Originally published as a limited-edition zine which was handed out at some local screenings & sold online. I only had 15 minutes on Zoom with them, so I feel like I barely scratched the surface of things I wanted to delve into! I hope you find something of interest here anyway.
MATT: I'm supposed to shoot a movie in New Zealand in the fall, so... maybe? Like, I'm sure I'll stop there.
MATT: Uhh... [after a pause] No.
JAY: [laughs]
MATT: It's a movie that's been announced, but... You know what, yeah, I shouldn't say anything, 'cause who knows. Where are you, Sydney or Melbourne?
MATT: I've heard that Melbourne is the big arts city. I'm often asked to go to MIFF by the woman who runs it. She calls me every year and is like, "Will you come and we'll do something," but it always coincides with me shooting a movie. Last year I was shooting the Bourdain movie, the year before that I was shooting this movie, the year before that I was doing something with BlackBerry. But I've heard that Melbourne is, like, the city.
MATT: For the 40-year anniversary, or the musical?
MATT: Yeah, same in Toronto.
MATT: Yes. It's so sad.
MATT: Very aware. You're not the first person to bring this up with me. I get made more aware of it every day. The first time it got brought up with me was actually when I turned 30, so a decade ago. Some film students screened it when I went to go give a talk at a class, and I thought, "Oh my God, this is just gonna keep getting worse and worse." [laughs]
That said, I stand by my young self. I don't want to crush the person who had those opinions. I look at myself in that video, and I'm wearing my hat from Nirvanna the Band - like, I'm clearly performing. The context is, those people had asked me to be in their documentary for film school, so I was in some ways trying to play to my audience, which was young people who felt dispossessed and like they'd never be able to make a movie, which at that time in Canada was basically reality. So, I don't want to stomp on the neck of my past self and be like, "I was so wrong to say that," but I do like the irony of it. I have become the manifestation of the devil that was chasing my young self, which I think is just great.
MATT: At that time in my life, I hadn't even shot The Dirties. I think we had just finished the webseries. So what 'working' even meant to me was a kind of scrappy, struggling thing. Have you seen the documentary Live Forever?
MATT: It's about the '90s Britpop explosion, specifically the war between Oasis and Blur. The movie is named after the Oasis song 'Live Forever', and there's this great moment where this guy is explaining the song and he says, "I think we all want to live forever, but just for a little while." And that's exactly what we get in life. At any moment, it's like we've got limitless time in front of us, and then we die. We all get to live forever for a little bit.
When I did that interview, the idea of being 40 years old was 20 years away. It was as much time as I had already lived. And I felt like I had already lived an entire, full life. Remember when you were a kid and you saw a teenager and you felt like they were, like, a god? And then you get older and you're like, "Wait a minute, those people were only four years older than me." It's the magnifying power of time. What's strange is that now, as I get older, it's like years mean nothing. The years crash against me like a wave and then recede.
JAY: But young people out there should be bold and take the power of their youth to the fullest. I don't want to dispel that idea, because it's a very empowering thing.
MATT: It's the only way you can give yourself permission to go out and behave as though you are already inside of the industry. So much of filmmaking is about giving yourself the permission to do it. More than anything, more than your resources or the state of your country, or even the state of your own mind, the major barrier is you deciding, "I can do this." Every film student I talk to, they'll tell me their story or what their problems are, and it all boils down to, "I am not brave enough to do this." Every single time. Every single time.
JAY: Isn't that amazing, that I actually said that? We're always giving so much credit to our editors [Curt Lobb and Robert Upchurch] for putting together that whole 2008 sequence, 'cause they had to go back and grab all the unused footage that we had from our webseries. We used to just improvise and shoot everything and anything, and somehow, when they were going through the tapes, they found this. They struck gold with that setup, for these old guys to confront their young selves. It is a very reflective moment to hear your young self saying, "I'm not looking forward to getting older." I have this little dark moment of facing my mortality at that young age, when I'm, like, 22.
And it's the truth. Back then, we only sort of knew how to improvise from what was really going on inside. I don't think I knew what we were shooting in that scene, so I was just saying what I was really thinking. I was talking about my real grandmother, who was at death's door, and I had the TV on and it was telling me about the H1N1 virus. That was just where my head was at at the time. It was a gift to be confronted with my younger self caught on tape, saying those things for real.
