33:58Sean Fennessey:And not just authentic, although it does feel authentic, but you're like, it's happening right now before me. I know exactly what you mean when you say that.

1:34:04Matt Johnson:Yeah. And I think that that is, again, strangely, the connection with it and religion. There's this, I mean, this Carl Jung idea where, I forget what the word for it is. It might be synchronicity, even though that word now is talking about like computer, computers taking over reality, where the fiction world and the real world touch, it's like these magic moments where you see something and it is fake, but it's also real. Right? I think the example he uses is like the story of Jesus, where it's like a fictional story. Everybody acts like it's real. So how do you explain that? And those types of moments, I see all the times in movies, Werner Herzog's a master of this and they animate me in a way that I can't explain.

1:34:49Matt Johnson:And so for me to think of like the intent behind my own movies is impossible because I have no idea why I'm drawn to certain things. I remember I saw the Orson Welles film, F for Fake, and I'm sitting there watching it on like a tiny computer. I forget who'd shown it to me. And I was like, this is the greatest thing I've ever seen in my life. How have I never heard of it? I feel like it was made just for me. Like it was meant for me and it was meant for me to steal from it. It was like literally instructions for me. And when you find something like that, everybody has these experiences, but yeah, I guess I just, I run after them.

1:35:28Sean Fennessey:It's a coherent touchstone because I feel like a lot of people have been desperately trying to explain or make comparisons for what this new movie is. And you hear a lot of jackass, right? Because there's sort of real world experiential stunt quality to so much of what you're doing. And Borat. Yes. Well, and I think part of that is like the convulsive, like I had no idea this was coming, feeling that the movie gives you. Right. Which was a great experience when we saw those movies in movie theaters.

1:35:49Matt Johnson:Right. A kind of chaos out of controlness that only, in my opinion, like America was like, look, it's no coincidence that Sacha Baron Cohen had to come to America to make that movie. right and jackass although they were hardcore ripping off a canadian tom green it's still it's like that collision with american anything goes ism that that really lets it take off in fact all three of these examples like jackass really is like tom green via america and then borat is literally the bbc via america and even our movie is canadians creating an american movie we're remaking back to the future so there's there's something about that that that the i want to say like a commonwealth sensibility combined with this american freedom that gives you this feeling of oh this could go anywhere yeah and also it's a lot of like culture worship i think all three of those are basically american advertisements they are but they're simultaneously undermining and almost

1:36:52Sean Fennessey:just lampooning an American idea of like civility or comfort, you know, like by sending figures into the world who can kind of like show you how silly and distorted some of those experiences are.

1:37:04Matt Johnson:Yeah, of course. But that's, everything has to have an up and a down. Like otherwise everyone would reject it.

1:37:12Sean Fennessey:I'm curious about you and Jay.

1:37:13Matt Johnson:Yeah. Yeah.

1:37:14Sean Fennessey:So you've known each other. When did you first meet?

1:37:16Matt Johnson:In high school when we were just, I think in grade nine or ninth grade, as you guys would say.

1:37:20Sean Fennessey:Okay, so you, it's over three decades that you've been, or about three decades that you've been friends. You're directing him now in a mainstream film that is about a project that you've been doing for almost 20 years. Yeah. And you both have had individual success and you've worked together a lot over the years as well. But Jay is really centered in the movie. He's a protagonist. In a way that he's not in the show.

1:37:44Matt Johnson:Sure, yeah.

1:37:45Sean Fennessey:And I'm curious like what it's like to direct him because you get a really good performance out of him. He's unbelievable. And so can you kind of talk about making sure that that happens, doing it in the way that is like where you guys can trust each other? Like it feels, it felt different from the show.

1:38:02Matt Johnson:Look, the word trust is the big one. I got to give Jay all the credit here. I mean, I would direct him in as much as I would like give him lines in his voice when we'd be acting together. Sometimes even on camera, you can see me giving him lines that we've, that in my mouth will be moving, but no words are coming out. But I am not directing him in the way that, let's say, I was directing a movie like Blackberry. Both of us are just waiting for the other one to say something interesting and then following it up. So I can take very little credit for that. That's 99 % Jay McCarroll, who's just become an extremely gifted thespian.

