Writer-director-actor first made name for himself as an indie Renaissance man with the 2013’s deftly made THE DIRTIES about making a mock revenge comedy about high school bullies that turns scarily real. Three years later, using many of the same primary actors, Johnson returned this year with OPERATION AVALANCHE, which premiered at Sundance, and I caught at the SXSW Film Festival. This time around Johnson and friends play low-level CIA agents circa the late 1960s, who infiltrate NASA to discover if the space agency will indeed be able to deliver on the promise set for by President Kennedy to put a man on the moon by decades’s end. When they discover it doesn’t look like NASA is on target for such a task, they decide to film a fake moon landing to play on televisions around the world as the actual lunar lander is orbiting the moon.
What starts as something of a fun adventure involving dressing like astronauts, building a full-scale lunar module, and Stanley Kubrick (who makes a brief appearance in the film…the real Stanley Kubrick, mind you) turns into something much more sinister, even dangerous. I had a chance to chat with Johnson recently, just before his Viceland series “Nirvanna the Band the Show” was about to premiere at Fantastic Fest. He’s a great guy to chat with and most importantly, he has incredible stories about getting his film made using the sneakiest means at his disposal. With that, please enjoy my chat with Matt Johnson and check out OPERATION AVALANCHE when it opens near you.
Matt Johnson: Hey, man. How are you doing?
Capone: Good. How are you?
MJ: I’m great. You know what? I think we met at Fantastic Fest before. Did you see my first film THE DIRTIES?
Capone: I did. Actually, I was going to say, I actually help program a film festival here in Chicago for a bunch of film critics, and THE DIRTIES actually played at our first festival.
MJ: Oh, dude! That was the best. That was the year that you guys did that tribute for Roger Ebert. That was awesome.
Capone: Were you here for that?
MJ: I wasn’t, because I was at a different festival. My producer, Matt Miller, was, and he told me all about it. He told me it was the best festival he ever went to. Yeah, that is so cool.
Capone: We definitely might have met at Fantastic Fest that year.
MJ: Our TV show is playing at Fantastic Fest in a few days. When I was a kid and we were making “Nirvanna The Band The Show” originally just as a web show—I guess I was 20 years old—I called Harry Knowles because he used to list his phone number on the website, and I was like, “Hey, if I send you my show will you review it?” And he was like, “Okay, sure.”
Capone: How funny. I’ve been to three film festivals this year, and this film was at each of them. I caught it at SXSW. I missed it at Sundance, and it was also at Fantasia.
MJ: It was at Fantasia.
Capone: I think it’s hilarious. I just watched it again recently just to remind myself for this interview. This is probably the most obvious question you get asked, but why do you think this conspiracy theory about the first moon landing has persevered and even thrived in recent years?
MJ: I’ll tell you why. It’s because it seems like it’s so in the mindset of the American individualist. It seems like there’s such a—especially in the present day, stoked by people like Donald Trump—real almost libertarian cowboy style mentality of “Nobody’s going to fool me. I know better than all these institutions, and Goddammit, I’m being lied to.” And I think that the moon-landing conspiracy, because it’s innocent enough and because it’s a bunch of nerds. It’s a bunch of people that the jocks in the 1960s didn’t respect who did something impossible and really incredible. It’s just a really easy thing to do to say “What a bunch of liars. Of course my government can’t do it. Of course my government can’t do the things they say they can. They’re screwing me in all these other ways. How could they have got this right?”
So it’s almost a comforting conspiracy, as opposed to these other conspiracies like 9/11 or Roswell or JFK. Those are not comforting. You think about that and you think “Oh yeah, maybe that conspiracy’s true.” You really don’t get any good feelings from that, where as this one you think, “Oh, yeah. I know that I’m right about this, and I know that my gut instincts about science are correct,” which of course are completely wrong.
Capone: There’s something about it too that, it feels like a conspiracy designed to make us feel better about ourselves. It was a positive conspiracy.
MJ: Exactly. It’s very low stakes. This is what I say at film festivals. Fantasia was a great example. I often see one or two really, really old, super-hardcore conspiracy theorists who want to talk to me about the film, because they believe we made it as almost a treatise or a university paper on how this actually happened. And we talk about it, and I let him know “No, no, no. I just think this is a good story. I don’t believe this at all.” What I really want to say to these guys, and to anyone who believes this conspiracy, is “Guys, what does it even matter? Let’s say it is a conspiracy, and the movie is the truth, and the government did lie, who cares? Does that affect anything at all? No!” It’s these other conspiracies that have stakes to them. This one, it’s just a cool story, and that’s it.
