Matthew McConaughey, whose right eye was inflamed from a bee sting, stepped onto the set on the first day of shooting “The Rivals of Amziah King,” raised his hand and inquired, “Is anyone else nervous except for me?”
The group of actors and crew laughed. The actor said, sounding like a mix of a preacher and a surfer with his trademark drawl, “Alright, alright, alright, I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t the only one.”
McConaughey, however, was not fooling about. After a six-year break, he says he felt squeaky going back to the screen. He wrote a memoir, “Greenlights,” recorded a few voice parts in movies like “Sing 2,” spent time with his family and maintained a subdued image. “I needed to write my own story, direct my own story on the page,,” McConaughey says of his absence from front of camera.
But he was intrigued to Andrew Patterson’s creativity and strong sense of place when he came onto his script, which followed the dynamic owner of an Oklahoma honey operation and his bond with his foster child. The fit of the portion resembled a worn-in pair of jeans.
“It’s not where I grew up; but I know of these kind of people and places and these kind of characters that live in the middle of the country,” McConaughey explains. “This group of individuals in southeast Oklahoma where the movie takes place know the Constitution, they know the rules they are living by, and they are not seeking or obtaining approval from the rest of the world. I can relate to them.
Patterson had worked on the project for years, expanding it once into a seven-episode mini-series before cutting it back once more. He always thought McConaughey had the free-wheeling appeal he required for Amziah, whose roaming entourage of musicians and bee-keepers trailed behind him like a caravan of apostles.
“I wanted an actor with the kind of temperament whereby he could just hang out with them for hours,” he explains. “It had to be somebody so disarming, who would just do their thing inside this environment I was trying to convey, and who could be comic in a somber movie? Those kinds of people are not very common.
McConaughey shows that kind of attraction even over the phone since he has a monologue inclination. He likes to meander, looping away from a question, then somehow glide back toward an answer with a laid-back certainty that leaves you more interested in the trip than the destination. McConaughey also wants this to be a one-sided dialogue, hence he asks me what I believe the rural backdrop of the movie meant to represent. “Well there you go,” he adds cheerfully after I give him my (not very original) opinion that what I enjoy about movies like “The Rivals of Amziah King” is that they transport you to settings different from your own.
“I suppose for a New Yorker you are rather detached from that world,” he explains. “So you might see a people and place like this and go, “Oh, I didn’s actually know that existed, right?’ Which, very honestly, is the best feature of movies?
Making “The Rivals of Amziah King,” which opens at SXSW on March 10, McConaughey claims helped him rekindle his passion for his line of work.