The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.
What keeps you interested in these characters? Because ultimately it’s the same premise every time: just trying to book a show at the Rivoli, right?
Jay McCarrol: Well, Matt and I have been channeling these pseudo-real versions of ourselves since we met each other, and it’s sort of been giving us the same thing our whole lives. Like we just enjoy egging each other on. We figured out a way to put every single influence in our lives onto these characters. And we have so many similar influences and things that we love… So there’s an endless amount of runway for us to put these characters through different parodies, and put them through different adventures, because we figured out they’re always going to fail and start right back at the beginning.
Matt Johnson: You know, the truth is the, our interest wanes… and I think that’s what refreshes it. It’s very Gilgameshian in that way. When we made the web series, we just stopped and we were like, “we’ll never do this again.” Then we made the TV series and Vice went of business and so we stopped. That was a little different because we had hoped that we’d be able to release the third season, but instead it was just like, “okay, well, this is completely over.” And so it is the distance away from it that then makes it seem brand new, and what’s so great is the movie deals with this idea in a way. I think the characters inside the project don’t ever change. But our own individual circumstances chang so much between each version that it’s almost like returning to this statue of ourselves, or this frozen version seems fresh, because we ourselves have changed so much. So I think that’s what, uh, keeps it interesting— and it’s a kind of an anti-answer because what keeps it interesting is that it loses our interest and we leave it and then we come back to it. And so I can see very much in another decade coming back to this and it seeming brand new all over again. And yet to the audience it seems like nothing has changed.
taking an idea and presenting it poetically makes it more true
What changed for you in how you approached this project, now that you’re both much more accomplished filmmakers?
MJ: I think the illusion that Nirvanna The Band creates with audiences is entirely due to the super-imposition of a three act Hollywood structure onto home video footage. And I think that if people realize that that’s all that’s happening, you do see behind the curtain quite a bit. Because the more movies I make (where I need to figure out how to hold an audience’s attention for the entire runtime), the more I realize that it’s all just about story structure. Of course acting and having performances that are credible might even be above that. But since Jay and I are playing ourselves, we sort of have that figured out. It’s not like we’re going to give false performances. Like it really is just us. The way we’re shooting is exactly the same as when we were in school. It’s exactly the same. We go to the street and just film on the same types of cameras. Really our trick is to give a character exactly what he wanted as the break into act two. So in act one, the character wants something so desperately that they’re willing to do anything to get it. And at this point (and most screenwriters don’t do this – they do the opposite: they put the goal further away from the character), I give it to them. And the character realizes, “oh my God, this is hell!” In this movie, Jay wants to be famous. Matt wants to spend all this time fucking around. We give them both exactly what they want. Jay, you’re the most famous person in the world; Matt, now there’s four of you and all they want to do is fuck around. They’ll do any plan you want. In fact, they’ll pitch you the plan. And they both realize this is just immiserating.
JM: We’re big fans of the “monkey paw” trope. It also helps that we’ve worked with the same filmmaking team through all these movies. We just keep getting better and better. And so we’re just constantly on a journey of taking the lessons learned to the next project. And I’ve been doing that too with the music and this was an amazing opportunity… because a film composer in my position, with my status in the film composing world, doesn’t normally get an opportunity to do a big orchestral thing.
What does the film actually look like on the page? Is there page?
JM: So there’s a group of us, and we come up with a story.
MJ: But this term is so vague. We don’t write!
JM: Well okay… We talk about a story.
MJ: Yeah.
JM: We start talking about what’s going to happen.
MJ: And it all comes from somebody saying something like, “we should do something big, like some big cinematic idea and we should use the footage of when we were kids,” and that’s all we had at the beginning.
JM: Yeah. And normally what happens is that Matt will take notes of what we’re talking about…
MJ: I don’t actually write in those first meetings— I write the things down when I go home.
JM: And he’ll just sort of synthesize everyone’s writing ideas and the story. And it really helps that Matt has a voice for writing. Even just taking a good idea and making it great. Just by the way he writes it, it doesn’t even change the idea. Every story idea has a kind of intentional voice that is consistent. And so when we get to read it back, it’s just on one page: this is what the movie is about, and then this happens, and then this happens. We want to simplify it like that. But it does help that he’s the one who puts it down and has the ability to write that sentence with a little more style.
MJ: Do you guys know the concept of the “poetic fallacy” of good ideas? I’ll teach it to you. It’s so brilliant. Okay, so there was this study of aphorisms, and test subjects were asked to rank the power of various statements for truthfulness. For example, “common problems create common foes.” And they present this to a group as a maxim. And then they present the very similar maxim “common woes create common foes” to a different group. And they asked both groups to rank the truthfulness of these sayings. It turned out that the one that rhymed outperformed the one that didn’t rhyme by a huge amount.
JM: So what’s the lesson?
MJ: It’s that taking an idea and presenting it poetically makes it more true. And that’s crazy because it’s the same factual statement as a non-poetic statement. And so if you and your friends are getting together and writing something, whether it’s a script or an idea or a song, and you can find a way to synthesize that into a sentence that feels good to say – as stupid and superficial as that is – it gives it a kind of numinous power that you can’t describe. And so when we all get together and write, really it’s just us in a room trying to make each other laugh. And what I liken it to… I heard this idea in a documentary about the Bee Gees and it blew my mind. Have you guys seen this Bee Gees documentary? It’s a must-watch about the creative process. Here’s how they describe songwriting: All of those big hit songs… They say they wrote those songs in a matter of minutes, and it felt – as they were coming up with the things and pitching them to one another – that they were all remembering the same dream they had the night before.
And that’s how it felt when we were getting together to come up with this movie. We’re all remembering something that happened…We’re not creating something, we’re all remembering it together. And so when I go home and I write this, it’s so simple because it sort of exists outside of us.
I know this is pretentious in a way, but it’s easier to write when it’s true. It happened. We all remembered it. Do you know what I mean? And it helps you to know when you’re on the right track because you can feel it in the room. Because everybody… they don’t say “that’s funny.” They say, “that’s true.” And how can a fake story be true? And yet we say it all the time. Yeah, that’s true. My favorite feeling when I’m watching a movie, even though they’re all fake, is I’m sitting in the theater and I’m watching what’s happening and I say to myself, “yeah, that’s true.”
It’s crazy. All my best friends are in books. They don’t exist. And so somehow we get tuned into that, and that’s the process. There’s no script. There’s this little two-page written outline that I share with everybody, and we all read it and laugh. We all laugh, and as we shoot, we go back and change little things. But the truth is I don’t remember rewriting it. We just kept it all in our heads.