{"id":610152,"date":"2026-07-29T15:26:18","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T15:26:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/610152\/"},"modified":"2026-07-29T15:26:18","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T15:26:18","slug":"matt-johnson-crosses-the-border-with-tony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/610152\/","title":{"rendered":"Matt Johnson Crosses the Border With \u2018Tony\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n Photo: Jon Laytner for New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n

On a leafy corner in Toronto\u2019s Roncesvalles neighborhood, Matt Johnson leads me into his apartment. The cozy one-bedroom he shares with his fianc\u00e9e features a washer-dryer squeezed into the kitchen, a coffee table doubling as storage, and living-room walls lined with movie posters: Back to the Future, The Fifth Element, Harmony Korine\u2019s Gummo. Along the narrow hallway, bookshelves burst with first editions of John Updike, battered Stephen Kings, graphic novels, dime-store paperbacks, board games, books about mythology, children\u2019s fairy tales, and Warhammer rule sets. Home is where Johnson reads, writes, and spends mornings, unless he\u2019s at the coffee shop up the street or at Zapruder Films, the production company he co-founded with longtime collaborator Matthew Miller, a 15-minute walk away. \u201cThis is a magic place,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Despite the July heat and the Ontario wildfires blanketing the city in a jaundiced haze, Johnson\u2019s practically bouncing as he watches me scan the bookshelves. Within seconds, he\u2019s pulling out things to show me. Updike\u2019s The Coup: \u201cIt\u2019s about a French African ruler who goes on an adventure and loves women!\u201d John Braine\u2019s Room at the Top: \u201cThis book utterly changed my life.\u201d Elena Ferrante\u2019s The Story of a New Name: \u201cHave you read this? Doesn\u2019t get better than that, eh?\u201d A thick spine reading \u201cCOMSTAT\u201d in the corner catches my eye. \u201cOh, that\u2019s funny,\u201d he says, retrieving what turns out to be a binder. \u201cThat\u2019s actually my Magic cards.\u201d Inside are neatly sleeved Magic: The Gathering collections, X-Men drawings he made with his brother as a kid, and, on the first page, his father\u2019s old business card with a young Johnson\u2019s scribbles. \u201cMy dad was in sales,\u201d he says. \u201cSales plus reading \u2014 that\u2019s the secret of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 40-year-old Canadian filmmaker is weeks away from the premiere of A24\u2019s Tony<\/a>, his first film produced within the American studio system, which is slated for release on August 7. Starring The Holdovers\u2019s Dominic Sessa as a young Anthony Bourdain, the film is a sorta-kinda biopic that draws inspiration from a few chapters of the late chef turned writer and travel personality\u2019s breakout 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential, zeroing in on the mid-1970s period when he first starts working in restaurants in the seaside haven of Provincetown, Massachusetts. Johnson\u2019s film reworks those pages into a classic coming-of-age tale: A young lout lies, runs away from home to chase a girl, stumbles into a dishwashing job, and gets his ass whipped into shape.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an unexpected choice for Johnson\u2019s Hollywood entry. His first two features were loose, low-budget films starring himself and made by messing around with friends; they were built on spontaneity and the belief that a movie reveals itself in the edit. 2013\u2019s The Dirties<\/a>, a found-footage comedy-drama produced in his 20s and populated with real students, sees him and collaborator Owen Williams embed in an actual Toronto high school as bullied, movie-obsessed teens filming a revenge flick, a premise that curdles into a portrait of Johnson\u2019s character as an edgelord school shooter in the making. His follow-up, 2016\u2019s Operation Avalanche<\/a>, again with Williams, pushes the guerrilla instincts further: The pair, posing as student documentarians, sneak into real NASA locations for a story about two CIA agents tasked with faking the moon landing in 1967.<\/p>\n

Running alongside those two films was the project that made Johnson a cult figure: Nirvanna the Band the Show<\/a>, an idiosyncratic late-aughts web series that became a Viceland show between 2017 and 2018. It follows fictionalized versions of Johnson and a friend, musician Jay McCarrol, as they pursue absurd schemes to get their band booked at the Rivoli, a once-storied Toronto venue. Each episode barrels forward with the logic of a live-action cartoon, hijacking the visual language of everything from My Dinner With Andre to Dog Day Afternoon, while cramming in references to pop culture, video games, and Canadian esoterica. Its public sequences, shot among unsuspecting bystanders, blur performance and reality. In Nirvanna, style is substance, an expression of Johnson\u2019s own culturally saturated persona, who\u2019s convinced, like a middle-schooler operating on Underpants Gnome logic, that reality will bend to sheer force of will.<\/p>\n

