Jenny Mao | Copy Editor
Featured image: Matt Johnson declined having Operation Avalanche screened at TIFF due tos Hollywood massiveness, opting instead for the Sundance Film Festival. | Courtesy of Lionsgate Films
Some filmmakers dream of being nominated for prestigious awards. Others dream of premiering their films at major festivals. Some turn both of these dreams into reality. The fifth annual Canadian Screen Awards took place March 12 and honoured outstanding achievements in Canadian film, television and digital media.
Matt Johnson, who graduated from York with a BFA in 2006 and then completed his MFA in production at York in 2016, had six nominations for his feature film Operation Avalanche.
The conspiracy thriller is set during NASA’s Apollo program in the 1960s. Johnson and Owen Williams play CIA agents, whose names match their own, who go undercover as documentary filmmakers at NASA to seek out a Russian mole.
Instead, they discover that NASA cannot make it to the moon by 1969, and they go on to convince the CIA that they can film a fake moon landing.
While Johnson was invited to premiere Operation Avalanche at the Toronto International Film Festival, or TIFF, in 2015, he ultimately declined and opted to premiere his film at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016.
“Films that my friends have made seem to get lost in the Hollywood massiveness of TIFF,” he told The Globe and Mail.
“Your friends come to the screenings and people think, well of course they played TIFF. It’s expected. There’s no victory in it.”
The film later had its theatrical run at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in September of last year. But despite the decision to decline a local premiere, the film has not lost any Canadian traction.
Operation Avalanche was nominated for six Canadian Screen Awards, including Best Motion Picture, Achievement in Direction and Achievement in Visual Effects, tying the film with the third-most film nominations this year, behind It’s Only the End of the World with nine and Race with eight.
What makes Johnson’s film so captivating is his method of shooting locations. He admits that their cast and crew actually infiltrated NASA headquarters to shoot some of the scenes.
“We told them we were students shooting a documentary on how this place was in the 60s. We were friendly. We shot what we needed and left the same way we came in,” said Johnson.
This sneaking around is not new to Johnson. For his first feature film, The Dirties, Johnson enrolled in a high school to film there and convinced those around him that he was actually a student, despite being in his 20s at the time.
Looking closely at Operation Avalanche, York community members can recognize their university in several scenes.
Considering that this film was Johnson’s graduate thesis project, this comes as no surprise.
“Filmmaking is about believing so strongly in your own stupid idea that you’re willing to do moronic stuff you’d never do,” he said.
“When you’re trying to get a film off the ground, it’s like nothing else matters.”
