How ‘BlackBerry’ Director Matt Johnson Used His ‘Broke Filmmaker Tools’ With a Multi-Million-Dollar Budget to Tell a Great Canadian Story (EXCLUSIVE)
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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.
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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.
His next film, the 2016 conspiracy thriller “Operation Avalanche,” again employed Johnson’s documentary-style approach to more ambitious subject matter: the story of CIA agents who infiltrate NASA and try to fake the 1969 moon landing. This time around, the pic went to Sundance and was snapped up by Lionsgate.
“You’d think this would be a lot easier,” says Johnson of “BlackBerry.” He joined the project after being approached by producers who had optioned the book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry,” by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, reporters at Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail.
“When I first started working on it, I was like, ‘I don’t have to shoot with any real people. I can write everything down beforehand. There doesn’t have to be any improv!’ But this turned into an eight-month investigative journalism journey for me and my producer [Matt Miller].”
That’s largely because Johnson quickly realized that McNish and Silcoff’s book, as expertly reported as it was, was still “fairly dry journalism,” says Johnson.
“[BlackBerry] founders Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie participated at some level in the writing of the book, and agreed to be interviewed, so it really didn’t speak to any darkness within these guys, which is what I was interested in.
“I thought what I’d be reading was what personally went wrong between them, but it just kind of alluded to it a little bit. I thought, ‘Oh, I bet if I can flesh this out and try to figure out what drove these guys, I’ll find something interesting.’ I thought I could do some investigative journalism on my own to figure out what these people were actually like.”
With the guidance of his long-time lawyer Chris Perez of Los Angeles law firm Donaldson Callif Perez — whom Johnson speaks of as one would a parent — the director read “everything that’s been written” about Lazaridis and Balsillie. He then sought out his own sources, and tracked down a significant ex-employee — “a bit of a prankster,” describes Johnson — who had played a key role in BlackBerry’s early years but had since retired to rural Quebec.
The former staffer provided diaries he’d kept from the period that ended up being the “central document” for the whole movie, providing guidance for everything from sets to clothing. He was also the inspiration for Johnson’s goofball character Doug, who’s effectively a composite of the ex-employee and BlackBerry co-founder Doug Fregin.
“We [would] break into places and sneak around before we started shooting,” Johnson says, detailing how he was “dead set on shooting in all the actual locations these guys were in” rather than studio backlots.
“I love things being real,” says Johnson. “The more that we get right, the more permission I feel we have to do things that are really crazy.”
“BlackBerry” stars Jay Baruchel as the nerdy, tech wunderkind Lazaridis who founded the Waterloo, Ontario-headquartered Research in Motion, while Glenn Howerton plays the shouty Balsillie, an unlikeable corporate shark who turned RIM into a real business. Both are actors best known for their comedic chops, though the film is far from a comedy. “I like working with comedians,” shrugs Johnson. “I think comedy actors — especially if they’re good — can be the best dramatic actors in the world.”
The movie received plenty of buzz from the outset, largely driven by nostalgia for the BlackBerry combined with intrigue about Johnson’s approach. Audiences won’t be disappointed. Tonally, “BlackBerry” falls somewhere between “The Social Network” and “The Big Short,” and succeeds in zeroing in on the fraught relationship between the company’s CEOs, as well as the frat-party vibes of the fledgling Research in Motion. Howerton, in particular, knocks it out of the park as Balsillie in a portrayal that isn’t exactly kind, but isn’t “sadistic” either, as Johnson points out.
Neither he nor Lazaridis were involved in the film, though Johnson says his “secret dream” is to hold a Toronto screening following by a Q&A between him and Balsillie. “That’s what I would love,” says the director. “I think that would be so funny.”
“BlackBerry,” which was co-financed and sold internationally by XYZ Films, was snapped up by IFC Films in the U.S., Elevation Pictures in Canada, and has now sold internationally to Paramount Global Content Distribution. His next film features “Stranger Things” star Finn Wolfhard and “The White Lotus” actor Fred Hechinger and tells the story of a young Canadian investigative journalist who helped crack Vice’s connection to a massive 2015 Canadian drug bust in Australia.
It feels like Johnson is miles away from where he started. His relationship to his own fame is in some ways reflected in his oddball “BlackBerry” character, who’s desperately trying to hold on to his buddies’ old way of doing business despite the fierce current pulling Research in Motion into uncharted waters. Johnson, who vows never to leave Canada, hopes he can do both.
“What happens is, as soon as you have any success and you have money to do things, you can’t shoot in the street anymore. You can’t shoot with people who aren’t members of an acting union anymore. You can’t point a camera anywhere you want. You can’t shoot any time of day. These luxuries that as a young person you think are not luxuries, you don’t realize these are tools that you have. And so, for me, a lot of it was trying to reintegrate those broke filmmaker tools into a multimillion-dollar feature film, because that’s the real sweet spot.”
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