What started as Johnson goofing around with friends reached an apotheosis earlier this year with the release of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie<\/a>, a Back to the Future\u2013riffing feature integrating newly shot escapades with decades-old footage of Johnson and McCarrol that created unexpectedly poignant beats on growing older. The film earned rave reviews at SXSW, was acquired by Neon, and sent Johnson and McCarrol crisscrossing North America on a nearly sold-out screening tour. \u201cI didn\u2019t expect it at all,\u201d Johnson says. \u201cIt was very humbling.\u201d Once known mostly to Toronto cinephiles, he now routinely gets recognized on the street. Out by his apartment, a honeymooning couple from Santa Cruz, California, stops us. The starstruck groom says they attended a Nirvanna screening in San Francisco and he\u2019s a huge fan, and Johnson shares plans with the couple for the series\u2019 upcoming DVD release. \u201cI\u2019m happy you guys got married,\u201d he tells them as we part. Johnson will also be a groom in the near future; his wedding in Toronto is scheduled for the day after Tony hits theaters.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Photo: Jon Laytner for New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n

Johnson leads us into the Revue Cinema, the independent theater where he catches at least one film a week. (Among his movie takes: \u201cHeat 2 is a huge, huge mistake.\u201d \u201cWonder Boys is a great, sadly forgotten film.\u201d \u201cThe first half of Malcolm X is good and then it devolves into nonsense.\u201d) Gazing across the empty hall, he recalls marveling at how young the crowd was at the sold-out Nirvanna showings there. Youth is a thread he returns to often. He treats childhood as a wellspring, describing his Nirvanna characters as impersonations of real kids: how they speak and scheme, their playfulness and total disregard for social friction and boundaries. He talks about being shaped by childhood obsessions \u2014 watching Star Wars and Star Trek: The Next Generation, playing Magic: The Gathering under the covers by flashlight \u2014 and how motivated he is to pass that wonder forward. \u201cI was so spoiled with all of these cultural artifacts that I was literally drowning in them. It was, like, orgasmic,\u201d he says. \u201cAt the same time, I think it created in me a feeling of You owe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nirvanna expanded Johnson\u2019s profile, but it was 2023\u2019s BlackBerry<\/a> that transformed his career. The film turned the smartphone\u2019s rise into a story of two founders \u2014\u00a0Jay Baruchel\u2019s quiet, technically gifted Mike Lazaridis and Johnson\u2019s sweet, fun-loving Doug Fregin \u2014\u00a0bulldozed into a global empire by Glenn Howerton\u2019s screaming, shit-breaking Jim Balsillie. Prior to signing on, Johnson says he was \u201ca scumbag Toronto filmmaker that was totally broke but not upset about it.\u201d Years of shoestring productions had given him creative freedom, but Zapruder Films was running out of money, and with Viceland Canada having folded in 2018<\/a>, they couldn\u2019t make more Nirvanna. A longtime advocate for first-time filmmakers, Johnson had even considered an opportunity teaching film at the University of British Columbia, having loved his experience teaching at York University between 2018 and 2021.<\/p>\n

So when producer Niv Fichman brought Johnson and Matthew Miller a nonfiction book about BlackBerry\u2019s rise and fall that the CBC had optioned as a TV series, they expected to write the script, collect a paycheck, and move on. Johnson took the job partly out of patriotism; he was bothered that so few people knew the smartphone was a Canadian invention. He also found his way into the story by approaching its three leads as competing facets of himself: Fregin\u2019s innocence, Lazaridis\u2019s technical obsession, and Balsillie\u2019s megalomaniacal ambition. The hired-gun TV assignment morphed into a feature \u2014\u00a0Johnson\u2019s most conventional film to date \u2014\u00a0and he started going out to established actors like Howerton and Baruchel. \u201cIt was so much like that David Foster Wallace quote,\u201d Johnson says. \u201cWe thought we could do it cynically and it would have no effect on us. Then it rolled out of control.\u201d<\/p>\n