1:38:40Matt Johnson:And I think because he's so like, he really wanted to do a good job. Like, like he, he, he thought about what his character was going through and because he was on set for Blackberry and both of us really, really watched Glenn and Jay Baruchel. Like we really watched them because we'd never seen real actors do anything. And the amount that they were able to do with just their faces without talking, like they were just so disciplined. And I know that left a big impact on him. and so he he was really trying to do something great and we both knew early on that he was the protagonist of the story because he was the one who needed to change right he was the person who at the beginning was like this life isn't working for me and then in the last second not to spoil anything but but but well this will spoil the whole movie but you know what i mean like and so he realized that he was going to do most of the lifting and specifically relating to your question about mostly first audiences seeing this movie, he was going to be the person who anchored them.

1:39:40Matt Johnson:He is the audience, right? Like when he looks at the camera and is like, this is crazy or when he gets convinced, it's really the audience is being convinced. And so again, I don't want to take any credit for that, but he just has a really brilliant aptitude for understanding what the real world would feel in these moments.

1:40:00Sean Fennessey:When you say it took two years to make the movie, what do you mean by that? And how did you know when you were done?

1:40:07Matt Johnson:We just added a new ending to the movie that's only going to be released on DVD two days ago. And I'm telling you, it changes everything. There's a scene after the credits where you get to see, this will spoil it, but you get to see a scene from another angle that changes the entire movie. And I mean literally. It's like the creation of a supervillain.

1:40:33Sean Fennessey:I feel comfortable talking about some details of the movie. Because I think serious listeners of the show will be all over this movie. They already are. The doubling. The time travel and the doubling seems very complex. And especially for a movie at this scale. How did you do that?

1:40:49Matt Johnson:So we were really, really lucky in that the movie jumps back and forth between 2025 and in 2008. And we had been shooting web series versions of this show when we were kids, basically. And we had just shot so much of it that when the idea of making a time travel movie came up, the first thing the editors, Kurt and Bobby, did was just watch every single one of those DV tapes waiting for like split second moments of like. useful story beats. And the first one they found where we were like, oh my gosh, we can build an entire movie around this was that clip that opens the film of me next to Jay going, you know what, Jay, I think things are going to work out for us.

1:41:31Matt Johnson:And then in that same shot, you see us walk down Queen Street and we turn and Jay goes, hey, does that guy look like me? And then I go, that guy, he looks like me. And we were talking about an advertisement outside of a FCUK store, but the camera pans over and then back and then we keep walking and when we saw that clip it's like maybe one minute we were like okay we can build the entire movie around this because it answered so many questions it's like okay so we saw ourselves as kids so then what were we as adults doing there and why were we trying to get something and that's where we got the idea that we need to steal fuel for the time machine that would have got us there and so we just built the whole story backwards out of it and everything else although it seems like it's um like special effects is all just clever editing it's it's it's alarmingly effective it's one of my favorite things i've ever been a part of in my life when you're seeing young me talk to young j about the meaning of life when we're literally talking to one another through 17 years of time and that conversation is thematically resolving the movie that these guys are trapped inside of.

1:42:41Matt Johnson:Yeah, it's one of those things that as you see it, it's depressing because you're like, I will never be able to do anything like this ever again. So there's an incredible hangover joke in this movie

1:42:52Sean Fennessey:that people love.

1:42:54Matt Johnson:Which by the way, for us, was just a minor plot point. We never thought that that was going to be that big of a laugh.

1:42:59Sean Fennessey:I think maybe American audiences and their relationship to that movie. You know, over the years, podcasting about movies so much, we are, especially on that show, The Rewatchables that we do, we go back and like look at the core essence of what was comedy in 2008. What was acceptable or what was understood to be really funny. And that's something that's really great about what you're doing in the movie, but also kind of sort of turning it on yourself and like the web series and the TV show. Definitely. Are these like, kind of like Cliff's Edge of bad taste or like confronting what is acceptable.

1:43:31Matt Johnson:Which was open edgelordism. I mean, that's really the ethos that was driving that show.

1:43:36Sean Fennessey:Can you talk about that and maybe how you feel about that now you're at this stage of your life and even making a movie that seems to be like looking back at your own edgelordism?