MATT: Yes.
MATT: I think it's absurd to have anything where you're expecting the audience to laugh that doesn't set up stakes where they really could lose something. I think Jay and I find truly pathetic things - and I mean that in the best sense of the word, like a pathetic display of vulnerability - those things are so much funnier than the best-written joke in the world.
I'll tell you one of my favourite moments in our TV show. It's so simple, but it almost makes me want to cry. An episode opens [Season 2's 'The Buddy'] and Jay's been invited to a party. That's it. He's going to a party, and he doesn't want Matt to go, so he's gonna go by himself. Matt has a plan he wants to do with Jay, but Jay's got something else to do. And this is a very common thing which happens with friends constantly, but for these characters, it is so heartbreaking. You can tell that Matt simultaneously wants to beg Jay to let him come along, and to kill him for rejecting him.
If you have a great relationship with somebody, a lot of it goes unspoken. A lot of it is things you just can't ever say. And that can lead to these misunderstandings or recalibrations, like in this movie, where one person believes the other one's holding them back, and tries to grow out of the relationship. And these things are only funny because they are deeply true. So, I find the ending of the film very emotional as well.
It's not like something like Dumb and Dumber, which is in some ways the opposite side of the spectrum. I don't mean to denigrate that film - it's a brilliant comic farce - but you're laughing at those guys almost to distance yourself from them. With Nirvanna the Band, you're like, "This is funny because I love these guys."
This is gonna sound ridiculous coming from me, but when I'm watching Nirvanna the Band the Show, what I'm thinking is, "This is just like me. I'm just like this." I recognise it is literally me, but I mean it almost at a deeper level. Like, these are the types of friendships I had when I was growing up, where you hurt somebody and immediately you realise, "Oh, that hurt me worse than it hurt them," and you're trying to find forgiveness.
You brought up Heated Rivalry, and I know you wrote an essay about The Dirties, so I'll bring it into a kind of male space, which is so different, I think, than the way that women resolve social issues with one another. I think the male tool set is particularly small when it comes to figuring out these types of relationship dynamics, especially when it comes to best friends. All of my films are in some way trying to play on that, without me even realising. It's not like I'm in control of it. But when two men have a really close bond, things become strange.
JAY: Yes.
MATT: Yeah, many times.
JAY: You're right! That's a very special movie in that sense.
MATT: I agree with you completely. And when I say my movies are dealing with a kind of restrained male psychological toolkit, Romy and Michele evades that by bringing it back to the high school mentality, right? I would say that adult men and teenage girls are matched in terms of their psychological sophistication, which Romy and Michele does perfectly.
JAY: Yeah, that's it. You said it. Their ideas of what they want in life are at odds, and this film gifts them each with what they want in such abundance that they learn that the balance of having each other is much better than getting what they think they want. But it happens in different pieces of the movie. Like, I love the moment after I say "I'm not looking forward to getting older," and my older self is very sad, but then Matt says, "You know, when you have a best friend, you don't even notice getting older." That's such a beautiful sentiment, and it changes Jay's mind right there, but then Matt turns on him and Jay loses that lesson [laughs]. It's in one ear and out the other.
MATT: Well, because it's forked! It's a forked lesson! Yes, a best friend is going to get you eternal life in a sense - or, I guess I should say, eternal youth - but that is going to come with some serious costs. Maintaining a friendship that long means that you've gotta twist yourself into a pretzel sometimes because you are still acting like you're 12 years old.
JAY: I think that when you have a relationship and a bond with somebody for a long time, you develop a lot of convictions about where you think you're right and your friend is wrong, in terms of just baseline, general ideas about life or how you handle things. You're in such lockstep with them, but over time, the things that make you different end up being these thorns, and you move away from them with such force you might end up overcompensating, where you try to say, "Well, I'm not like this. I'm not like you." But when you try to push away from them, you lose something in yourself. I think this film is about realising that nobody's perfect, and that some of those thorns are needed.
Interviewed on February 10th, 2026.