BlackBerry became a critical darling, earned a Golden Bear nomination, swept the Canadian Screen Awards, and landed on the National Board of Review\u2019s list of the best independent films of 2023. Hollywood started calling. Johnson had been developing another project (described as a \u201cTSA comedy\u201d), and Josh Safdie began flying him to New York to work on it. But many of the early opportunities \u2014 more biopic-adjacent, corporate-bro stories in the vein of BlackBerry, including an adaptation of Michael Lewis\u2019s Flash Boys \u2014 held little appeal. Among those was Tony, a Black List script by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe that King Richard producers Tim and Trevor White brought to Johnson. He initially passed, largely because he barely knew Bourdain\u2019s work. \u201cIn my head, he was no different from Guy Fieri,\u201d Johnson admits. He was also wary of taking on a figure whose legacy had been elevated into secular sainthood after Bourdain\u2019s 2018 suicide. \u201cHe clearly means a lot to other people,\u201d Johnson says. \u201cWhy would I step into the fray of something like that?\u201d<\/p>\n

The answer came through a lunch date with Dominic Sessa in New York. Johnson had loved Sessa in The Holdovers<\/a> and arranged the meeting, during which the two instantly hit it off. By that point, Johnson had moved past the Bourdain project, but discussing it with Sessa \u201ctransformed what was a kind of dull prospect into something shiny and new.\u201d Both were drawn to what this period of Bourdain\u2019s life represented: the unstable, unfinished years when someone is still inventing himself. Johnson pieced together the basic building blocks of the story on the spot. \u201cWe told A24 that we were thinking about making this movie, and they said, \u2018You\u2019re going to make this movie with us right now,\u2019\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n With Sessa filming Tony.
\n Photo: A24\n <\/p>\n

After leaving the Revue, Johnson waltzes us into Anchor Fresh Fish Market, a weekend favorite, for fish jerky. At the register, he points out the knife he bought, along with a dozen oysters, after figuring he should learn how to shuck while writing Tony. The movie is as much a biography of Bourdain as it is of Johnson. The character of Bourdain\u2019s mother, played by Dagmara Dominczyk, is directly inspired by Johnson\u2019s mother, a physician whose exacting standards both intimidated and shaped him. \u201cShe\u2019s a very sweet, nice woman, but as a child, I was terrified of her,\u201d he says. \u201cShe would often say, \u2018I love you, but I don\u2019t like you.\u2019\u201d (Their dynamic even surfaced in The Dirties, when Johnson filmed his mother without her knowledge, capturing her response to what she thought was a question from her son rather than his character: \u201cYou say a lot of wacky things. I don\u2019t know why you do that. For effect, I guess.\u201d) Like Tony\u2019s protagonist, Johnson grew up convinced he was meant for more. \u201cMy whole childhood, I was always told by my teachers and people in my outside-the-house world that I was destined for something,\u201d he says. \u201cThat was not my experience at home whatsoever. That left me with a feeling of Well, I had better do something.\u201d The young Bourdain\u2019s early self-mythologizing echoed Johnson\u2019s own instinct to invent himself before he\u2019d earned it: \u201cLying and manipulating \u2014 putting on a false identity of somebody who has achieved something even though I had done nothing \u2014 was a way to patch things over because I felt there was an expectation on me to be great.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tony imagines Bourdain as a young man trying on identities, sketched with just enough of the real figure\u2019s contours drawn from Kitchen Confidential to feel familiar: arriving in town in a crisp, light-blue seersucker suit modeled after Pierre Cardin; burning his hand on a blazing-hot cast-iron pan; witnessing a chef bone a new bride behind the restaurant. Head perpetually hung, Sessa\u2019s Bourdain is a gun looking for somewhere to point, caught between opposing role models: Leo Woodall\u2019s hedonistic, hypermasculine Masshole and Antonio Banderas\u2019s regimented, elegant face of the culinary world. That restlessness, and how it breeds a combustible urge to cross lines, shows up in a number of Johnson\u2019s creations. The Dirties includes a scene where Johnson\u2019s out-of-touch high-school character is in blackface, while the Nirvanna web series has bits that carelessly chase juvenile provocation, including stray uses of racial accents and slurs. Johnson sees that material as part of the messy process of adolescence, but it can come across as edgelordism, a term Johnson relates to differently than most. <\/strong>\u201cTo me, that is just the persona of a kid literally trying to find the edge of the social boundary that he\u2019s in. I find it so unbelievably addictive, and it animates me,\u201d he says. \u201cOf course, I\u2019m an adult now, and so that\u2019s been sublimated into a usable personality where I\u2019m not seeking out the edge at all times whatsoever.\u201d The Viceland series retains that boundary-pushing impulse but with more restraint and a sharper grasp on the joke being on its leads. When Johnson\u2019s character deadpans about Jewish people hating Christmas, for instance, the humor is rooted in watching him dig a deeper hole for himself.<\/p>\n

