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| BlackBerry Photo: courtesy of Glasgow Film Festival |
Matt Johnson loves talking to critics, he tells me. It’s a chance to spend time with people who love movies as much as he does. In bringing a fictionalised take on the story of the first smartphones to the screen with BlackBerry, he also plays a character – Doug Fregin – who is passionate about film, and horrified when he discovers that prospective business partner Jim Balsillie (played by Glenn Howerton) hasn’t even seen Star Wars. Jim takes business very seriously and points out that unless the product reaches the shelves, nobody can make a living from it. Doug’s initial business founder, Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) says that if there isn’t time to make the product meet his standards, he doesn’t care. I ask Mike if that debate over quality put extra pressure on him when it came to making the film itself.
“I feel as though, weirdly, the limitations that get put on you wind up being the fuel that has you do the work that you need to do,” he says. “Every single time I've been in a situation where I had limitless time and limitless options, I was so paralysed by anxiety about not making the right decision that I couldn't actually propel myself towards any goal. And so having that ‘You only have two hours to shoot this, you only have three months to write the script, you only have six months to edit the film,’ these things wind up making the work actually happen. So while it is a complaint that all artists will have, ‘I didn't have enough time,’ I think that the other side of the coin there is that if you didn't have that pressure on you, you wouldn’t do it. That's certainly true for me.”
Did he relate to the characters in the film when they’re told that they have only a few hours in which to assemble a prototype phone?
“Those characters are all based on me,” he says. “Like, literally, you're watching my life. One of the things that Matt Miller, my co writer and producer, and I realised early on is that these guys creating the BlackBerry were basically living parallel lives to us making movies. The life of a young filmmaker is so close to what you're seeing on the screen, right? You're a nobody toiling away with your friends, you have an okay idea and then you make something that's a bit of a success, and that winds up changing the landscape for you permanently. Your friendships change, your life changes, your relationships, your partners change in a major way. And so yes, absolutely. I related to all those things, because I was writing them from a personal place of staying up all night trying to finish an edit to screen the next day. I think that there's almost a mystical dance that happens when it comes to creation and limitation.”
The film isn’t just about creation, though – a lot of what makes it work is the way that it balances creative concerns with the need to be savvy about business objectives. How did he get that balance right?
“I actually saw a lot of myself in Jim. And I love that character. I know Glenn was very worried that audiences were going to hate him, that he was going to be alienating, that nobody was going to understand him. And I thought, ‘No way, this guy's a hero.’ This guy is trying so hard. He doesn't understand the technology. He doesn't understand these guys. He doesn't understand the culture. He doesn't like them very much, and yet he's doing everything he can to give them what they need to do the work that will wind up building the company. And so I liked him a lot. And I agree with his point, which is that...” He trails off for a moment. “Look, there's a great line in the movie that Michael Ironside has, where he says ‘Look, we still have to ship the goddamn thing.’ And that's true.
“Guy Kawasaki is a kind of technologist’s philosopher. He worked at Apple for a long time. He has a great line about a revolution, like a revolutionary product he's talking about, and that is that if you're building a revolution, it doesn't have to be perfect. There can be all kinds of problems with it. It doesn't matter. You're shipping a revolution, so just ship the thing. because you'll be able to fix it in later editions. This is just a beta. You know, it's like the first refrigerator. The first refrigerator was like unwieldly, I'm sure it was insanely loud, it weighed 1,000 pounds it was impossible to get into your house. But it was a revolution. You didn't need to go and buy ice from the store anymore. So who cares? Just get the thing out the door.
“I think that, in some ways, Jim represents that way of thinking, which is like, ‘Look, you guys can tinker with this thing forever to try to get it perfect by your standards, but the world does not have the same standards as you. So just let's ship the goddamn phone.’”
But then there is also the race with other companies trying to get their products out there first, and also try to get a product that is slightly more advanced, so that they can can ease into that space and steal some of that market. So it seems slightly more complicated. And there's a complicated relationship there between innovation and capitalism.
“Hugely, hugely,” he nods. “And look, my personal opinion is that at the end, the consumer wins. Because these corporations are fighting. If it's Palm Pilot and BlackBerry each trying to fight for market share, we the consumer are getting to bear the fruit of this competition between these two giants. Ultimately we are going to decide what product we want, and them going head to head over it is just going to benefit the ultimate technology in the future. I believe thoroughly that the competition between Palm Pilot, BlackBerry, Nokia – all of these cell phone wars in the late Nineties and early 2000s – leads to the iPhone, smartphone revolution that we're all bearing the fruits of today. That wouldn't have happened if those companies weren't duking it out in the way that we see in the film.”
As you says, it was a very particular period of time when all of this happened and all these companies came together. So how did he go about recreating that era? The trick, he says, was to be very specific.
