It’s 1997, you’re on the cusp of the online generations to come, and society is about to make big moves from bulky desktops to portable devices that hold everything you need in the palm of your hand. Like this year’s Tetris and Air, IFC’s BlackBerry stars Jay Baruchel (This Is the End) and Glenn Howerton (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) as the founder and CEO of the BlackBerry, and tells the story of the smartphone that dominated the market before iPhones. In an interview with Collider’s Steve Weintraub, Baruchel and Howerton discuss the impact these phones had on society, and how they knew this biopic was going to be something special.

BlackBerry, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and South by Southwest this year, stars Cary Elwes, Rich Sommer, and co-writer and director, Matt Johnson, alongside Baruchel and Howerton. It not only tells the triumphant underdog story of how this Canadian company clawed their way to the top, but the subsequent downfall as innovation left the so-called CrackBerrys in the past.

BlackBerry hits theaters on May 12, but before you snag tickets, Baruchel and Howerton share with us what they learned while doing their own research as BlackBerry founder, Mike Lazaridis, and CEO Jim Balsillie, respectively. They discuss projects special to them, what it was like for Howerton to shave his head, and why they weren’t afraid studios would move in on this meteoric story’s untapped potential. The duo also regale us with anecdotes about Johnson’s Stanley Kubrick-esque directing style that led to three different cuts of the film. Find out what changed post-premiere and more in the video, or you can read the full transcript further down the page.

COLLIDER: First let me just start by saying, I thought you guys were fantastic in this. The movie is so good. Jay, I have to start with an individual question for you. What was it like not playing the person who was obsessed with hockey?

JAY BARUCHEL: [Laughs] Yeah, crazy! Or movies, really. You know, it was kind of refreshing. It was nice to see how the rest of the world lives, to be in a world where I didn't know hockey or movies were important. But they also, I have to say, these filmmakers were very, very, very respectful of me. For anybody who cares, you know, the scene in the diner with Cary Elwes where Jim's watching hockey, I'm almost certain the Canadians beat the Leafs on TV in that game, so they purposely picked a clip for me.

Glenn, I have to ask, are you a hockey fan in general, or no?

GLENN HOWERTON: I mean, I think it's an interesting sport. I think, probably, if maybe I lived in Canada I'd be, but I don't know. Look, the truth is I'm not a sports fan in general. I prefer to play them than watch them.

I'm curious of the two of you, who do you think is winning the cup this year, but maybe that's a Jay question.

HOWERTON: That's definitely a Jay question.

Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton on a cropped poster for BlackBerry
Image via IFC Films

BARUCHEL: [Laughs] Oh you know, at this point it's kind of anybody– I think everybody that was favored is fucking out of it already. So yeah, the fucking Florida Panthers might. It's crazy. It's, yeah I know, horrible.

Yeah, I'm a Bruins fan, and I was hoping the Bruins were going to do it.

BARUCHEL: Oh, buddy. Literally like the best year of any hockey team ever in the regular season in NHL history to go out in the fucking first is crazy. I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

Anyway, the point is, I don't know who's gonna win. Glenn, I have to know what it was like for you the day you decided to shave your head to get to do this, and what was it like leaving like your apartment, or wherever you were, and going to, like, a supermarket or a Starbucks with that look? What was it like for you?

HOWERTON: Yeah, okay, so I was surprised at how I felt after I shaved the top of my head. I didn't realize how much of my, I guess my identity was wrapped up in the fact that I have a full head of hair. My nickname in high school was “Curls” because I had like thick, thick, thick curly hair. So when people would talk about me, like in some of my most formative years, it was often about how much hair I had [laughs]. So, you know, it really kind of stripped me of that part of my identity in a really interesting way.

But when I would go out on the town as Glenn, I would always wear a hat. And the reason is not because– I actually got to a point where I actually kind of liked the way it looked. This is maybe a strange thing to say, but I truly actually was like, I don't know, it was liberating and I just kind of liked it. I kind of liked it, but I was a little worried about going out in public, at being bald, not because I cared if people saw me and were like, “Oh, that's a bald guy.” Like, I didn't care about that because I thought it looked kind of good. What I did care about was if people recognized me and thought, “Oh, I didn't realize that guy wears a wig.” You know? I didn't want people to think that, like, I usually wear a wig like that.

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Image via IFC Films

That actually makes sense. But also, people could think that this is a bit for [It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia], or something.

HOWERTON: Well, that's true. That's true. But you know how the internet works, it’d be like, “I saw Glenn Howerton, did you know that he's really bald?” And then I'd be doing this interview with you right now and people would be like, “God, that wig. That’s a hell of a wig.”

BARUCHEL: “It’s a great piece!”

HOWERTON: “It's a pretty good piece.”

Listen, you make a movie in a void, and you never know how people are going to react to it. So what has it been like for the two of you – because this isn't like some Marvel movie with crazy money – to have such positive reviews, playing at SXSW, playing at Berlin. What is it like for both of you to be part of something that clearly is resonating?

