Matt John­son: ​“Peo­ple say ​‘Now you’ve got to make the Twit­ter movie’”

“I tried to make it small,” says direc­tor Matt John­son of Black­Ber­ry, his new tech dra­ma that some­how man­ages to make the epic rise and equal­ly epic fall of its epony­mous and once-ubiq­ui­tous pro­to-smart­phone feel inti­mate. ​“What I was real­ly drawn to was these young guys who didn’t realise what they were onto and were com­plete­ly trans­formed by their suc­cess. It’s very much like the indie-film­mak­er problem.”

This com­par­i­son isn’t too far off the mark. When we catch up with John­son he’s on the move, trav­el­ling non-stop from one end of Toron­to to the oth­er to meet an actor to dis­cuss a poten­tial role in his next movie (No, he didn’t tell us what it is). It’s a trek that sees him pow­er­walk, cycle and dodge both dogs and traf­fic, all while answer­ing our ques­tions via Zoom on his phone, like a low-stakes episode of 24.

Sim­i­lar to the char­ac­ters fea­tured in his new film, John­son is in the mid­dle of his own tran­si­tion­al rise, although it doesn’t seem to have sunk in just yet. ​“So many first fea­tures are made by a rag­tag group of peo­ple who have no con­cept of suc­cess, they’re just mak­ing some­thing because they love it,” he rea­sons. ​“Then, all of a sud­den there are all these things that didn’t exist when you were unsuc­cess­ful. That ten­sion and pres­sure cre­ates some­thing I’m very inter­est­ed in.”

It’s a vibe that’s cap­tured well in Black­Ber­ry, a film that isn’t Johnson’s first but def­i­nite­ly feels like the one that’ll do the most for his career. Land­ing on the scene with his script­less, Kevin Smith-pro­duced 2013 debut The Dirt­ies, the Cana­di­an film­mak­er played around with found footage and mock­u­men­tary before land­ing on his third and meati­est film to date. In Black­Ber­ry, he loose­ly adapts Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s book Los­ing the Sig­nal: The Untold Sto­ry Behind the Extra­or­di­nary Rise and Spec­tac­u­lar Fall of Black­Ber­ry, cre­at­ing a dark­ly fun­ny and most­ly true take on how a bunch of tech-obsessed losers changed the world.

To do this, he fol­lows Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Dou­glas Fre­gin (John­son), the geeky intro­verts behind the tiny start-up Research in Motion which cre­at­ed the Black­Ber­ry and first har­nessed the web-smarts need­ed for Apple to det­o­nate the smart­phone boom later.

When we first meet them, they’re going nowhere. Tired of being over­looked, Lazaridis hires busi­ness shark Jim Bal­sil­lie (Glenn How­er­ton) to get their pro­to­type the atten­tion it deserves and yank them into the big time. By putting his rep­u­ta­tion, liveli­hood and even­tu­al­ly his busi­ness morals on the line, Bal­sil­lie suc­ceeds. How­ev­er, with quick suc­cess comes new prob­lems, fresh com­peti­tors and some harsh life lessons learned dur­ing an emerg­ing mid-90s tech scene that’s still try­ing to fig­ure itself out.

“It sound­ed like an inter­est­ing idea for a Tro­jan Horse-style film,” says John­son on the appeal of lur­ing view­ers in with a weighty The Social Net­work-style dra­ma only to instead deliv­er a light­ly com­ic cau­tion­ary tale about tech’s Wild West. ​“I was fas­ci­nat­ed by the world of start-ups at the dawn of Web 1.5 where there was a gold rush to try and fig­ure out how to use the inter­net and new tech­nol­o­gy to make as much mon­ey as pos­si­ble. ​“The only peo­ple who had any famil­iar­i­ty with his world were under­grad­u­ates, so com­pa­nies were forced to hire young peo­ple,” he explains. ​“One of my main goals was to accu­rate­ly rep­re­sent what it was like to be in a fra­ter­nal cabal that, unbe­knownst to them, is rad­i­cal­ly chang­ing the world – even though they think they’re just fuck­ing around with their friends.”

To make things more authen­tic, John­son hired come­di­ans and his real-life friends over dra­mat­ic actors to pop­u­late a moment in time where busi­ness and ama­teur­ish play inter­sect­ed. ​“My orig­i­nal con­cept was that it was going to be much more reac­tive but as we start­ed work­ing on the sto­ry, we realised it was so tech­ni­cal, you could nev­er impro­vise,” he says, explain­ing how hav­ing some­one describe how to fix a cell grid didn’t real­ly gel with off-the-cuff quips. How­ev­er, hav­ing nat­u­ral­ly fun­ny peo­ple deliv­er his lines gave things an unex­pect­ed dose of real­i­ty amid all the high-stakes dra­ma. ​“Hav­ing them say all this prac­ti­cal, prob­lem-solv­ing dia­logue whilst still try­ing to be fun­ny peo­ple gave it a life,” he says. ​“It made it more realistic.”

