Co-Writers Matt Johnson, Matthew Miller Tapped Into the Tech Product Film Zeitgeist with ‘BlackBerry’

In the mid-1990s, Research in Motion (RIM) CEO Mike Lazaridis and his best friend / RIM co-founder Douglas Fregin pitched a “PocketLink” cellular device to renown entrepreneur Jim Balsille. When Balsille joins RIM as co-CEO, he empowered Lazaridis and team to develop a hacked prototype for a major meeting with Bell Atlantic. Through pitfalls, luck, and incredibly hard work, the team ultimately created what would ultimately be known as the BlackBerry. The device would, of course, revolutionize not only the mobile industry but also how people communicated and shared information at work. Their success would be unparalleled until the advent of Apple’s iPhone, the literal BlackBerry killer. 

Screenwriters Matt Johnson (who also directed and co-starred) and Matthew Miller refashioned this fascinating story for the recent critically acclaimed IFC film BlackBerry. The film made its television debut on AMC and streaming on AMC+ this week as a 3-part limited series with additional footage. Here, in an interview with Awards Daily, they talk about what made this story compelling for them as well as how they developed the style which they would use to tell this complex story. We also hear about their distinct writing techniques as a team and how their collaborative process stops them from having total writer’s block. 

Awards Daily: What attracted you both to this story?

Matthew Miller: Well we’re Canadian and this was a big Canadian story when we were growing up in the 90s. These guys were on the front page of the paper every day so it had a certain scope to it that I think was exciting for us. I think overall what attracted us to the story was realizing all the parallels between what they were doing and what it was like for us as filmmakers. These guys were best friends starting this tech company in this dingy little office that is making this phone that they think will change the world. That was such a familiar feeling for us when we were young trying to make movies. As soon as we started seeing parallels between these guys and our own journey then it became really compelling to us.

Matt Johnson: There’s also a really nice moment in the zeitgeist of filmmakers making movies about products and companies or biographies of tech giants and innovators. It seemed like nobody made a film that dealt with these people in a realistic way. They all seemed to lionize them, whether it was because the subjects themselves were involved, or let’s even take the example of the Barbie movie where the project is itself paying for the movie to be made. It just seemed like there was a need for somebody to tell these stories realistically in terms of the psychology of the individuals involved. I mean this is a small Canadian movie with only a $5 million budget so we could do whatever we wanted, and there was nobody overseeing how we told this story. So that was quite attractive versus what was happening in the market and bore out to almost be completely true. I’m actually looking forward to seeing more films that are dealing with those subjects in a slightly more credible way.


Awards Daily: Touching on that, there have been a lot of stories about tech people and their financial shadiness and eventual downfall. There is some of that in this movie but it really is just more about how these people were huge and then all of a sudden they just weren’t anymore. Is that part of the story that was more appealing?

Matt Johnson: What I loved was we got to focus on the psychology of the three individual characters. Carl Jung has this great concept where the unacknowledged unconscious of the individual will manifest itself in the kind of psychosis and then play itself out as fate. You see in Mike and Jim their blindness to the real problems that they each have as men and literally happening right in front of them. Mike so badly wants to create the perfect product, and change the world but is completely unwilling to acknowledge his own faults and failures. Then what happens? A truly brilliant product appears in the marketplace and he has nothing to do with it and it completely destroys him.

Whereas Jim, trying to control everything, trying to put himself in a situation where he will never be fired again and will have complete control over his own destiny, is betrayed and stabbed in the back by his business partner, the last person he would ever imagine doing that. The personal side of the downfall was much more interesting than the corporate side of the downfall. We were not interested in cellular or smartphone systems. In fact I am quite certain that whatever the next big piece of personal digital device is that usurps the smartphone, I imagine that will be a film about systems as opposed to people.


Awards Daily: You have both written together on a bunch of different projects. What is your process in writing together?