BARUCHEL: The best! It’s spectacular.

HOWERTON: I mean, Jay's had the good fortune of being involved in really great television projects and film projects. And I've been a part of a few films here and there, but really haven't had much of a career in the world of film. So, to finally get such a juicy, juicy role in something, and then, actually, people are watching it and enjoying it is, as an actor who's always been a huge film buff and somebody who loves watching films and is just obsessed with films, it's incredibly, incredibly gratifying the response to the film. And the fact that people are really talking about it and seeing it, it's really exciting.

BARUCHEL: Yeah, it's really special, you know? For me, I really just wanna leave it knowing that we did something cool. And I knew that we made something special, I was convinced of that, like, in the first week. I was like, “Oh, the process and us jamming, we're making good songs, man. No B sides, like, this is the best.” But, you know, I have no idea what people like. And if the past sort of half decade has taught me anything, it's that I don't understand the world or people or their interests or their tastes or anything, you know? And especially in an era where there's basically, you know, a movie about four people stuck in a house, or Harry Potter and James Bond in Star Wars, and nothing in between. You never know what people's appetites are like. So this is all to say that, it's the best. It's nice to see that people dig it as much as we do, you know? That's the coolest thing in the world.

This is one of those crazy stories. At any point were you like… you know, having a big studio, or someone, come in and tell the story before you guys could tell it, if that makes any sense?

BARUCHEL: Oh, were we worried that we were on to something so cool, and it was a matter of time before someone else told the story?

Yeah.

BARUCHEL: They might have been. Because most of the story happened in fucking Kitchener, Waterloo, I didn't assume that anybody was on our trail [laughs]. I thought we had some time. I thought we had some time, yeah.

HOWERTON: You know what? What a fucking total diss, too, that somebody didn't beat us to it in a way. Like, you know what I mean? It's like a weird Canadian diss. Because I feel like if this was an American company that probably would have happened, and that's kind of messed up.

BARUCHEL: Yeah, that's not wrong, actually. There would be competing BlackBerry projects if it was down here.

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Image via IFC Films

Well, what Hollywood is good at is hearing that someone is making something and then thinking, “Oh, that's a good idea. We should also do that.”

BARUCHEL: Yeah. I think it also speaks to the sort of collective, selective memory, or selective amnesia, that the modern world has about this device and this corporation. I think iPhone kind of makes you forget that there was anything before it, you know? And so, I think that's also part of why this is a kind of great, untold story.

HOWERTON: But so many BlackBerry obsessives are coming out of the woodworks, and are so excited about this movie because they were so obsessed with their BlackBerry device.

I mean, in the movie, you talk about it being a CrackBerry, and I remember people calling it a CrackBerry. And listen, I'm sure you've been asked this 1000 times, and I apologize, but did either of you have one and did you enjoy it?

BARUCHEL: Wouldn't it be fucking crazy if we were like, “Whoa, you know what's crazy? Nobody’s ever asked that.”

HOWERTON: Nobody's ever asked us that!

BARUCHEL: [Laughs] I had one. I had almost every iteration from whenever I started circa ‘04, ‘05, ‘06, I guess, until about two years ago. I literally got rid of one two years ago. So, I went down with the ship in a large way. I adored that machine, and I miss it.

HOWERTON: I never had one. I could never wrap my head around how to get my thumbs to work on those little teeny tiny buttons.

BARUCHEL: And you didn’t want people to get a hold of you.

HOWERTON: Yeah, I also, for the most part, just always want to be left alone. So the BlackBerry was kind of my worst nightmare.

This is a sidebar question, but both of you have done cool work in a number of things. If someone has actually never seen anything you've done before, what is the first thing you want them watching and why?

BARUCHEL: Oh, damn. Bro, that's a heavy question. I've literally never– that's a heavy one no one's ever asked. Oh, wow, fuck.

HOWERTON: I mean, there's a few things that I'm very, very proud of, but few that I'm more proud of than this film. And if people watched this, and this was their introduction to me as an actor, I would be stoked.

BARUCHEL: Yeah, I would feel the same way. But I guess, yeah also, I'd have to say the two Goon movies, I think. I'm not in them a ton, but I co-wrote them and directed the second one, and they are as close to my worldview as has ever been put on screen. So, that'd be a good entry point. I'd just be interested that somebody would be psyched to like– that somebody was, like, Googling me and being like, “Who is he? What else did he do?” You know? God, if someone went down, like, a Fredric March rabbit hole, but for me, I would be very, very– I went down a Fredric March Wikipedia rabbit hole recently. So anyway, yeah, so that's it. You know what? Fuck me, go look at some old Fredric March movies [laughs].

Characters from Goon at a bar talking.

It's also shocking that the thing you're recommending us has to do with hockey [Goon].

BARUCHEL: What's that? Oh! Yes, yes, yes, I know, crazy right?

So you guys obviously did a lot of research when you were getting ready for these roles. What were some of the things that you learned about BlackBerry or your characters that really surprised you?

