Matt Johnson Interview (September 14, 2024)

I've always wanted to ask you about the way you use music in your work. Something that really struck me was when I was watching BlackBerry and then Slint just came on. What has your relationship with music looked like throughout your life and how has that affected your filmmaking?

When I was young, I never listened to music at all. I was so intimidated by music and popular music in a major way. I always saw music, especially music that other kids were listening to in school, as being the proof that you were with it, and because I didn't understand it, I was afraid to even approach it. So I never even owned CDs or listened to music casually because I saw it as something that was slightly scary. It was only when I started making my first videos that all of a sudden I had permission to listen to music because I needed to use it in the edit. When I was quite young, what brought me into movies was editing. It was kind of the dawn of commercially available nonlinear editors and because I had no sense of story and I couldn't record dialogue, all I could do was edit silent video that I would put to music. So I wound up being forced to find songs that would work with these images that I shot. I had this awakening as a young person where I was like, oh, the synthesis between these two things is something that not only I really love, but I feel like I understand it. I felt like... there's moments in The Dirties when I'm editing. It's a very specific moment. I'm sitting at a computer like this [Matt is sitting at Stan’s desk in Posteritati] and I'm editing a montage to music and then it cuts out of it [Matt re-enacts scene from The Dirties] ... it's funny, I don't even understand my own work enough to know why that was so meaningful to me. But I knew that the process of me as a young person editing footage of my life to music that I thought was relevant or cool was giving me a feeling of my youth at that time. It had a power beyond what I felt when I just heard the songs or what I felt when I would just conceive the scene in my head. I got so addicted to that that when it came time for me to start making movies all the time, I would always start seeing certain scenes with music, and when scenes wouldn't work, I found that I could just find songs that I loved and make the scenes work by just cutting them to it. That's something that I share with my editor, Kurt. But even when I was making the web series of Nirvanna the Band the Show, the montages that I would cut, specifically cultural montages…Do you remember the opening credits of Blackberry? How it's all of those different things to...

To Elastica!

Yes! If you could see the videos I was editing at Christian Camp when I was 15, they look exactly the same. It's something that– it's almost like taking the zeitgeist and distilling it to a sequence with music. Maybe I'm deluding myself, but to me, the whole reason that I wanted to make movies was to kind of create these time capsules of an emotion and a feeling that you just couldn't get. When Pirate Bay was first starting, there was a really big trend of editing anime footage to Radiohead songs or other music that fans would be putting out. It was hugely influential to me. I remember... Oh man, I wish I could remember this one video. We could probably pull it up. [Matt opens up Stan’s YouTube] I love that this computer is open. I haven't watched this since I was like a little, little kid. Let's see here… [Matt proceeds to scroll through every Radiohead anime edit on YouTube trying to find the one he watched as a kid and clicks on an Evangelion, Fake Plastic Trees video] No, this isn't it. But you can see other people have caught on, right? Like this has become a big thing. You get the idea. But yeah, holy shit, this thing basically made me realize, oh, I get it. I can do this, but I can do it with things that are important to me. I think it was actually to Akira. Let's check it out. [Matt searches again and finds it.] Yeah. This may be it. We won't be able to hear the music, but this may be it. So I saw this when I was, I don't know, 14, 15, something like that. This combined with what I was doing at Christian Camp led to that. You asked specifically though about Slint – when I'm preparing a movie, I don't know how, but somehow the collective unconscious will get certain songs to me. Whether I'm driving with somebody and they'll put a song on or I'll just randomly be listening to music for some reason, which I actually never do. I only listen to music when I'm making a film, it’s the only time–other than The Smiths, who I listen to every once and a while– and I'll hear a song and I just know immediately. I've been a huge fan of that album from when I was a kid, but I knew that that song would be in Blackberry at a pivotal moment. I just knew it. From the beginning of the script, I put it in the first draft and it was the only song that stayed from the first draft right to the end. My friends all told me I was crazy. They were like, why? This doesn't even make any sense. It's not cool. It has no energy to it. Then it was when we saw it in the edit, we were like, oh, no, damn! I can't explain it. There's something about it where when you see it, if you know, you know. It's like a secret language that only some people speak, but a lot of people do, you know. Somehow, when movies do it right, it's like the hand of the filmmaker reaches out directly to you and you go, oh, well, this is made for just me. You feel like you're alone in the theater. That is what for me, music in movies does more than anything else, more than jokes, more than tone, more than images. It's the use of music in movies that makes me feel like I understand the voice of the filmmaker. I love it–and I think it's funny. I think using certain songs sometimes can be hilarious. In Nirvanna the Band, we do it all the time, playing songs just at the right moment, and they make me cry. I don't know. There's something about the sincerity that music can bring specifically to my own work, which is in some ways so insincere and so goofy that the collision between those two is just kind of extremely satisfying.

