Matt Johnson the Filmmaker the Profile

BlackBerry catapulted the rebel director into the mainstream. Now he's making the Bourdain biopic Tony. Can a pop culture-obsessed terminal adolescent learn to conquer the Hollywood movie machine?

- JOHN SEMLEY

THERE'S A SCENE EARLY in BlackBerry, director Matt Johnson's breakout 2023 comedy-drama about the rise and fall of the titular Canadian cellphone, where a ragtag crew of Research in Motion programmers take five from revolutionizing telecommunications. They're sitting in their dumpy Waterloo offices, and instead of working, they begin playing the 1990s real-time strategy computer game Command and Conquer: Red Alert. It's a short scene and not especially memorable. But it was shot over several hours, producing enough raw footage for a whole new movie and its sequel.

Actor Jay Baruchel, who plays CEO Mike Lazaridis in the film, was perplexed. Baruchel is a veteran of polished Hollywood sets, where time is always someone else's money. When he realized that the actors were engaged in an actual Red Alert campaign, which can take six to 10 hours to complete, he was apoplectic. "Jesus Christ, you know?" Baruchel recalls thinking. "We still had four or five pages of shit to shoot with, like, dialogue and stuff!"