Johnson has been asked about those choices often enough that he notes he should have \u201ca canned answer by now.\u201d He views it \u201cin the way that I would look at any young person who\u2019s, in their own way, trying to find a way to be funny: I\u2019m completely openhearted about it.\u201d He feels sorry for the times the show didn\u2019t land the way he and McCarrol intended, but he\u2019s \u201ccompletely unjudgmental\u201d toward his younger self. Would he have done anything differently? \u201cAbsolutely not,\u201d he says. \u201cThat would be like me going back in time and slitting my own throat. It made me \u2014\u00a0for better or worse.\u201d<\/p>\n

Filming Tony was a bruising experience. \u201cIt was a combination of how I shoot movies colliding with the American system \u2014 and I mean colliding,\u201d he says. The sheer scale of the machine felt alien. Without his full production team, who couldn\u2019t join the Provincetown shoot because of visa red tape and cost, Johnson was a man stripped of his native tongue, learning on the job and unable to replicate his loose, experimental style inside the new infrastructure. He recalls a perfect Atlantic sunset and wanting to just let Woodall and Sessa exist within it while the camera rolled, an instinct that time and money wouldn\u2019t allow. \u201cIt\u2019s not like there was a single person saying, \u2018No, you can\u2019t do that,\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cI mean, sometimes there was. But the kid in me was not invited to set, to use a metaphor.\u201d Johnson, rarely prone to negative feelings, felt \u201ccomplete and total dread\u201d during the filming; exhausted near the end of the shoot, he was talking through a scene with Stavros Halkias when the comedian told him, \u201cOh, man, even you can\u2019t make it seem like this is a good situation anymore.\u201d He ultimately found his creative footing again after working with Miller to build the studio\u2019s trust, gain more control over postproduction, and reunite with his longtime creative team. (His usual editors, Curt Lobb and Robert Upchurch, cut the film, while McCarrol does the music.) \u201cI got to make the movie I wanted to make, even though we took the long road there,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Photo: Jon Laytner for New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n

The result is a surprisingly straightforward film. Tony is missing the electric How did they pull that off? audacity of The Dirties, Operation Avalanche, or Nirvanna and lacking the scruffy edges that made BlackBerry feel so alive. But it\u2019s still unmistakably a Matt Johnson film. After all, what are the pirate-ship kitchens Bourdain recounts early in Kitchen Confidential if not a more dangerous, adult version of the juvenile hijinks that have always fascinated Johnson? He also intermittently taps into something genuine about Bourdain as an individual and a symbol. In the movie\u2019s most potent scene, Tony spins a story for Nancy, the girl he\u2019s chasing (played by Emilia Jones), who believes he\u2019s in Provincetown on a writing scholarship and has no idea he\u2019s actually working in a kitchen. He describes a solitary writer\u2019s life \u2014 places he\u2019ll never visit, experiences he\u2019ll never have \u2014 intercut with images of him bonding with his kitchen co-workers: swimming, fishing, taking guidance from Banderas\u2019s chef. It\u2019s warm with the pleasure of watching this kid come into being and, for anyone who knows Bourdain\u2019s story, the implied person he will become.<\/p>\n

Johnson is currently working on another small Canadian film, a true-story caper about a Vice editor\u2019s side hustle as a drug-mule recruiter with Finn Wolfhard slated for the lead<\/a>. He\u2019s also developing an adaptation of Magic: The Gathering for Legendary, a job he first angled for a decade ago. He\u2019ll inherit parts of the Dune production apparatus for the project \u2014 storyboard artists, costume designers, locations \u2014 and if the cards fall right, it will be a trilogy. When I ask him how he feels about juggling his passion for small-scale projects with his friends and his growing Hollywood cachet, he answers \u2014\u00a0after a brief interruption when a fan stops to ask for a photo. \u201cI\u2019ve been really careful after the experience of making Tony, which wound up great,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m trying to only do projects where I feel like only I could do them, where it\u2019s really needed for me to be a part of it.\u201d But even he concedes there\u2019s no going back. \u201cIt\u2019s probably never going to be the same as it was when it was four or five of us making The Dirties and we were just at a film school, but I\u2019m trying my best to keep the spirit alive.\u201d He\u2019s fine if the bigger swings don\u2019t land. \u201cThere\u2019s no such thing as the Hollywood stuff \u2018not working out.\u2019 It\u2019s like asking the wrong person to marry you and they say \u2018no,\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cWould I be fine making small projects in Toronto for the rest of my life or even going back to teach at York? These are all great outcomes.\u201d<\/p>\n

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