Capone: Having been through the process of dividing and writing about a fake moon landing, and producing footage to that effect, are you more or less convinced that it happened?
MJ: Well, we tried. I basically, for a year and a half, tried to fake the moon landing, and I can tell you it is absolutely, completely impossible. We used only technology that existed at the time; we didn’t cheat. Obviously nowadays, it would easy to do, but there’s a really like cool, geeky answer as to why it couldn’t have been faked, and it’s just that you couldn’t shoot slow-motion video in 1960. You just couldn’t. If you wanted to shoot slow-motion video, which you need to do to make people look like they’re walking in zero gravity or low gravity, you would need magnetic drums the size of states the size of Texas. That’s how big the “hard drive” would need to be to record a 40-minute take in slow motion on video. But we did every other trick in the book that you could to fake the moon landing, and the footage you see in the film is the stuff that we shot using that technology. We got pretty close.
Capone: I will admit the only reason I ever paid attention to any of these is because Stanley Kubrick’s name kept coming up. If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t give a shit.
MJ: [laughs] Same with me, same with me.
Capone: The fact that he might have theoretically been a part of this is thrilling. In doing research for this, I’m now realizing how much of what I watched in this movie was not fake, that you inserted yourself into some of this stuff, and the shots of Kubrick is really him, right?
MJ: Yeah. That was the hardest thing we did in the whole movie was using the real Kubrick. As I’m sure you can tell, a lot of this stuff we shot on location like we shot at the real NASA, we shot with real scientists, but we knew we wanted Kubrick in the movie, but when we went to the Kubrick family estate and said, “Hey guys, we’re making this movie. We need footage of Kubrick from 2001.” They were like, “No. Not only can you not have it, but we’re not giving it to anybody.” And we were like, “What the hell? So does nobody have this footage?”
And we looked for months for Kubrick footage. Nothing. Dude, none of it exists. Kubrick burned his 2001 set, so they were all destroyed. It’s almost like they were trying to hide something. It’s so crazy. But we had a VFX effects supervisor, who was a really smart guy, and said, “Hey, you know what? I’ll take these high-res Time-Life photographs that one day Stanley Kubrick let them on set to take pictures,” and he said, “I’ll re-make them in 3D space.” So he just recreated all the 2001 sets from still pictures, and he recreated Stanley Kubrick from a famous photograph taken of him also from 1967. And that’s just animated photography. So it’s very illegal, and the Kubrick family is furious over it. But hey, if they had just given us the footage, we would have been fine.
Capone: And then you also somehow managed to get into present-day NASA and interview these people under a false pretense.
MJ: Well, -ish. We told them the truth, but not the whole truth. We said we were film students making a documentary about the Apollo program. We just didn’t say it was a documentary about NASA faking the Apollo program. But yeah, we did that exactly as it seems in the movie.
Capone: Then I have to ask, were there Plan Bs if any of these didn’t pan out?
MJ: No. I mean, have you seen the movie?
Capone: Of course. Twice.
MJ: That character is not too far from the real me. What was Matt’s Plan B? The plan was, it’s got to work, and if it doesn’t work, there’s not a movie. But we were smart. We shot that stuff first. It’s not like we shot the whole movie and then went to NASA, and then if we didn’t get that stuff, it wouldn’t have been gone. It was the same with THE DIRTIES. We went into high school and shot their with their permission. We always try to have an element of danger and reality in the production, because that’s what we can form the rest of the movie around.
Capone: So do you ever have to rework and rewrite based on these interviews since you don’t know what they’re going to say?
MJ: A lot. A great example is the dude who tells me “Go to this place and this place and this place on earth, and they look exactly like the moon” That guy? We had no idea he was going to say that, and then he said it, and we watched it like “Oh my god, this footage is incredible. Let’s shoot an entire section of us now going around to these places and taking pictures.” We let that feed the story, because we don’t write a script; we just have an outline, and then the outline will change as the footage we get changes.
Capone: But at the same time you’ve also built this entire lunar lander that looks great.
MJ: We go the specs from NASA.
Capone: Why do they care at this point?