John­son gets in on the action as Doug, Mike’s head­band-wear­ing, movie-night-lov­ing part­ner who watch­es help­less­ly as suc­cess evap­o­rates the fun atmos­phere from his once joy­ful com­pa­ny. Mean­while, Mike is the oppo­site in every way; a repressed per­fec­tion­ist who gets more than he bar­gained for with BlackBerry’s swift success.

“Jay typ­i­cal­ly brings a lot of phys­i­cal ener­gy to his per­for­mances but here he intro­vert­ed that. He took all of his impuls­es to move and fid­get and put them in a cage,” says John­son. ​“It comes through as some­one who’s always mad and unable to say what he wants to say. It’s like he had a caged mon­ster in him for the whole movie – and I love that. I think it’s the heart of the film.”

One per­son who has no prob­lem cut­ting loose is Bal­sil­lie, played here by It’s Always Sun­ny in Philadelphia’s Gold­en God, Glenn How­er­ton – com­plete with a shaved pâté. As the take-no-shit boss brought in to drag Black­Ber­ry into the mar­ket­place, he acts as the scream-hap­py dad to a bunch of rev­o­lu­tion­ary tech kids and gets to flex both his comedic and dra­mat­ic chops in the process.

“I knew Glenn was per­fect for this role,” says John­son. ​“We always tried to remem­ber that this guy had every­thing on the line. For me, I see Jim as total­ly prac­ti­cal. He’s try­ing to solve prob­lems and is will­ing to scream at you. The goal of that per­for­mance was to have audi­ences say ​‘I’d nev­er do what he’s doing but I under­stand why he’s doing what he’s doing,’” he adds. ​“That was key in terms of jus­ti­fy­ing his rage.”

Mean­while, How­er­ton ful­ly embraced the chance to play a real-life busi­ness­man with a tough rep­u­ta­tion and wast­ed no time get­ting into char­ac­ter, start­ing from the head down: ​“Right away, [Glenn] said ​‘I don’t want this to look fake’ so I wasn’t even giv­en the option to [use make-up]. He was like ​‘I’m shav­ing my head’ and that was that.”

In real­i­ty, it was a mix­ture of bad man­age­ment and indus­try change that led to BlackBerry’s down­fall. From ille­gal­ly back­dat­ed stock options used as staff pay incen­tives to the arrival of the iPhone, a device that offered users a touch­screen instead of a key­pad and access to every­thing all in one place – Black­Ber­ry went from dom­i­nat­ing 45% of the cell phone mar­ket at the peak of its pow­er to being noth­ing more than a nos­tal­gic mem­o­ry to mod­ern-day phone users.

Despite this rocky descent, John­son was keen not to point any fin­gers. ​“While we were mak­ing it, we thought for sure that the real Jim was not going to have a sense of humour about it but he’s since come to screen­ings and said he loves the movie,” he tells us. ​“I was stoked because I love him. This movie was made as a love let­ter to him, in some ways. He made bril­liant deci­sions and was a nec­es­sary piece of the company’s suc­cess. It wasn’t alto­geth­er his fault that things went bad.”

As John­son arrives at his des­ti­na­tion across town our con­ver­sa­tion sud­den­ly nears its end, leav­ing time for just a few final ques­tions. With Elon Musk seem­ing­ly deter­mined to destroy anoth­er Sil­i­con Val­ley giant, does he feel tech his­to­ry is doomed to repeat itself? ​“I’ve had many peo­ple say to me ​‘Okay, now you’ve got to make the Twit­ter movie.’ I’ve nev­er used Twit­ter before but I can see some con­nec­tions to that sto­ry,” he admits.

As for his own future, with Black­Ber­ry already receiv­ing glow­ing reviews State­side, it’s usu­al­ly at this point in a new filmmaker’s career that they cross paths with lightsabers or super­heroes. We won­der if John­son, who wears a head­band through­out our call mir­ror­ing his indie-spir­it­ed movie coun­ter­part, is wary of heed­ing his own story’s warn­ings about mov­ing too fast, too soon.

“I try to live my life in a way where if young peo­ple see my films, they leave think­ing ​‘That doesn’t seem so hard’ and in a way, Black­Ber­ry is emblem­at­ic of that,” he sug­gests, dodg­ing the ques­tion but shift­ing focus onto his film’s mes­sage for cinema’s next gen­er­a­tion. ​“These idiots went to work just because they thought it was fun and end­ed up cre­at­ing the thing that’s basi­cal­ly the cen­tre of our cul­ture right now. If they can do that, who knows what you can do.”