1:43:44Matt Johnson:It's, you know, it's strange. Again, like I said, it was sort of a means to an end. I'm talking about this hangover joke in the movie that we all just thought was a great way for the characters to realize they're in 2008. and I didn't realize that it was going to become such a as as you so definitely put it like a like a true talking point around me looking at my own childhood because so much of it I filmed my first movie is about me as an edgelord school shooter literally and and it's funny it is a kind of like millennialism that I grew up in but I I have to be honest I'm not judgmental of it whatsoever I actually think that for a kid, I talk from my own experience, there's something really magical about taboos.

1:44:31Matt Johnson:And whenever our society creates a taboo around anything, it doesn't matter what it is. Like kids, especially naughty little boys are going to be like, well, what happens if I do touch it? And that is somehow addictive and it animated me in a way that I would not have made my early films if I didn't have that feeling of wanting to deal with something that was taboo. Because it's like when you're given a rule as a little kid that your parents just tell you because they're trying to make you quieter, have you stay in your room where you're like, wait a minute, is this a real rule? And what is a rule?

1:45:09Sean Fennessey:Well, I think it's sometimes correlated to ultimate bad behavior, but just because you're an edgelord doesn't mean you are doing bad behavior, but you're so close to the line of someone else who's crossing the line. And so, you know, when we talk about it on that show, at least in terms of comedy, it's literally framed by this category, what's aged the worst? Oh, yeah. And the idea of paging Doctor from The Hangover is like, that hasn't aged well. That's not a joke you would do right now.

1:45:33Matt Johnson:In a million years. And what's so crazy is that it's not even, I mean, here I am judging comedy. It's not even judgment.

1:45:40Sean Fennessey:It's sort of like, I don't even, I'm not sure what the right way to phrase it is because there's no clear way to communicate what's right and what's wrong. It's just like, that doesn't feel right anymore.

1:45:46Matt Johnson:No, it doesn't. But my point was that even at its time, I don't even know that that was that great of a joke. I suppose the idea is the expectation of this guy who's a doctor and his wife has got these high expectations for him and his friends. And then Bradley Cooper says, the worst possible thing in terms of him trying to be like, no, my friends are trustworthy people. We're going away. Everything will be fine. So I think it's like

1:46:09Sean Fennessey:kind of good character building for the Cooper character. This is like, he's the boorish asshole. Yeah. Now, you know, he's the one who said that at the time we knew that, but now there are like, I think a lot of the boundaries and you kind of going back to your own boundaries and even just me looking back at the web series, I'm like, wow, Matt was pushing it. Oh, yeah, definitely. This is unusual to go back and see this this way.

1:46:28Matt Johnson:But isn't it so crazy? Because to me, I'm making that show with Jay and Jared, our cinematographer, and we're making it for like seven people who live like within a mile of us.

1:46:39Sean Fennessey:Is that good though? Do you want people to be finding it now? Are you excited about that?

1:46:44Matt Johnson:Excited? No, but I'm certainly not against it. But it's so strange because what you're watching is like a childhood project that was made in total anonymity by people who were in Canada, never thinking that anybody would ever in a million years watch this stuff. And so it's why I'm so cautious around saying like, oh yeah, that was so stupid or I would never do that again because I would be lying. I think that the things that were animating me and the things that I found funny, I have to honor those things because that was me. And that child still exists inside me. So yeah, I'm sorry. I have no choice.

1:47:31Sean Fennessey:I know that you and your lawyer have become very good friends and samurais in the face of fair use. Yes.

1:47:39Matt Johnson:He literally wrote that somebody came to a screening last night with the textbook that he's learning in law school with my lawyer's name on it called something and fair use literally wrote the book on it.

1:47:51Sean Fennessey:So, you know, I have like a little bit of experience in this realm, but it does seem like you guys have like figured out some dark arts to, in order to pull off what you pull off. And I think part of the thrill of the movie is like, how are they getting away with this as a feeling that you have while watching the movie that is so exciting.

1:48:05Matt Johnson:Right.

1:48:05Sean Fennessey:So like, what is the process? Like, when do you know you've gone too far? How do you, cause you're, it's a, it's a creative act and you're making something. So how does he help you figure out what you can and can't do?

