“No donuts this time?” asks Canadian director Matt Johnson when we meet in Glasgow two weeks after our first encounter in Berlin, post-world premiere of his latest feature BlackBerry. The first half of our interview happened at lunchtime, and I brought a bubbly pink box of fresh donuts in tow. When we meet again, my hands are empty, much to Johnson’s disappointment.

So contagious is Johnson’s excitement for the things he loves, he will often punctuate carefully considered descriptions of texture, taste and smell with “I love food” in the same way he punctuates carefully considered observations on filmmaking with “I love movies”. The director brings this manic energy to BlackBerry, a film following the early days and demise of Research in Motion, the company behind the beloved smartphone.

BlackBerry offers an allegory for the joys and woes of obsession and the pleasures and risks of working alongside friends. “The fact that anyone has the balls to make a movie about the financial decline of the Canadian film scene and disguise it as a film bro biopic is an immediate 5/5,” notes Vincenzo Nappi on Letterboxd, pointing at Johnson’s commentary on Canadian cinema through the chronicling of perhaps the most successful business to ever come out of the country and—like many of its exports—still widely believed to be American.

As with both his previous films, AJ Ford aptly stating how “we now live in a time where Jay Baruchel and Glen Howerton give the best performances of the year.”

If BlackBerry succeeds in its fresh attempt to bring the tech biopic into the realm of something more earnest, it is mostly thanks to the man at the helm: a walking well of sincerity if there ever was one. In a conversation sprawling over two countries, two festivals and many sugary snacks, Johnson gets candid about his hesitations about BlackBerry, his fascination with the inner worlds of young men and guerilla filmmaking.

A Canadian friend of mine lives twenty kilometers away from where it all happened, and said everyone in his town knows about these guys. They were rock stars. But, whenever he travels, it feels like a fever dream.
Exactly. I when we went to Rotterdam with Nirvanna The Band The Show, and everybody was so shocked that it was Canadian. People were like, “I didn’t think that country made anything.” That’s the same feeling I’d get when I would tell people that BlackBerry was Canadian. There is a defiant scrappiness of being Canadian, and wanting people to know we’ve done a few good things.

Justin Bieber!
People think he’s American! I bet that if you took a survey of a thousand people worldwide, they would say he’s American.

How do you blur the lines between personal and fictional? Doug has a lot of you in him. How do you navigate where to insert yourself, and where to retract?
My goal is to try to make it as personal as possible. I guess there is the feeling of shame or embarrassment—there are certain things I just don’t want to put on camera, but I try to make it as personal as I possibly can. In the specifics of your life, there is a universal reality that people appreciate, and it feels real because of how specific it is. I like movies where I can tell only this filmmaker could have made this. Those are always my favorite films, where someone has a specific knowledge that nobody else in the world has, and they are showing it to us. I love that.

Audiences will be making the connection between Doug and Matt, which is a line you’ve blurred before with your work. So how do you feel about BlackBerry as a gateway to the films of Matt Johnson?
It’s going to be a real trip for them to go back and watch The Dirties and be like, “What the hell is this!” But I think it’s really great. It was definitely more personal than I thought it would be. My movies are very formally challenging. BlackBerry was the first time that I made something that was an invitation.

It’s why I wanted to call it BlackBerry. I wanted to do something about something so broad, so seemingly boring. The idea of a movie about smartphones seems so boring. It has an approachability that makes it seem safe, in a way that all my other work has just been so repulsive. I love the idea that this can be a way for people to see my other films. I really hope they do.

Is it about having fun and being with your friends? Is it about trying to be perfect and making the world a better place? Or is it about a straight-up search for power? And those three things can all exist for one person, but if any one of them gets out of control, your life becomes hell.

This feeds into something else that’s complex to tackle: the moment where ion turns into toxicity. When writing the script, how hard was it to steer away from an on-the-nose cautionary tale?
Treating all three characters as though they were right is what helped. I don’t think the film tries to make the case that any of them is 100 percent right or 100 percent wrong. I don’t think any of them are really the true villain, and none of them are really the hero. That’s how we avoided it being propaganda for any one of these messages. Because I truly feel that what these three men represent needs to be synthesized in order to have a meaningful life.

