How ‘BlackBerry’ Director Matt Johnson Used His ‘Broke Filmmaker Tools’ With a Multi-Million-Dollar Budget to Tell a Great Canadian Story (EXCLUSIVE)
variety.comManori Ravindran Executive Editor of International After breaking into NASA to make his last movie, “Operation Avalanche,” one would think that “BlackBerry” — a film that, on paper, sounds like a standard book adaptation about a Canadian boom-and-bust story — would be a walk in the park for Matt Johnson.
For anyone else, it might have been. But short-cuts don’t compute for the Toronto-based helmer. His outright rejection of Hollywood’s camera tricks in place of a wild do-it-yourself approach has made him one of the most radical new voices emerging from Canada.
In “BlackBerry,” which world premieres on Friday, Johnson tackles the story of one of Canada’s greatest modern inventions, the BlackBerry mobile phone — tracing its spectacular ascent into a global phenomenon that brought email to users’ fingertips, to its tragic downfall in the wake of corporate mismanagement and the dawn of Apple’s iPhone. “It’s an odd couple, that’s for sure,” Johnson admits. “I would never have thought that I’d be making a movie about, like, a technology company.” The 37-year-old director broke out with 2013’s “The Dirties,” a documentary-style narrative film, made for around $10,000, about a pair of cinema nerds who are bullied terribly at their high school and exact revenge through a school shooting.
Johnson actually enrolled in a high school in order to access real students and film scenes between classes. The movie went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance, and was picked up by Kevin Smith’s Phase 4 for North American distribution.
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