1:48:15Matt Johnson:It's, I think the opposite of what people think. I think people imagine that Blackberry is a good example that we would go film it and then show it to our lawyer and be like, is this okay? It's the exact opposite. In this, it would be like, okay, so we're making a back to the future parody. Here's all the reasons that I think that this is important to the story that I would write. And then Chris Perez would then look at my reasoning behind justifying these parodies and be like, okay, yes, I believe this. I believe that your artistic license to tell a story about this is going to justify its use.

1:48:51Matt Johnson:And then we just do that for every single piece of copywritten material in the movie where it's like kind of like going back to high school where you need to create a coherent argument as to why you as a storyteller need this and only this. And we do it way before we shoot anything.

1:49:08Sean Fennessey:Have you heard anything from the Zemeckis camp?

1:49:11Matt Johnson:I mean I wish but no not only not nothing from the Zemeckis camp in all of my time making all of these movies from the dirties to the TV show to Blackberry which has got more fair use in it arguably than this movie we've never heard anything from anyone

1:49:28Sean Fennessey:is that a good or a bad thing

1:49:29Matt Johnson:that's great that's what you want

1:49:30Sean Fennessey:but you don't want to get the letter that's like I saw your movie and I loved it like that's also a thing you sometimes hear

1:49:36Matt Johnson:you know what those letters don't go to me I don't I don't I don't get I don't get those letters

1:49:40Sean Fennessey:you're getting one right now. You've been asked a lot of questions about some of the house stuff, as I mentioned, how you pulled off so many sequences. Is there one that you have not been asked about or are really proud of that you want to talk about?

1:49:53Matt Johnson:That's a great question. It's funny. I'm trying to think of something that's in the film that for us, the hardest thing to shoot, and although it doesn't seem that impressive when you see it, is there's a scene in the movie at the very, very beginning in the first 10 minutes when I go up to a girl outside the skydome and I, oh, yeah, outside of the skydome, the CN Tower. And I say, hey, is this the line to get into the edge walk? And she goes, yeah, I think so. And I go, okay, great. Because I need to jump off of it. And then she gives this look like, oh my gosh, really? And then I say, thank you very much.

1:50:25Matt Johnson:Goodbye. And then we leave. And it's a totally innocuous moment. And then in the third act of the film, because time loops perfectly, you see Jay and I walk. Now I'm covered in climbing ropes and he's pushing a wheelbarrow full of extension cords. And we see the same girl in the same spot wearing the same clothes. And I say, oh my gosh, I remember you. You're the girl from Brazil. And she goes, what? Like she looks at me and she's like with this look of you're insane. And I go, oh my gosh, that's right. I've never met you before in my life. And she goes, no. And I go, okay, goodbye. And then I climb up the CN Tower and And that was easily one of the hardest things to shoot.

1:51:04Matt Johnson:It was next to impossible. We shot it 20 times with 20 different people. Could never get it to work. And in the movie, it goes by in a split second. I don't think anybody even really noticed. No, but she's so memorable.

1:51:15Sean Fennessey:I saw the movie in November and I can see her in my mind's eye.

1:51:17Matt Johnson:She's incredible. But okay, so how do you land on people like that?

1:51:21Sean Fennessey:I think that's something about the kind of like in the real world experiential aspect of the filmmaking.

1:51:26Matt Johnson:The right person. Yeah, the Safdie style street casting where you're like, okay, yeah, this person's got the magic. I mean, Toronto is full of travelers, which makes it great. And we approach interesting looking people and interesting people approach us. So how do we decide? I don't know that much decision gets made. In that case, she was in the right place at the right time. and we had shot that thing so many times with so many different people over and over and over again and had to do that switch so quickly because in real life me asking her the first question into the second question needed to take place within a span of 30 seconds yeah it is like did you guys have wonder shows in canada have you ever seen one i mean like huge influence there's like a little

1:52:07Sean Fennessey:you mentioned tom green there's wonder shows and there's a couple things where i'm just like only a rare breed of comic mind knows how to do this. Knows how to find the right... I mean, obviously, this is something Sacha Baron Cohen is expert at, too. But it's a very memorable aspect of the movie itself. Can we talk a little bit about getting the Hollywood water bottle tour that you went on and your experiences in your career kind of adjacent to this? Because a lot of filmmakers who make films that are critically acclaimed and have small but passionate audiences usually get funneled right into the system, right?

