The Toronto-based filmmaker, actor, and writer stops by to tell us what he's been into.
February 26, 2026
Matt Johnson is a Toronto-based filmmaker, actor, and writer. He’s behind films like The Dirties and BlackBerry, and he previously directed, co-wrote, and co-starred alongside Jay McCarrol in the cult mockumentary series Nirvanna the Band the Show. The show follows the hijinks and hilariously elaborate schemes of a band called Nirvanna the Band as they gun to play their debut show at The Rivoli. Its film continuation, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, premiered at SXSW last year and has its theatrical release this month. I strongly implore you to see it in theaters while you still can because it is so, so awesome. Matt has also directed the upcoming A24 biopic Tony, about Anthony Bourdain, so keep your eyes out. Lucky for us, Matt’s here to tell us what he’s been into.
WHAT Matt Johnson IS INTO...
Sign up for free to unlock this article
(and hundreds more!)
👾
Their big hit game, the biggest game that everybody knows them for is the Hades series. Hades won Game of the Year, I think, four or five years ago. And they, for me, are what to aspire to as an artist. They’re a company of really like-minded people who just put everything they have into their products. And it sounds funny because it’s like, oh, a video game. In some ways, I think certain people would think, how deep could it be? But specifically the game they just released, Hades 2, which is about the Greek pantheon of gods and how they interact with one another. It’s a roguelike adventure game where you could play it and think, oh yeah, I’m just playing a little action game. But for me, their games open up a whole world of story. You’ll see the theme of a lot of these things: the big influences on me as a filmmaker and storyteller are almost always games. I get so much out of games, and I think it’s because I find them easy to interact with. I love playing board games with my friends, and the little details that designers put into their games, I become addicted to. There’s this amazing idea in Greek mythology, which is that you have these really unbelievable characters, these gods, like Ares and Dionysus and Hades and Aphrodite, characters that represent a kind of crystallized human emotion. And I didn’t realize that the evolution out of those old gods into the world we live in now means we think of all of these things as just emotions that we all have. Like, I am angry. I am sad. I want to go party and drink. These gods were basically sublimated into emotions that now we all have, and it was something I was just so ignorant about. I didn’t realize that’s what had happened, what the modern psychological movement had done. And had I not played this silly video game, I would not have made that connection, which has become so meaningful to me in the movies I make. I love getting ideas from games. And I love the fact that there’s a developer who puts so much work into what they do that I can tell, in every moment I’m playing their game. And like Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, they’re using super cheap aesthetics, almost the aesthetics of a video game almost from the ’90s, to tell their story. And that’s another thing I really appreciate.