Your relationship with work, whatever that is, needs to integrate these three things: a sense of play, a sense of making the world better and a sense of greatness. You need those three things to be in balance within you. If any one of them takes over, you wind up like the characters in the film: ruined. I was just trying to treat the characters with respect—they are a person, not a cliché. I believe in these guys, and I believe that what they’re trying to do is sincere. All that each of them wants is valid to me.

This validation also feeds into your other films, with your interest in the dynamics of male relationships and how men interact in all kinds of pressure cookers.
My experience with life is quite limited, I haven’t traveled widely. I was born in Toronto, but my formative years were in a suburb just outside and my entire experience of maturation took place in groups of men who all had very specific interests, be it video games or board games or any kind of competitive games. Men playing games made me, me. I would watch those relationships and how they’d change and how it’d change me, and I thought there was something mysterious and meaningful to that. So I’ve been investigating it because I don’t think I have quite figured it out.

For me, friendship and fraternity are my biggest motivators in of trying to do things that are difficult. I liked making my friends laugh, and I liked playing games where we pushed each other to discover new things, but I also realized that it can lead to dark places: a group of men with one goal can accomplish amazing things, but then that same group can turn on itself as soon as there’s any outside validation.

It’s a hard thing for me to talk about. But, certainly, this trilogy of movies I’ve made has been specifically about how friendships between men motivate them and help define the personalities of the individual. I always felt my own personality is defined by the people I’m around.

I’m acutely aware of how powerful the presence of women is for young men. Men and women can be together and that’s life and it’s beautiful, but men are very affected by women, especially the men I know. Rightly or wrongly, they behave better, they act differently. So I appreciate the idea that it’s almost like you’re getting let in to observe how young men act in private, because that is, at least in my experience, how they act. There’s a big difference between a group of boys just walking around doing their own thing and a group of boys with one girl. I that feeling well from being nineteen years old and going, “Well, there’s a girl here. We got to act differently.”

You’ve said before that you’re drawn to the idea of creating guerilla filmmaking with wider financial and technological means. With BlackBerry, you’re entering studio territory. Is the idea of making small films with big tools still something you believe in?
Oh, big time. I hope I can continue to bring this grammar to larger-scale films. Because what you realize is that $100 million movies can’t do certain things that, technically, low-budget independent films can. Steven Spielberg is not shooting on the street with real people, right? Those are all extras. I don’t want to lose the ability to go out and actually shoot in real places with real people, people who don’t know they’re on camera. It would be a real shame to get rid of these things, because they have a magic and chaos you can’t recreate with money.

It’s funny you mention Spielberg, as one of the greatest moments of BlackBerry is a nod to Raiders of the Lost Ark. Was that always how you envisioned ending the film?
No, I wish I had, but I really didn’t. It was one of the last things I wrote. I always say that movies kind of write themselves, and this was almost like the movie gave the ending to itself. That Raiders of the Lost Ark nod was something we knew we were doing as soon as we realized we were going to have those boxes. It just felt so right. The original ending of the film was set in 2013, with Mike and Jim meeting up at a diner to sign the paperwork and talk. It was actually stolen from Y Tu Mamá También, so I was originally stealing from a different movie.

Is there anything you’ve seen in a cinema lately that had you overwhelmingly excited?
The first 60 minutes of Barbarian, when Justin Long is measuring all that shit in the basement. I’ve never seen anything like this before in my life. The first two-thirds of that movie is unbelievable. This guy’s a genius, and I was watching it in a theater just in hysterics. I was with all my friends, it was the night that we did the test screening of BlackBerry, back in October. I was screaming, I was howling. I couldn’t believe it. I was screaming in the movie theater with people shushing me. I was so happy. I love movies so much.