1:52:44Sean Fennessey:You start taking the agency tours and you start going to the studios and they want you to do something.

1:52:49Matt Johnson:And then they just find anything that fits and that's what you do. Pretty much, right?

1:52:52Sean Fennessey:And so I know you're making an A24 movie. I know you're making more after that as well. Like, can you just give me from your perspective what that experience was and is like?

1:53:04Matt Johnson:I think everybody's different. it's hard to totalize that i don't know how in a sentence to describe were you excited to be doing those conversations were you scared no i wasn't scared here's what i think all filmmaking comes down to is do you have true enthusiasm for something right like and i mean you the creator do you have enthusiasm for something and is that enthusiasm transferable to somebody else in a way where you can tell they're getting it. And so in some ways, Jay told me this quote about bike riding. He says, you know, the more you learn how to ride a bike, it doesn't get any easier.

1:53:43Matt Johnson:You just go faster. And that I think is really deeply true about filmmaking, which is that it feels like exactly the same as trying to pitch my friends or trying to pitch just Jay on an episode of our web series. It's identical. And so the process, it doesn't feel any different other than I'm talking with strangers and oftentimes we don't see things the same way. But it's so great because if you don't, like you can't lose. It's like, okay, I want to make this movie. And they're like, I don't really see it that way. It's a great.

1:54:17Sean Fennessey:Bye. Yeah, you're such an articulate and smart interviewee. So I wonder if you are, are you like a dynamo in the room? Is everybody like, this is awesome? or did you find like doors getting slammed in your face? What was it like?

1:54:28Matt Johnson:No, that's, you'd have to ask somebody else who was in one of those rooms. I can't talk about like, how would I know? I know that I've never been at a pitch meeting for something that I wanted to do and it didn't get made, literally ever. But I think that has something to do with the fact that it's not like I've got a thousand different movie ideas and I'm like, let's do this. Like, if I'm going to talk about something, it's because I'm like, oh, it feels true. It feels like it should get made. And here's what's amazing. I think there's some cynicism around Hollywood, around like executives or studios that they have some kind of design or like basically that they have an agenda beyond they love movies and they're waiting to meet somebody else who loves movies so they can make a movie together.

1:55:11Matt Johnson:That's been exclusively my experience that people are excited by something that is new or that seems uncynical and they want to do anything they can to make it.

1:55:24Sean Fennessey:Do you think that's self-selecting because you make a very particular kind of thing? It's quite possible. If they located you, then maybe that indicates something about what their interests are?

1:55:31Matt Johnson:I'm sure that's 100 % true. And so it's why I can't give a universal opinion on this. But that's just been my experience.

1:55:41Sean Fennessey:What was your experience like making a movie that was not in the very specific orbit of your personal experience?

1:55:48Matt Johnson:Oh, well, I've never done that. You mean you're talking about the Anthony Bourdain movie? I mean, that movie is, I decided to make that movie because of the actor Dominic Sessa. He and I met and we realized that we saw that period of life, like 19, 20 years old, leaving home, trying to find an identity for somebody who was young and lied a lot. We had a very similar experience. So that's an extremely personal movie. so it's not like but but do you mean what's it like making a movie outside of the system that I have in Toronto with all strangers yes that was extremely complicated yeah that was a very that was a very difficult time in my life

1:56:28Sean Fennessey:I wondered because you are you make things so specifically and so personally and you have like hacked the system in a way to do things in your own way

1:56:36Matt Johnson:yeah by making them with a small group of people in Canada yeah so that was a real splash of cold water it turned out amazing and I met incredible friends Michael Bauman was my cinematographer who is a dear friend And I mean, I can't say enough about this guy. I mean, he's a genius. But that took a lot of getting used to because I didn't have a single Canadian with me. Not one of my friends got to come.

1:56:58Sean Fennessey:What was the difference between not having any Canadians then?

1:57:01Matt Johnson:It was crazy, man. Like, it was like I was making a movie on another planet.

1:57:05Sean Fennessey:What's the defining character though? Like, what explains the difference between the two species?