“I knew that we didn't have the resources. I mean, it's a very small film coming out of Canada. I made a decision early on, with the producer Matt Miller and our cinematographer Jared Raab, that we were never really going to show anything that Mike, Doug, or Jim didn't have something to do with. Maybe odds and ends here and there, but we were never, say, going to like cut to the engineering room at Apple. We were never going to show what the people in Nokia were thinking. We weren't going to make the film any bigger than the three characters. And that helped us to make the world seem real and grounded, by just keeping it in the perspective of these three guys, and only showing their tiny little sliver of it in Waterloo, Canada.”
He has a very particular approach to filming with a lot of handheld cameras, looking at people through windows and so on. Was that part of keeping that dynamism and keeping it very focused on those people?
“Yeah, and also making the film seem very observational. I really love the notion of movies that seem found and not placed. I think in some ways, you could say it's the difference between this movie and maybe a movie like The Social Network, where it's telling a very similar story: best friends create a piece of technology, it takes over the world and changes the culture. But in that movie, absolutely everything is perfectly planned – every line, every beat, every frame – whereas what my friends and I are more interested in is discovering a world and being like, ‘Oh, wow, it feels like this is actually happening live before us.’ It's a magic trick that I'm much more interested in, where it seems as though the scenes and moments are being filmed for the very first time, and we have no idea what's about to happen and it seems out of control.”
I note that there’s something similar going on in Anne At 13,000 ft, which he starred in recently, and he agrees. But is it different when he’s both acting and directing?
“Not really. I am much more comfortable directing from in front of a camera, mostly because it gives me a kind of distance from where Jared is shooting. I feel like if I get too hands on then all of a sudden, the entire environment becomes too controlled and I have too much say in terms of dictating what is going to get the audience's attention. What I really love is when Jared and either Adam Crosby or Luca Tarantini, the other operators, follow something that they find interesting, and they're working with their own intelligence. I'm witnessing their own curiosity in the camera. And then ultimately, Curt Lobb and I get to decide what we use to edit.
“I'm setting the stage as the director and being like, ‘Okay, so this is what's going to happen.’ And then the camera operators say, ‘Okay, we see what's going to happen. Here's what we find interesting as camera.’ And then in the edit, I go ‘Okay, I see what you found interesting. Here's what I want to focus on.’ I mean, I'm not the editor of film, but directing the edit. It's a nice back and forth. I feel like if I were not in front of the camera as much as I was, I would have maybe too much influence over what the camera was shooting, which I know may seem antithetical to what the director is supposed to do, but I find it really, really freeing because it means that we can kind of stick to our documentary roots a bit more.”
Is that approach easier because he’s working with people he already knows well?
“I don't think I could do it any other way. I started working with my friends because it takes a certain level of trust. I'm trusting that Jared is going to follow his instincts in a way that I've seen him do many times before. He shot every single one of my films and my TV series, so I've worked with him for literally thousands of hours, making films together.”
I ask about the casting of Michael Ironside, because that was an inspired choice. Was he just looking for somebody who could be scarier than Glenn?
“Exactly,” he says. “We were in a kind of a pickle, because Jim already was so intimidating and so big and loud that we were like ‘Who on earth is there that's going to be like, more humourless than him?’ Michael Ironside is somebody who I've watched since I was a kid. I’m a massive Total Recall fan. I love Paul Verhoeven. I've loved all of these roles that he's done. I'm like, ‘Oh, this guy is amazing!’ And he's also Canadian, which is so important to me, to cast as many Canadians as I possibly could. After talking with him once on the phone, I knew that not only did he get it, but he was so easy to talk to about things. He brought together many people. He's directing me in a lot of the scenes we're in together. He's telling me things that he wants me to do. It was a cool collaboration.”
Music plays an important role in the film. There’s a moment early on where the company has just secured its first important deal, and Love Will Tear Us Apart surges up triumphantly. I tell Matt that i was intrigued by the idea of using Joy Division as happy music.
“There's two tunes that Jim himself listens to in his car, Joy Division and The Strokes,” he says. “I was trying to give that character a sort of depth with his music choices that I didn't think he would get otherwise, because we never see this guy’s home life. Outside of Doug, we don't really get to see what these people love away from their work. And so that Joy Division song, to me, said a lot about the kind of guy that Jim is. This is the kind of music that he's listening to as he's going through a transition, as he's going into this new job, as he's feeling the challenges of it. And it makes him feel cool. I think that Glenn played Jim as a very cool guy, as a guy who was very self possessed and wanted people to look up to him and think he was handsome. Another subtle area of the film is that Glenn plays the character as quite handsome, and well dressed and well mannered, and he never wants to lose face, ever. And I think that those music choices help to inform that, that this guy really wants to be cool and really wants people to see that he's cool.”
Even though he hasn’t seen Star Wars?
He laughs. “Yeah, exactly.”
BlackBerry is screening at the 2023 Glasgow Film Festival.
