Through a series of unexpected events I found myself anxiously waiting in the modernist, glass hallway of the business suite at CitizenM in Glasgow City Centre. My anxiety was due to the fact that I was about to meet Matt Johnson to discuss his upcoming film Blackberry which he wrote, directed and starred in. “Hello, I’m Matt,” he extended a friendly hand to me. Of course, I already knew this. I was intimately familiar with his Viceland series Nirvana the Band the Show which I had binged over the Lockdown of 2020. It was a show that had ironically kept me sane despite it’s delirious insanity, centring on a band called Nirvana (no relation) as the two members try and get a show in Toronto using a mixture of scripted comedy and real world situations that push the boundaries of art and being a public nuisance. I told him I loved the show and that I was somewhat nervous before the interview. “I love it too, I still can’t believe we did some of that stuff. Like have you seen that episode where we steal an artifact from the museum?”. Before I knew it we were comparing our favourite scenes in the show and what I had assumed would be a serious interview quickly spiralled into informal riffing.
Matt Johnson’s Blackberry is a similar experience, it takes its serious topic but spins it on its head through Johnson’s trademark absurd humour. The film details the rise and fall of the Blackberry Smartphone and follows the company’s founders, played by Jay Baruchel and Matt Johnson, as they grapple with the seedy corporate world and the seismic shift in tech with the introduction of the iPhone. “I wanted to take something very serious and almost boring on its face, as an entry point for audiences,” Johnson explained. “All my other work from Nirvana the Band to even the kids’ show I made are difficult for audiences to find and to approach, almost intentionally. Like, the camera work is challenging, the storytelling is challenging and the acting is challenging. I don’t mean challenging as in it’s high art, it pushes audiences away and forces them to stick around”.
Though this is not Johnson’s first film, this is bound to be one of the first films that a wider audience will see. It is a gentle introduction to him as a director, writer, and comedian. “I knew this was going to be different because, with a concept like the Blackberry phone, it was going to attract an audience of people who one; never [seen] my films before and two; had maybe never even seen low-class cinema like the kind that I make before.”
Low-class might be somewhat underselling what Johnson is doing here but his point is valid. He is taking a genre of modern biographical filmmaking and refitting it from the inside out to facilitate his hectic and anarchic predispositions. Key to the delivery of this is Matt Johnson and his portrayal of Douglas Fregin. Doug is a carefree tech nerd, completely lost in his world of dial-up, playing Command & Conquer, and hosting the tech giant’s movie nights every Friday (always quick to point out it is sacrilege to work on movie night). He is the focal point for much of the movie’s humour and a peephole into Matt Johnson’s world of satire in an otherwise dry and serious world of tech.
I asked Matt Johnson what drew him to play Doug, and he had levelled with me that it wasn’t his intention when writing it. “There are two answers to this, the first one is that Jay [Baruchel] had said he wanted me to play Doug, he said: ‘I want you to play the guy opposite me, cos that’s going to make it more fun for me’. So that was my first piece of motivation. The second one was that I knew that Mike and his character were not going to be verbose and weren’t going to be doing a lot of improvised chatter with the other engineers, and so I thought: well how am I gonna get these engineering scenes to seem alive and big?”
The tech engineers that surround Mike and Doug are in fact Matt Johnson’s friends, a lot of what we see in the first coming together of corporate investor and future Co-CEO of BlackBerry Jim Balsillie and the team at Research In Motion is all ad-libbed. “It was just easier in the end for me and my friends to play those engineers than it would have been to cast all those roles with strangers and to have some named actor at the level of Glenn and Jay to play it. So while certainly, the marketing of the film suffered greatly because no one gives a damn about me and nobody cares that I did the movie. It certainly made the movie way, way easier and I think more realistic.”
Matt Johnson isn’t particularly concerned with pleasing everyone. He wants this to be his breakout within a wider audience than he previously had exposure to however is still very much filmmaking of a singular, slightly off-kilter vision. I lauded my praises for the film, telling him I thought his ambitious entry into the world of mainstream cinema was a successful one and hope he did too. His response was, “Pssh… I have no idea. I think human beings want to see archetypal stories told through a new lens over and over and over again because they help us remember who we are. We like to be reminded about our own human history and I think Blackberry in many ways is an archetypal story about people who think they have changed everything and then relax and go, ‘ahh! I’ve done it’ and then they sit on their throne and do nothing. A bit like, well I mean, stories in the bible *laughs*.”
Before I left him, I had to ask. When is the third season of Nirvana the Band the Show coming out? He gave me a muted response. While a large portion of the third season was shot, a legal dispute and the termination of the Canadian branch of Vice had led to an indefinite ETA. In a rather depressing example of life imitating art corporate nonsense had somewhat scuppered Johnsons passions. “It was only recently that we got the rights for the show back and now we’re looking for a new place to air it but it’s funny, during that legal back and forth I started making Blackberry and so it’s almost as if I had to take a break from the show in order to make this movie and only now that this movie is coming out do I have a chance to go back and look at this Nirvana the Band stuff. So I’m hoping that Blackberry does well enough that I can release season 3 of the show because that would be my ultimate dream, that’s my favourite thing I’ve ever done.” We can only hope.
‘Blackberry’ is out now in UK cinemas.