1:57:09Matt Johnson:If I could answer that, I could write a book about it. I have no idea. Yeah, but it's like, well, you know where it starts? Americans don't take off their shoes when they go in the house. And somehow from that. We do in my house. You do? We do. Oh, it's beautiful. And I'm not judging them because of course, like, why not? This is your country. Do what you want. I mean that deeply.

1:57:37Sean Fennessey:Is there some sort of politesse that is lacking? Is that what you're saying?

1:57:40Matt Johnson:I don't know what it is. There's a kind of like, yeah, it's like, I think that somebody once said about Toronto, Toronto feels like every single person in the city is like just trying to keep to themselves because the city, they know that they're visiting. It doesn't matter who you are. You feel like you're a visitor there and you're like, okay, yeah, I got to be polite because I'm just visiting here. In New York, everybody owns New York. This is my city. Get out of my way. This is mine. Like, you know what I mean? This is my kingdom. And so I think that that describes the difference well. Also, it was like a studio movie.

1:58:12Matt Johnson:Like we were on a completely different schedule. I was working with a huge team of professionals. Every single person at every single crew level knew more about making movies than me. Everybody. And so I'm like the person from Canada who's never made a real movie, who really has a totally unique process that to me is just like, well, that's just how I make movies. But to everybody else was like, what the hell are you doing? And so it's not like it was a negative experience in that way. People were incredibly supportive. but there was a lot of getting used to one another. Definitely. I would say not with the actors at all.

1:58:48Matt Johnson:Like those actors are some of my best friends and now, and I mean, that's the part of filmmaking I adore where you're basically just working with five or six people to play and tell a story, but working with the, like a crew of that size was like crazy.

1:59:04Sean Fennessey:What do you take away from that then going forward to do the next couple things um well i think that i was very

1:59:16Matt Johnson:lucky to have formed strong relationships with the cast that could be the central fulcrum of the entire creative process because i had because me and dominic were trying to do things in the scenes that really, and I'm using the word forced, but I don't mean that coercively, that forced the production to move at a certain pace and operate in a certain way. And I think that if you're a filmmaker, all of a sudden working in a studio system for the first time, that will help you a lot because again, this never happened, but I can picture it being very easy for a crew to turn on a director, but they're never going to turn on the cast in a million years.

1:59:56Matt Johnson:And so if, if you are in an alliance with the cast and they really believe in what you're doing, then it creates an environment where everybody's like, okay, we're doing things a bit differently and it's great. Whereas if the director is trying to do things differently and the cast is like, I don't feel comfortable with this. You are so dead. You have no idea. Like you'll make, you'll basically never make a movie again.

2:00:18Sean Fennessey:That's very interesting. I've not heard it put that way, but that does make sense. Why do you say they won't turn on the cast just because it's a different kind of relationship that they have? Have you been on a movie set before? I have, but not in the way that you have.

2:00:27Matt Johnson:because they are the blessed the blessed people they're they are like the holy few yeah yeah they're magic yeah look actors are magic people and we've all decided that's true so it is the premise of this show yes yeah they're magic people and so you know like they they can't have bad days like they're every like they're just and i don't mean this cynically like you you're there for them yes they have something that no one else has and you have to kind of way

2:00:53Sean Fennessey:to make a way to make that special.

2:00:56Matt Johnson:They are the movie. Yeah. And I think one of the, I mean, I love movies, but whenever I see a movie and I'm like, and I'm not connecting with it, it's because I'm feeling at a deep level the director doesn't understand that. They're showing me all their tricks. They're showing me how they can move a camera. They're showing me their awesome plot. They're showing me all these things instead of just an actor thinking.

2:01:15Sean Fennessey:I was thinking about this last night about you too. Do you see yourself as, forgive the phrase, but an auteur? Is that something that resonates with you?

2:01:21Matt Johnson:No. I mean, my movies are all specifically me, but I don't think that there's any kind of individual thing that ties them all together, apart from the fact that I had to use these busted Canadian production techniques because we had no money.

2:01:34Sean Fennessey:I know, but your films have a look and style that is consistent. You know, even when you're changing time period, changing, you know, black and white or color, like there is a vibe, a visual connectivity to all the things. Don't you agree?

2:01:47Matt Johnson:Well, put your actors in close-ups.