That makes me think of the original web series, that one shot of you with the “I'm sorry” pumpkin and your Daniel Johnston “Hi How Are You?” shirt–

That was actually a reference to Gus Van Sant's “Last Days”!

Does Gus Van Sant have a big influence on your work?

You'd think so because of Elephant, but no, not at all. I'm an Elephant Hater. I find the performances to be both lifeless and very amateurish. I watch them and I’m like, I've never met a kid like that in my life. When we went to make The Dirties and there were all these comparisons to Elephant, I always felt like, did you guys ever talk to a high school student before in your life? Nobody acts like that at all. I found it, not offensive, because I'm really not offended by anything, but the idea that people were watching Elephant and seeing it as such a, sincere artistic take on something so violent–it seems like a low effort experiment where Gus Van Sant basically took high school students that he thought looked good and moved them around like chess pieces and then had them kill one another kind of for his own selfish pleasure, which is a fairly dark read on what is going on in that movie. But I didn't feel any humanity at all in that movie. But that said, I love the film Gerry. I think Gus Van Sant's Gerry is amazing. That had a huge influence on me, the way that they talk, the way that they're always talking in code. I'm a huge Casey Affleck fan. And Last Days, aesthetically, we thought it would be hilarious to make a Nirvanna the Band episode that was a rip off of Last Days just because of the Kurt Cobain side of it. And Cobain wore that Daniel Johnson shirt in a very famous photo.

When you were making Nirvanna the Band, how did you land on Nirvanna? Why Nirvanna?

It was as stupid as it seems. We were thinking like– what is the one band? Because I was your age when I made that, right? And so the premise that Jay and I fell in love with was... It gets back to this whole me being afraid of music and thinking that music is so cool and intimidating that I couldn't be a part of it. We were trying to play these characters who were so divorced from the culture and what people our age really should have thought was cool and ironic. We wanted them to unironically not know that that name was not appropriate for a band. It just seemed like there was no other band that embodied being with it more than Nirvana did. And so that's why... I mean, I don't even know if I would have been able to express that at that time, but that's why we named it that.

Can I ask about the movie? I know you guys just wrapped– You’ve been working on this project for such a long time, this particular story and characters. How do you keep that interesting to you? How has the movie developed since the show?

I mean, in my opinion, the magic of Nirvanna the Band, the show is that the characters never grow and they never develop. But it's inevitable that as Jay and I get older, that the way we approach them is going to change. I would say the real bedrock of that series and those characters, for me, is Calvin and Hobbes. No matter what, when you open up a Calvin and Hobbes story, Calvin is going to be Calvin. Bill Watterson wrote that book for a decade and Calvin never got older. He was perpetually the age that he was. I feel like, because somehow Jay and I were able to access our prepubescent selves in those characters, we would be able to return to them at almost any point in our lives. They would be fundamentally still the same people because they are who we were when we were 12, 13 year old boys. So that person is frozen inside me. I mean, now it's much harder to be offensive in the way that I used to be and it's a lot harder to be as embarrassing because we know so much more, but in other ways it's exactly the same and the characters are still exactly the same.

Does that ever feel constraining though? To continue doing the same sort of style and the same characters for so long–

If I had to do that forever, like let's say I was still making that TV show, then maybe I'd be like oh I'm done with this, but that says less about the characters and more about the process of making it. It's very, very challenging to make that show because every time we go to shoot we don't know what's going to happen. Things are always changing the plot. It's such a dynamic process and you need to pay such close attention to it. I have tried making Nirvanna the Band the Show where I am like 50% not paying attention and it spirals out of control. It's like making origami. You can't half-ass it at all. It’s very tiring and we all get exhausted by that, but it's also so rewarding because it's such a small group of people. It's my favorite project I've ever done in my life.

It's also my favorite project of yours. I go back to it so often. It just never gets old for me too. Something else I wanted to ask about, because this is also relevant to Matt and Mara– you always play characters named after yourself. How do you remain separated from that when you’re acting and why are you always playing a “Matt Johnson”?

You mean separating yourself from characters? That's not something I ever think about at all. Have you ever read this great book called Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth?

You just said this in the movie! You mentioned that too, exactly the same!

Do I? Yes. That's great. That's art imitating life. Oh wow, wait a minute. I give this speech in the movie, don't I? Where I say there's nothing you can admit to in real life. Oh wow this is crazy. That is how I feel. That's the truth. When I was saying that to that class that was truly my opinion. I read that book and I thought oh my god this is all real but he's admitting to basically sexual assault and crimes. He's admitting to it. I finished the book–and it's one of the greatest books I've ever read in my life. It's hilariously funny and I realized oh anything I do on camera, no matter what it is, no matter how crazy it is, no matter how far it is from me…It will always be viewed through the lens of performance and so I will always be separated from it and because of that I lean into it as much as I can in a way to almost exercise these things from me– where I'm trying to be like how mean can I be, how crazy ugly can I be, how cruel can I be to my friend Jay? As a way of almost feeling where the walls in the room are in my own personality so that when I'm in a situation, even like this speaking with you, I have a very good sense of my boundaries because I've explored them in a space that is maybe not necessarily safe but is in the safety of performance, which I found psychologically very useful in my adult life. Very useful.