Matt Johnson: It’s very conversational. It’s mostly doing the research together and then discussing what we both find interesting. Then typically, once we zero in on the things that we both find interesting or compelling much of the writing happens almost automatically. Which may sound ridiculous, but it’s like when you’ve been talking about something long enough you find yourself bound to do certain scenes in a certain way. Then once we have that structure it’s just rewriting it every day. For better or worse, there are very few times in our schedule where it says writing time, because we work and are together all the time. So, if we’re traveling and we’re in an airport, we just start talking about what if this happened? That is just what we do; it’s just constant. It’s not like Stephen King sitting down at his desk in the morning writing for four hours. We are not those kinds of writers.

Matthew Miller: A good example would be the BlackBerry script. We had a 200 page draft of it that I don’t think either of us looked at or even touched for probably three or four months. Then we just picked up again later to do a rewrite once we changed our cast. It really is a fluid experience. To that point we generally like to have three, four, even five projects going on at any given time. That way if we get writer’s block on one project we can just work on a different project. Having this conversational process allows us to jump around from project to project and keeps us excited about new ideas constantly.


Awards Daily: On that note, do you have something in the works right now you can share with us?

Matt Johnson: Many projects, some that I’ve talked about already. We are making another true-to-life story starring Finn Wolfhard about a massive drug bust that happened in Sydney, Australia.

Matthew Miller: The short answer is we’re working on a lot of things. I imagine a couple of these will be announced in the next few months. But it’s always the same. We’ve been working on a lot of little things for a long time and it changes day to day. But when we were writing BlackBerry, BlackBerry was one of four film projects we were in the middle of. That just happened to be the one that took off. We imagine the same thing will happen again with our next film.


Awards Daily:  So Matt Johnson, I read Jay Baruchel insisted that you play Doug in the film. Did that change how you wrote the character in any way, or had he been already created before you were going to play him?

Matt Johnson: It was more unique than that and not the answer you would expect. As soon as Jay Baruchel said that I needed to play Doug it actually took all the pressure off of writing. Because I knew I could basically come up with whatever I wanted on set. I actually stopped writing that character, because I no longer had to worry about transmitting that information to an actor.


Awards Daily: Matthew Miller, looking over your filmography, you have been very focused on writing and producing over the last couple of years but you had done some directing in the past. Is that something you’re interested in pursuing again?

Matthew Miller: It’s funny the way life turns out. I think most people start out in film school wanting to be Steven Spielberg–at least I did! But you go to school and you see where your strengths are and what you are good at. I feel very good about where I am now. Would I like to direct another movie in my life? Sure. Do I think it’s going to happen? Maybe. I like working with Matt producing his movies. So let’s just call it a maybe. I think I will be okay if it doesn’t happen for me.

Matt Johnson: I think there’s a good chance that Miller winds up directing either a basketball television series or documentary within the next decade. That is my prediction


Awards Daily: You both have been open in other interviews that this is not a completely factual movie. That you were trying to get some important details in but it was more about, like you mentioned, the psychology of the characters. What were some of the details that you were really determined to try to get right here?

Matt Johnson: Our real secret weapon in research was going outside of tech journalists and pop culture journalists and instead talking to sports journalists. Because sports journalists had nothing to lose in talking about these public figures and they gave us a whole other dimension to these characters that we never would have thought of. And the only reason these journalists knew about them is because Jim tried to buy hockey teams. Also, one of the biggest resources was the original book (Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry). What that book had in it that we are very strict about keeping to was unbelievable quotes from the people involved. Lines in the movie that you wouldn’t think were actually said in real life were taken verbatim from the book.

I’ll give you some of my favorite examples. When Jim first hands the prototype of the first BlackBerry to the head of Bell Atlantic he says, ‘Well, it’s certainly the world’s largest pager.’ And then Jim says, ‘Actually, it’s the world’s smallest email terminal.’ That was the actual first reception to the first smartphone. Then there’s another great quote when Jim receives the iPhone and he’s told that this product will destroy them. As he reads the financials he says, “$500 fully subsidized, that’s the most expensive phone in the world.” That is exactly what the CEO of Microsoft said about the iPhone when he heard about it. We wanted to put as many of the real quotes about this era that we could put into the mouths of these characters. They seemed like magic and they grounded the film in that time and space.

BlackBerry: The Limited Series premiered as a three-night event starting November 13 on AMC and AMC+.