2:01:50Sean Fennessey:Yeah, sure. cutting style though yeah you know like yeah that the action shots you know the sense of like when the camera wanders away for a second like that you have moves sure yeah a lot of those i have

2:02:02Matt Johnson:to credit both to jared rab my cinematographer and to kurt lob the the person who's been editing my movie since the dirties and now bobby upchurch who edits with him like i would say that we all have the same worldview we all think the same things are funny like literally and we all love the same things. And so, it's funny though because it's hard to explain. Yeah, I know what you mean where, you know, you cut at a certain time or you show a certain expression. Yeah, again.

2:02:33Sean Fennessey:We sometimes talk about here like if you put your hand over someone's byline and you read their piece you can tell who wrote it. Oh, wow. That's like the sign of a great writer.

2:02:41Matt Johnson:Yeah, of course.

2:02:42Sean Fennessey:Even if your face wasn't in the movie, the energy of the film, I'm like, I could probably tell that was a Matt Johnson movie. Well,

2:02:47Matt Johnson:let's see what you think about Tony. Okay, okay. When I'm back talking about the Bourdain movie, you'll be like, so everything I said, I was really wrong about you.

2:02:54Sean Fennessey:Maybe I will. We'll see.

2:02:59Sean Fennessey:So Nirvana, the band, the TV show, the show, season three?

2:03:04Matt Johnson:Yeah. That's why we made the movie. I made Blackberry to make the movie so that I could make the third season of the show.

2:03:10Sean Fennessey:What's going on with that? Where is it? What's the status?

2:03:13Matt Johnson:If the movie keeps doing as well as it's doing now in theaters, then it will be released for sure. in what capacity well it's funny at first i thought we'd have to release it physically because there's like no network is ever ever ever going to put this on but now it seems like whatever network winds up taking a chance on season one and two of the tv show will probably

2:03:33Sean Fennessey:also release the third so you think that's what someone will license the shows and then put them

2:03:36Matt Johnson:oh boy that's what i think is going to happen and then what's great is that you're going to get to see the first attempt at us shooting this movie which i'm not sure if you know about this i don't So that movie that you saw is actually the second draft. And I mean, second time we shot the Nirvana the Band movie, because when we first shot it, we thought we should make it as a Confederacy of Dunces talented Mr. Ripley homage.

2:03:58Sean Fennessey:I read about this. Yes. Okay.

2:04:00Matt Johnson:Which we actually shot all through the United States in New Orleans for a month and a half, two months. How long ago was this? It would have been right after, shortly after the Berlin premiere of BlackBerry. So around the time that I was speaking with you is when we were planning to leave for the first time.

2:04:16Sean Fennessey:So what happened to all that material?

2:04:17Matt Johnson:We're turning it into a double episode of season three. Because when we got back and watched it, we were like, oh, this is great, but it does feel like television. And that's when all of a sudden we just decided to make this time travel movie. But hey, that's why I said it was a real change all of a sudden working in the American system.

2:04:36Sean Fennessey:Sounds like it. A Confederacy of Dunces, though, you may be one of the precious few who could crack that.

2:04:42Matt Johnson:Yeah, it's cursed every single production, including mine. We tried to make it into a movie, and now at best it'll be two episodes of television. But speaking of edgelords, Ignatius is the OG. It's the original edgelord.

2:04:54Sean Fennessey:Truly. What an inspiration. Another Nirvana movie?

2:04:59Matt Johnson:I mean, this movie's just in theaters right now. I don't know. These things are so hard to make that, yes, I'd love to do it. But the thing is, it would need to be so, we'd need to have such a good idea to top what we did. Like, I mean, the only clue I'll give, and this is something Jay and I have been talking about, is that we should do it in real time. it should be kind of like like a bit of a time code Figgis homage where where we where we do it in real time so that at least it has something where you're like where it truly is unbelievable

2:05:37Sean Fennessey:was that the four box film?