MJ: Exactly. That’s a 1:1—that’s a perfect replica of the lander.
Capone: Part of me feels like you spent 75 percent of your budget on building that.
MJ: It was about $60,000.
Capone: And then the rest of your budget was spent getting the Creedence Clearwater Revival rights.
MJ: Steve, that’s not a joke. You’re absolutely correct.
Capone: Two things jumped out at me the second time I watched it. One was, the heart of the film is about this guy who’s a small fish trying to be a shark at his job, and taking whatever desperate measure he needs to to make that happen, and he pays a price for it. And the other thing that struck me—and this is where the film overlaps with your life story—is this guy is constantly giving pitches to the CIA for these crazy films, which has to be much like your life up to this point.
MJ: You’re not the first person who’s said that, and it’s so funny because I don’t see it, of course that’s not what I’m thinking [while we’re making it], but yes, of course. It literally is about a guy whose life is about pitching every single day and hoping to god he can convince the people in the room that he’s not crazy. But the first half is also true. It’s about an ambitious guy who wants to be bigger than he is. A guy who wants to be something better and prove to people he’s better than he is, but of course he’s not, and when he realizes that, it’s too late, which very much is the story of me making this movie.
Capone: Well, that’s what I mean. It feels like instead of watching a movie, we’re just watching you in a mirror.
MJ: [laughs] Yeah, well I hope it’s not that boring.
Capone: Even though you’re working on the fly here, you’re making a period film. I’ve talked to enough directors to know when you make a period film, it doesn’t matter how simple the idea or production is, it costs more money to do that and it’s more complicated, because you have to have certain clothes, certain cars, and a certain type of production design. Was that a huge pain in the ass?
MJ: Dude, it was hell. It was the hardest thing about it. On THE DIRTIES, we could just go and shoot. We had an idea for a scene, we go and shoot, and it was so easy. With this movie, there were so many steps between the idea and then actually shooting it, because we had to make sure we had the cars and the clothes and the right people. We couldn’t just go out and talk with random people. Even at NASA, we had to make sure people were wearing the right clothes before we even approached them, and we couldn’t blow our cover. All the dynamism, and, I would say it’s a bad word, but the improv of THE DIRTIES, we had to be two steps removed from that on this film. So challenging.
But even then sometimes, the moment would strike and we would have to shoot, and then our VFX supervisor would have to go in, take out the building, take out the cars. We did lots of post clean up work, but we also had an amazing production-design team and did months and months of pre-production on it, just getting sets built. We had so much Kubrick memorabilia that we would just carry around with us, and whenever we would set up in an office, we’d just be like, “Okay, put up the Kubrick stuff.” We were prepared, but I don’t think we realized how much work it was going to be.
Capone: I was genuinely surprised to learn how many effects shots are in this, because they’re beautifully hidden, which I guess that was probably a goal was to not be able to spot them.
MJ: Tristan [Zerafa, visual effects supervisor] would be happy to hear that.
Capone: I just saw a behind-the-scenes package about the film, and there were all these green screen shots of you walking through mission control. I hadn’t really considered that that was how you did that. My favorite scene is the car chase, of course. It looks like one shot, first of all, which I don’t know if it was or not, but it looks great. How much planning had to go into shooting that?
MJ: Most of the planning actually was in terms of location planning. The sad thing is, because I have no training as a stunt person and our team has never done anything like that before, that was just as improvised as most of the dialogue scenes in the movie, so we had a really great stunt driver who just chased me. We did one rehearsal and then we realized the rehearsal is too fun. We’ll just shoot every single one of these, so without much rehearsal at all, the plan was I was just going to drive away from this guy, and he was going to chase me. We shot it once, then again and again, and I think by the end of the day, we had shot it seven times, and we didn’t know if we had it, but we just went with it. It was not more complicated than that.
One of the great joys of making movies this way is you get to do things that Hollywood movies just can’t do. A Hollywood movie just can’t put Tom Cruise in the front seat of a car and say, “Oayk, Tom. Drive for your life.” You don’t get that same feeling, and I think that’s one of the reasons why that scene resonates with people, because we did it the way that anybody with no money would do it, which is the film school way, which is you just do it.
Capone: I was going to ask you about the idea of making this a documentary. What are the advantages to that format for a story like this? What can you do in a fake documentary that you can’t do with just shooting it like a straight feature.