BARUCHEL: Good question. The thing that surprised me was not a thing about Mike Lazaridis specifically, so much as the great kind of research-in-motion adventure and misadventure, which was, I didn't know about the American government, like, stock exchange commission. Like, I didn't know that those guys came up to Canada with warrants and stuff, and I didn't know that about the Verizon Cell tower hijacking stuff. Like all of that really crazy fog-of-war shit, I didn't know any of it.

HOWERTON: Yeah, I didn't know any of this story at all, so it was all a bit of a surprise to me. But within the context of that, yeah, some of the hacking of the Verizon towers thing, like Jay said, that seems insane.

BARUCHEL: [Laughs] Crazy!

HOWERTON: Also, just when it's being pitched to Mike, “Hey, we can hack these towers,” and the way it's pitched, is like, “Oh yeah, we hacked into Sony Playstation’s sister.” I can’t believe that these guys just, like, hack into these systems to get what they want. It just seems insane to me. Some of the things that these guys did, you know, the fact that Jim was told, “You can't sell any more phones because it's gonna completely destroy the network.” And he was like, “Oh really? Watch me.” And then just goes immediately to his sales team and is like, “I need you to sell a million BlackBerrys.” You're just like, “That's fucking nuts.” And then just to come out and then just to basically blindside his tech team with like, “This is happening, so you gotta deal with it. You gotta figure this out, like just figure it out.”

I'm almost out of time, but what's a scene in the film that you got on the first take or a scene that you thought would be easy that ended up being a real pain in the ass?

BARUCHEL: Oh, well, there are no first takes because Matt Johnson, you know, he suffers the disease of perfectionism. Like, he's a bit of a mini Kubrick in that respect. If it were up to him, we'd still be shooting in that fucking warehouse. It all reads relatively easy because it's all just guys standing and talking, but it's fucked. And the way that they shoot is crazy, right? Like the cameras are always on the other side of the room, we never knew where they were, and they're shooting on these big fuck-off National Geographic lenses, and so we just didn't know– There is a chaos that we weren't privy to, the math, the code wasn't told to us. We were just kind of acting, but we never ever knew how close we were to getting a scene. We kept asking each other. Glenn and I would often be like, “It feels like we've got this, like, what the fuck is happening?” [Laughs] And so we were just kind of like out on the ocean, and Matt was the only one who knew where we were going.

HOWERTON: Yeah, I mean, it was a really interesting process. Like, usually you've got a bunch of lights and cameras like right in your face and, you know, you get used to that and it's not a problem. But with this, the cameras were always so far, like Jay said, most of the time we did not know where the cameras were. So every take felt like a rehearsal, and there was something kind of liberating about that, and fun about that. But yeah, I don't know, it was a very interesting process.

I remember having a tough time with that scene where I had to go in and tell the sales guy to sell a million BlackBerrys. I don't know why, but for some reason that scene was giving us problems. But I mean, it doesn’t really make for a good story because I just remember it was the only time on set where I felt like I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, and Matt was like, “No, you're not getting this.” [Laughs] That didn't really happen all that often, and Matt, he has a really great way of being very blunt and honest about things, but without being, you know, without being like mean or cruel. But if you weren't getting it, he was gonna tell you, and you were gonna be there until we got it.

BARUCHEL: Yeah, that's absolutely spot-on. The scene when him and I are practicing my first talk to Jim on the phone of, like, how we're gonna negotiate, Matt and I got into a full-on argument that, like, he cleared the set for half an hour so that he and I could hash this out. And through nobody's fault, there was no bad guy in that situation, it was just like– it is the best thing to work with somebody that has a really clear voice, and who just wants to create and wants it to be as good as it can be. There's a difference between that and somebody who is just shooting because they don't know what it is they're looking for, and they hope the entire cast and crew will just like show it to them, and they keep waiting for that moment without knowing what that moment looks like. And MJ is not that, MJ is specific and definitive.

But yeah, if you're not there, if you're not in the movie that he sees in his heart, you're gonna be there until you do, you know? Literally, the movie that came out at Berlin is slightly different than the movie that played at South By, is slightly different than the movie that's gonna come out this week [laughs]. Like, he has edited– he cut until they literally, physically told him he can't anymore. Like he cut after both festivals, he kept going back to it. All he does is make movies, that's all he wants to be doing, and that's the best thing in the world. However sometimes, on like hour 12 of a day as an actor, and you've got a wig or a fucking shaved head and it's 40 degrees Celsius in a steel facility in Hamilton, you're like, “Buddy, like, fuck off.”

blackberry
Image via IFC

I'm so curious of what he changed from SXSW to Berlin to what I saw, or is it just like a tiny little thing there?

BARUCHEL: Experientially, I don't know that even Glenn or I would ever notice it, right?

HOWERTON: Lots of tinkering, just little things. No big sweeping changes. The cut that's gonna come out is– the average person would never be able to watch them back to back, the Berlin cut and the theatrical cut, and be able to tell the difference.

BARUCHEL: There's no story changes, it's just vibe.