2:05:39Matt Johnson:yeah we wouldn't be doing it we wouldn't be doing it like that it would be hard because there's two of us

2:05:44Sean Fennessey:you and Jay and 2008 you and 2008 that's what I mean we can't we can't we can't go back to 2008 you have so much raw footage come on yes we do yeah we probably got a couple features in there

2:05:52Matt Johnson:that footage in a way well i'll tell you what you can pitch the editors that they've got to do this

2:05:56Sean Fennessey:again how about that let's re-watch all the stuff you shot 20 years ago it'll be fine yeah um what are you really excited about doing right now that's what i'm most curious

2:06:08Matt Johnson:the honest answer is the magic the gathering movie like it's the it is the you're such a

2:06:13Sean Fennessey:millennial it's fucking like an elder millennial i do feel a real kinship with you in that way

2:06:17Matt Johnson:that game taught me to read um and when i was a kid my dream was to be a professional magic card player and i mean that literally i made day two in detroit 2006 pro tour of champions kawagama and i drafted like garbage i sat next to richard hohen who just beat the shit out of me and and i made that decision right then i need to take filmmaking seriously because i'm never going to be a pro magic player and i just quit broke my heart and for years i've said i would trade my entire career to be a professional magic card player and now i'm making the magic card movie and so it's almost like yeah someone was listening i got it it was like making a wish on a monkey paw where you're like please please let me stop being a filmmaker and let me play magic cards

2:07:03Sean Fennessey:instead but what happens when it curls i mean that's what i'm saying yeah that's what i'm saying who knows what's

2:07:08Matt Johnson:what's going to happen to me but that to me that's like my Star Wars like getting to revisit a world that I know so well that I love so much that meant so much to me it's it's surreal to be honest to be able to do a project like that but I mean it's still early days who knows

2:07:25Sean Fennessey:Matt we end every episode of the show by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing they have seen can I just preface that question quickly do you feel as into like cinephilia as you were as a kid

2:07:35Matt Johnson:no I think it's a big curse that any filmmaker will tell you is that, um, that as soon as you start making movies, it's really, really hard to have the same kind of, maybe the word is even curiosity about what is, is happening. I'm assuming you're talking about new movies. It can be anything if you want. Oh really? Yeah. It can be literally anything. Yeah.

2:07:59Matt Johnson:Yeah. I mean that when we were prepping this movie over and over and over, I watched the documentary street wise. Now, have you seen this film? Yes. So this, I mean, this to me is like one of the greatest films ever made about Seattle. And, uh, if, if your listeners haven't seen this movie, I promise it'll feel brand new when they watch it. They'll be like, I can't believe I've never heard of this before. And, um, yeah. Although, I mean, in some ways that's a real film. like everybody in film school seen that film but but that's probably the last thing i saw where i was like oh my gosh this is unbelievable why did you watch it over and over and over because we were trying to completely steal the aesthetic from it when we would be shooting in public jay and i would always say to our uh to the camera operators jared and at that time nicolai we'd be like streetwise streetwise we're doing this streetwise we're doing this one streetwise which is basically just saying the camera's so far away shooting in a wide while action is happening over a wireless microphone.

2:09:00Matt Johnson:And basically it just meant like whatever happens, happens. Like just let it be the way it is. But if you are a film student and you're thinking of shooting things or making movies in this style, watch that film. It's like a how-to. I don't even know how they did it. Do you know how they did it? Of course not. It's like you watch it, you're like, what? This seems impossible. Is this all recreation? Like there's no way. You're watching crimes get committed. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's a masterpiece. Matt, it was nice seeing you. I love speaking with you. I can't wait to be back to talk about Tony.

2:09:38Matt Johnson:And I'm sure the tone's going to be quite different.

2:09:41Sean Fennessey:Well, hopefully not too different. I hope you're ecstatic and thrilled and always questing for the truth. Congrats on Nirvana. It's genuinely an extraordinary accomplishment.

2:09:51Matt Johnson:It's a huge compliment that you liked it. And I mean that. I am I'm totally grateful thank you thanks Matt thank you to Matt Johnson

2:10:05Sean Fennessey:thank you to Adam Naiman thanks to CR thanks Amanda thanks to our producer Jack Sanders for his work on this episode thanks to Lucas Kavanaugh for additional production support next week Wesley Morris returns it's time for the 6th annual alternative Oscars are you ready?

2:10:21Chris Ryan:I'm excited

2:10:21Sean Fennessey:I'm excited as well we'll see you then

2:10:27Thank you.