MJ: Well, I mean, the example we just brought up is a great one: being able to put the audience in the perspective of the camera while you’re driving away. It doesn’t work for everybody, but you get to add these very interesting layers of tension where not only are you in a car chase, and the camera is filming from the backseat, but that camera needs to keep filming, because that is the evidence that Matt is later going to use against the CIA. There’s just a natural tension to the camera even rolling once you get where the movie is headed, and this is basically Matt’s escape plan.
Beyond that, you also get to do really cool things with performances. We talked earlier about breaking into NASA. Well, there’s no breaking into NASA if this movie isn’t shot like a documentary. Ron Howard just rebuilt the mission control sets and shot APOLLO 13. Now, we could have done that exact same thing if we had the money to make this movie, but we wouldn’t have been whispering in that sequence. I wouldn’t have been actually afraid that NASA was going to open the door and catch us. You just get all these palpable differences that Hollywood movies—it’s not that they couldn’t afford to do them, it’s that no amount of money could create that. The less money you have, the more of these tricks you get to do. It’s a nice inverse relationship of what makes Hollywood movies great; this is a strength that indie movies have.
I felt the same way about THE DIRTIES. It just came from us saying “What are our weaknesses here? We can’t act. We’ve never made a movie before, and we don’t really know what we’re doing. So who else exhibits those qualities, and how can we make a movie that turns them into strengths?” And that became “We’ll make a movie about neophyte filmmakers in high school who have no idea what they’re doing.” And then all these things that are real about us become real about the characters. We thought we’d push that same thing here.
Now, of course the corollary is, found footage is kind of staid. It’s very easy to reject a lot of that stuff, so it poses a lot of real challenges to do something novel. It’s so funny, a lot of people I talk to—I think it’s because BLAIR WITCH is coming out at the same time as this movie—talk about how found footage can go the other way, and when it plays into the tropes, it’s not as exciting as it used to be, but I think for us, there’s still a lot of new ground to break, and when we do that right, it feels like we’re almost on the edge of something. It’s not for everybody, but for us, guys who are obsessed with movie language, it’s a lot of fun to see what we can do with no resources.
Capone: I was going back and forth about whether this counted as found footage. Found footage to me is someone making home movies that were never intended to be seen by anyone except themselves.
MJ: GRIZZLY MAN.
Capone: A lot of this footage was meant to be shown and used by the people in the film. It ended up being accidentally found, but that wasn’t sort of the intent. It feels more like a straight documentary.
MJ: I think it matters a great deal, and I couldn’t be more with you, and I wish that there was better language to illustrate the differences. You know what the problem is, man? So few people are making movies like this, and if more people were making fake documentaries using this style, then people would be able to recognize it. But because we’re like two or three movies in a sea of 10 million found footage horror movies, it doesn’t make sense to draw a distinction. But for the people who can draw it, I think there’s a reward for those people.
Capone: I wrote this down in my notes: the best advice you guys might give film students whenever you get that inevitable question about advice is “Don’t be afraid to be sneaky and to be flexible with your story, because sometimes you get footage that will turn it in a direction you hadn’t anticipated.”
MJ: It’s a complete philosophical difference from I think the way most young people think which is I need to be perfect before I go to camera. I don’t know if you went to film school, or know people who did, but that is such a prevailing poison, which is “I’ve got to wait until I get the $10 million, so I can make a Quentin Tarantino film. I need to wait until I get this great actor to agree.” And it effects filmmakers at all levels, but that is the problem: people waiting for permission or to be empowered themselves.
What we’re trying to do is erode that and say “No, no, no. You know who gives you permission? Yourself. Don’t worry about the law, don’t worry about money, don’t worry about doing things the best possible way, just do them the way that makes sense for you in your situation right now, and if you can figure that out, then you can actually do something really new and interesting.” It may not be what you thought you were going to do when you first decided you were going to make movies like Stephen Spielberg, but it’s going to be yours, and then you can take that, and one day you will be making movies like the big shots.
Capone: And now you’ve got this series?
MJ: It’s a television series. Yeah, it’s for Viceland, and Spike Jonze is our executive producer. You’ll really like it.
Capone: Do you know when it’s starting up?
MJ: January.
Capone: Excellent. Matt, thank you so much. It was great to get to talk to you. Best of luck with this.
MJ: I hope I’m at Fantastic Fest next year if you’re there, because it would be really great to see you again.
