You could make a documentary about how Toronto filmmaker Matt Johnson snuck into NASA’s mission control in Houston to make a fake documentary about a faked moon landing. Except, wait, he’s already done that – sort of.
Operation Avalanche, which opened in Toronto on September 30, is a fictional escapade, set in 1969, about brash young CIA recruits – two of them, Matt Johnson and Owen Williams, played by Matt Johnson and Owen Williams – who learn that the lunar module is too heavy to land on the moon, and decide to fake that part of the Apollo 11 mission.
Johnson was inspired in part by The Act of Killing, the 2012 Oscar-nominated documentary that interviewed former leaders of Indonesian death squads and had them re-enact their atrocities in the style of westerns, musicals, etc. Co-director Joshua Oppenheimer called the result “a documentary of the imagination.”
“Documentaries are lies; fiction movies are lies,” says the outspoken Johnson at the Toronto Hot Docs festival where – confusingly, it must be said – his fictional feature had its Canadian premiere last April.
“The Act of Killing set a new standard in terms of what a documentary can do using fiction techniques … to tell the story in a better way. What I’m trying to do is show the other side of that; how many documentary tools can a fiction film use?”
So he went to NASA and told them he was a student filmmaker making a doc about Apollo 11. They welcomed him in, and even acquiesced when he asked several of his “interview subjects” if they would mind donning ’60s fashions and heavy glasses; he wanted his documentary to look like it had been shot in the ’60s.
He didn’t tell them that he also wanted it to look as though he had managed to fake the moon landing, something about which NASA is admittedly a bit touchy.
Not that Johnson and his co-conspirators were trying to ruffle any feathers. “We love NASA, and we know for sure we went to the moon,” he says. And he was thrilled to be filming in the actual locations where things happened. “That’s where they sent up Apollo 11. We were on sacred ground. Those were the real computers!”
He also got lucky. One scene in Operation Avalanche has a NASA archivist showing Johnson pictures of places on the earth that could double as the moon, and telling him of certain terrestrial volcanic rocks: “You’d never know it wasn’t the moon!” The reaction onscreen is twofold: Matt Johnson, CIA agent, is ecstatic; so too is Matt Johnson, filmmaker. Both have ulterior movies for being there.
So the space agency never caught on to Johnson’s shenanigans. Ironically, the only time he and his crew got busted was when they snuck into Shepperton studios outside London to shoot a scene in which the CIA agents make contact with Stanley Kubrick, a major figure in conspiracy theories. Kubrick was making a film (2001: A Space Odyssey) with scenes on the moon shortly before the actual landings took place. Coincidence? Well, yes.
“We got caught in Shepperton,” Johnson recalls. “They thought we were there as paparazzi, because they were shooting a new Avengers movie in the same studio. We tried to tell them, ‘No, we’re here for Stanley Kubrick!’ ”
He chuckles at the memory. “Incredulousness winds up being such a shield for me and my team. It protects us.”
Johnson’s directing debut, The Dirties, was a runner-up for the best Canadian film prize from the Toronto Film Critics Association in 2013. Like Operation Avalanche, it plays with fact and fiction, featuring two high-school students (Matt Johnson and Owen Williams, natch) who are making a violent movie, also called The Dirties.
The theme carries through to Johnson’s next project, nirvanna the band the show (that’s right; lower case AND misspelled), which began as a web series and moves to CityTV and Viceland this year. In it, he plays a talentless musician (guess what his name is?) who is desperate to get a gig at Toronto’s Rivoli. In a bit of bizarre cross-promotion, he decided to do interviews for Operation Avalanche during the Sundance Film Festival as Matt from nirvanna the band the show.
“I was in character for a show where I basically play a brain-dead fool,” he says. “And nobody caught on!”
