ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke with Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’s Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol. The comedy duo discussed the new comedy movie’s wild Back to the Future parody, its challenging shooting, and gave a great update for Season 3 of the show. It’s out today in theaters nationwide. “When their plan […] The post Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie the Interview: How 2026’s Funniest Film Was Made appeared first on ComingSoon.net - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.
ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke with Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’s Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol. The comedy duo discussed the new comedy movie’s wild Back to the Future parody, its challenging shooting, and gave a great update for Season 3 of the show. It’s out today in theaters nationwide.
“When their plan to book a show at the Rivoli goes horribly wrong, Matt and Jay accidentally travel back to the year 2008. Blah blah blah blah blah,” reads the official synopsis.
Tyler Treese: Matt, obviously, you guys have a fondness for Back to the Future. I love that film too. You get to do your Doc Brown speech, which is very fun in the film. The time machine looks just like it. It’s incredible. What inspired you to do an entire movie-length riff on Back to the Future when you don’t have a crazy budget? This film is so ambitious and manages to pull it off.
Matt Johnson: The thing that landed on Back to the Future was the fact that we had the footage of us when we were kids, and as soon as we decided, oh, we are going to use this footage from 20 years ago, we needed a mechanism to get us there and it wasn’t always gonna be so Back to the Future Centric. If you’ve seen an episode of our show, like oftentimes we’ll bring in a number of different thematically adjacent properties and do them all at the same time. Like our Daredevil episode is also a Star Wars episode is also a King of Fighters episode. And so it’s also a Mortal Kombat episode. So, here we were like, okay, we’re gonna do a time travel movie.
At first, it was gonna be Back to the Future, but it was also gonna be Primer. It was also gonna be Live, Die, Repeat. We were gonna take elements from all of these different movies. But as we started writing it, we realized that the nature of the story itself was demanding that Back to the Future kind of be the centerpiece of it.
So we kind of waltzed into it being a true Back to the Future parody with the intention of having it be somewhat more vague and paying reference to a number of different time-travel films.
Jay, the Rivoli still being the goal is so funny to me. How important was it that these characters, at least Matt’s character, haven’t really grown in aspiration or goals? So we can tell the story that we see in the film.
Jay McCarrol: Well, not growing is a big theme of the movie and always an ongoing theme in the Nirvanna, The Band universe in our relationship, these guys both are dealing with different stages and wrestling different parts of arrested development and their sort of little bubble that they live in. So keeping the sort of immature and small-minded naivete of these guys alive really lent itself to us facing our younger selves. So we could really strongly address some of the themes that we’ve always had these characters go through.
And that’s why it’s fun for the people who have seen our show to like, watch these guys get the ultimate test of what has always been testing their friendship about when they grow. How much is Jay following Matt? How much is Jay facing his own? Sort of where am I going in this life? Do I like this Sian journey I’m on to get this show, or never get it at the Rivoli? And so yeah, it was important to us to, well, not that’s important to us, it just fell into place. We just really enjoyed doing it. And it was a gift that enough time has gone by that the time travel element just felt correct.
Matt, there’s a lot of candidly shot footage in the film, and that’s not new for you guys, but were there any specific challenges of shooting in Toronto? Especially because you’re more well-known now, and it’s just at a greater scale. Were there any unexpected challenges doing that?
Johnson: I’ll say to your second point of us being possibly well known, no, I don’t remember a single time when somebody noticed us from the TV show and then that causing us a problem. But it’s because specifically we shot in the most tourist-y areas in the city. We shot at the base of the CN Tower, at the skydome on Queen Street, on weekends. Like we were shooting in places where it’s mostly tourists or people who are coming from out of town. And that was a bit by design.
But in terms of how challenging that was, I mean some of that is the most difficult shooting I’ll probably ever do in my life. Like, there were things we were trying to make happen, like when we’re walking with that wheelbarrow with the cable going up to the CN Tower, like getting some of those shots and doing it the way that we did it was nearly impossible.
It’s so hard because you’re trying to get people to not laugh immediately at what they’re seeing and sort of take you seriously, but also not get so involved that they stop what you’re doing. And so we shot that sequence in particular, I think, over the course of like seven days, broken up. Same with all the stuff outside the CN Tower. We get to keep going back day after day after day to get like a few seconds at a time. But in the end, of course, it seems like it’s all just happens effortlessly. But that was the most challenging footage that we needed to shoot outdoors.
There are so many small moments in the film that I’m just thinking of. It’s gonna make me laugh. There’s a running scene, and then you just run into a raccoon. That’s such a small scene, but it made me laugh for 20 seconds.
Johnson: That raccoon seemed like it was on its own little mission that day. It was like Matt the raccoon and Matt the man met, and you could see we both had the same body language where our shoulders kind of went up, and we sort of checked each other out, and then we were like, “Okay.” Then he went on with his business, and I went on with my business.
McCarrol: It’s one of the benefits of rolling around with a very small crew with cameras ready to go, and you see a raccoon on the sidewalk, and it’s just action. There’s no script. We’re not gonna really plan anything. But so many moments like that happen and there’s tons of ’em that you would never know were just sort of these impromptu [opportune] times that we just press record on.
Jay, I wanted to ask, a lot of the interactions in this film were just mind-boggling to an American like myself, like getting through the security at the CN Tower, like the pliers and the parachute. The very nice libertarian guy was trying to save your lives when you were buying the pliers. How key is that sort of Canadian niceness to where you guys can be acting strange, and they kind of see the best in people, rather than being on high alert?
Jay McCarrol: You’re answering it, you said it very well there. And be that as it may, we were not expecting to walk through security at the CN Tower the way we did. But you know, I think what helps is that we’re trying to ride the line when we do involve real people, without hitting them with absolute ridiculousness, and we try to meet their eyes with a certain amount of sincerity.
So, at worst, they think that we’re just being incredibly naive, and if we’re taking and exploiting anything, it’s their generosity. You’re gonna find a lot of generosity on the streets in Canada. So that’s what makes it so fun to us, because you see these vulnerable moments that seem very private, but it’s just exposing how willing people are to just work with us. “What are these, just some pliers you want to take in? Yeah, that should be okay.” It’s like, “What are you guys trying to do what on the CN Tower? I really need to advise against this guys, let me help you out here.” That humanity to us is very, very funny.
Matt, when the time travel happens, and you get back to 2008, we see Bill Cosby, Subway Jared, P. Diddy, and the movie Hancock. We see all the real horrors of 2008 very quickly. How was it deciding what 2008 pop culture to lampoon?
Matt Johnson: We tried to just do everything. I don’t think we really made any choices. It was sort of the things that came to mind. Then the editors, Kurt and Bobby adding things as they went. Subway Jared was something that we weren’t even talking about, and then they found a moment to put in the edit. Because when we’re shooting, we never know what’s gonna make it or not, ’cause we shoot so much. We basically threw everything at the wall, and it was gratifying to see that they were able to use as much as they did.
Jay, hate to be the person asking immediately for more when we just got the movie, but are there still hopes for season three to be released? I know you guys had filmed some of that already.
McCarrol: Good news is Neon has got our TV show now, and we are gonna be releasing physical copies of seasons one and two. I think we can be very optimistic about season three being around the corner. So yes, we’re very hopeful, and we’re feeling good about it, and we have so much season three in the can. And even from the first part of our road trip effort of this movie, this has all been sequenced into season three episode ideas. There are episode ideas that are direct continuations from the time-travel movie. So we’re ready to go.
Thanks to Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol for taking the time to talk about Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.
The post Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie the Interview: How 2026’s Funniest Film Was Made appeared first on ComingSoon.net - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.
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