What is the difference in your practice between directing a film and acting in a film, like in Matt and Mara? How does it feel to be on each side and separating yourself there too?

I hear this question get asked to a lot of directors who act, and I've heard of a wide variety of answers but most of them come down to the idea of being a control freak or seeing how you do things differently or wanting to be in more of a position of leadership or authority. I do not feel that way at all. I see it as a vacation. I think it is an unbelievable stressor to be in charge of how a movie is going to get finished and how something is going to be made to be good in the end and to have that off of my shoulders. In fact my dream career would be that I could just show up to other people's movies, act and then leave. That is like– I'm amazed that's even a job. It seems unfair that people get to do that for a living because obviously, I'm not a good actor, but it is so fun and easy and people treat you– Have you ever been on a film set before? People treat the actors like they are the most important people in the world and like they're more important than anybody. If you're on a film set with an actor, that actor is more important to everybody than like their entire family in that moment. They're being treated like they've descended from heaven and I would like to be a part of that lifestyle.

How did you get to the point of making “The Dirties” and how did you fund it? How did you get everything you needed to do to finally make a feature film?

So I had made the Nirvanna the Band web series for about two years with Jay and Jared and by total accident, I had trained myself on how to make short story-style fake documentary films. I wasn't trying to do that. I was trying to just make a comedy web series that was plotless. I was almost trying to do sketch comedy on the internet, but it morphed itself into a serialized narrative show and by the end of it, I was sick of making that show and me and Jay's relationship was quite strained because we've been living together and working on it for so much. Talking about The Dirties, the early days–I had finished shooting the series and thought okay, I feel like I know how to shoot things that are fake documentaries now, what should I do? And my good friend Josh Boles had just watched the Belgian film Man Bites Dog and he said I just saw this film where it's a fake documentary but a serial killer and the serial killer is kind of charming, and he said you should play a serial killer in a fake documentary, you'd be great at it! He started putting together the idea for this school shooting movie and I thought oh my god this is so smart, this is such a great idea. So I went to Jared and my other friend Evan Morgan and I said we should make a movie exactly in the style of Nirvanna the Band the Show except about me as a high school student who's planning a school shooting and the audience doesn't know if it's a joke or not and I already owned the cameras from making the web series so we just took those cameras and started shooting. Evan said he knew a guy named Owen who went to camp with him who had a very similar register in terms of his voice and he said that we talked the same and I was like that's good enough for me, so we cast him on the spot and started making the movie. We had no money, between spending money on food and knick knacks and things like that, we probably spent about ten thousand dollars all together of our own money to do it but because the process was so cheap– we're making a fake documentary we didn't need to get money from anywhere.

And the fake documentary style is something you’ve continued to do–

Well I love that aesthetic. I love documentary aesthetics. I always have. I like documentaries more than I like movies, a lot more. I feel like for some reason the language of documentary cameras is more useful for the types of stories I like to tell, even Blackberry we use that aesthetic even though it's not a documentary at all. I'll stop at some point. The film I'm making now is not going to use zoom lenses so we'll see, maybe it'll end my career. Wait no, I'm making a movie before that...

Do you have any general advice for young filmmakers in terms of what they should be doing in order to start making feature films?

Yes I do and it's that every young person I meet believes that there is something standing in their way. But nothing is standing in anybody's way. People tell themselves this story as a way to not have to face the difficult reality that the person standing in your way is yourself and your worst enemy in your life will always be you. You are going to be the person who says oh I'm not smart enough or I'm not good looking enough or I'm not a good enough writer and this stands in the way of almost any achievement that you want to make in your life. You will tell yourself you're not good enough one thousand times more than somebody will stand in your way and be like I don't want you to actually do this because you are young or a woman or not right for this or that. That is a complete myth. You are going to get in your own way more than the world will get in your way, and as soon as you realize that it's quite freeing because then you go oh, so I guess I can just go and make a fanzine on my own because I don't need anybody's permission because nobody cares. Everybody is both narcissistic and deeply concerned with how they are coming off that they do not have the time or energy to sabotage somebody else, and if you just take the initiative to go do something– anything, if you go do anything and you stick to it, you will be successful. But it's very painful to get over the self-doubt and looking in the mirror and being like oh actually I hate myself. I was born very lucky in that I have no negative self talk for whatever reason. I was born with a very bad concussion and then I had a babysitter who hit me in the head with a frying pan when I was two. She said I ran into a doorknob. Then I was hit by a downhill skier when I was seven and so I had these three successive concussions that have left me with…I never tell myself negative things ever, but I hear that many people do. If you do, you should stop.