BlackBerry director Matt Johnson has hit the big leagues. He's still an indie kid inside.

BLACKBERRY, THE ORIGIN STORY of Canada's iPhone, was the vehicle that vaulted director Matt Johnson into the mainstream—sweatband in tow.

- KATIE UNDERWOOD

On the indie circuit, however, Johnson had already cemented his cred with mad-genius guerrilla films that made some wonder if his brain had formed without a fear centre. For 2013's The Dirties, his debut feature, he went undercover as a high-schooler; for his moon-landing mockumentary Operation Avalanche, he infiltrated NASA (for real). Maybe the most beloved of Johnson's run-and-gun projects is Nirvanna the Band the Show, a Borat-style buddy comedy in which Johnson and co-creator Jay McCarrol rope unsuspecting Torontonians into their stunts—3D-printing a (fake) gun at a library, for example. Now it's received the big-screen treatment: Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie screens at the Toronto International Film Festival this month.

Now 39, and buoyed by BlackBerry's success, Johnson is being lobbed directorial gigs an indie kid could only dream of: he's in talks to helm Hasbro's upcoming Magic: The Gathering movie and just wrapped Tony, the A24-backed biopic of Anthony Bourdain, a fellow outsider-turned-insider. Does the freewheeling Canadian cult filmmaker feel hemmed in by Hollywood expectations? Johnson and I spoke about it over a long-distance breakfast. (He ate, I watched.)

Where are you right now? More importantly: how's that breakfast you're eating?

I wrapped Tony in Massachusetts a week ago, and now I’m at my family’s place in Thunder Bay. They immigrated here from Iceland a long, long time ago, and it’s where my dad grew up. I’m actually eating French toast he made me from bread he bought at Holland Bakery in town. I had to eat so much seafood in Cape Cod that just to be back eating things from Canadian grocery stores is great.

How was being a Canadian in America?