We All Want to Be Friends With Matthew McConaughey

“We all want to be friends with Matthew McConaughey,” the actor’s friend, director Jeff Nichols, said onstage Friday, and the observation was certainly true in Little Rock, where McConaughey brought his new film The Rivals of Amziah King and mountains of charm.

They spoke for the Arkansas Cinema Society’s Filmland festival, which Nichols, an Arkansas native, co-founded. Nichols has been friends with McCanaughey since the actor starred in his 2012 film Mud, one of the projects that started the 2010s McConaissance in which McConaughey switched from the rom-coms for which he’d become known to a series of critically acclaimed roles that won him an Oscar (for Dallas Buyers Club) and Emmy (for True Detective) in the same year, 2014.

Since then McConaughey has been known as not just an actor but kind of life coach, teaching a philosophy that includes a line from his film debut, 1993’s Dazed and Confused: “You just got to keep living, man. L-I-V-I-N.”

That line, from his character Wooderson, is maybe his third most famous in the 1993 Richard Linklater classic. One of the others — the ad lib “Alright, alright, alright” was emblazoned on Filmland hats in Little Rock, and shows up on T-shirts and bumper stickers worldwide — but especially in McConaughey’s native Texas.

The actor said he had never been to Little Rock before, but it turned out he has local ties: A distant relative was the city’s mayor, in the 1940s, as current Little Rock mayor Frank Scott Jr. explained before declarig Friday “Matthew McConaughey Day.”

Or just McConaughday, for short.

Arkansawyers delighted in McConaughey’s connection to and presence in their state,. At one point someone on the Filmland red carpet handed him a pint of mud-themed local ice cream and asked him to eat it on camera.

“Do you have a spoon?” he asked politely. They did not. So he took the ice cream backstage.

It makes sense that everyone wants to hang out with Matthew McConaughey, given that his career is bookended by two great hangout movies.

The first, of course, is Dazed and Confused, a film he landed by hanging out in a Hyatt hotel bar, as a film student at the University of Texas at Austin, and charming one of the film’s producers. The latest, his first film in five years, is Andrew Pattinson’s ambitious and cool The Rivals of Amziah King, in which McConaughey plays the title character, a beekeeper and honey man who moonlights as a mandolin player in a bluegrass band.

The film spends a long, delightful time luxuriating in Amziah’s music and throwaway observations before easing impressively into heist and revenge territory.

In two length discussion about his work, before and after the Amziah King screening, McConaughey emphasized the importance of L-I-V-I-N in the moment — especially onscreen.

He stressed that some of his best-known moments — like the “alright, alright, alright” ad lib that was his first line in a film, and his closing argument in A Time to Kill — were first takes. He loves first takes, when everything is fresh.

‘Everything after take one is acting,” he told Nichols. “And you can improve on a performance in Take 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. But if you can, be relaxed and actually receive and respond in Take 1 — where you’re hearing it all for the first time. What we actors do in Take 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, is try to not anticipate what’s coming next, even though in the back of our head we know.”

One of the reasons Amziah King cast newcomer Angelina LookingGlass as the female lead is her naturalism on camera, McConaughey said. She was so new to the craft that she wasn’t set in her ways. She was willing to change when he did, as if hearing every line for the first time.

“I would do takes with her and I’d change it up every single time, and every single time it didn’t didn’t move her at all — because that time was the first time for her every time anyway,” McConaughey told Nichols. “Can you dare to have it be the first time every single time?”

McConaughey was in full raconteur mode, sharing asides about all of his films, and his beloved mother, age 95, who he said was one of the inspirations for his work in Amziah King.

Amziah likes to throw people into situations where they’ll be the hero, and McConaughey sees that quality in his mother, too.

“She was one who — if me or my two brothers — whenever we were sad or weren’t confident or insecure about something, she’s really good about grabbing you, literally raising you in the air and celebrating you until you’re out of your head and you believe you’re worth something,” he said.

And at 94, she still likes a good time, including with McConaughey’s friend and True Detective co-star.

“She’s been kicked out of two bars for smoking weed with Woody Harrelson,” McConaughey shared.

Matthew McConaughey on Working With Directors Richard Linklater, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, John Sayles, Steven Soderbergh, and More

At Nichols’ urging, McConaughey looked back on his film career by talking about his experiences with different directors — including many of the best in Hollywood history.

McConaughey shared that much of his acting philosophy was shaped by working with Linklater on Dazed and Confused. He was only supposed to have three lines in the movie, but his role kept growing as he and Linklater bounced ideas off of him.

Linklater has a very collaborative approach to getting what he wanted, McConaughey said.

“He never said the word ‘no,’ McConaughey recalled. “We would play what he and I called verbal ping pong, and I’d come up with an idea, and he’s like, ‘yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah…. and what if, you know, we did this?’ And then the actor’s going ‘yeah, yeah, yeah.’ But if you tell an actor, ‘no, not that it, here’s what it is,’ we’re like, ‘Oh man, you kind of took half my steam. You took half my energy.’ So you go, ‘Yeah, that could work. … and all of a sudden he’s like, ‘Man, you want to shoot it?’”

Linklater also had “a genius way of directing everybody on Dazed and Confused,” McConaughey said.

“The first thing he did, he handed every character a cassette with a playlist that he had made, and he goes, ‘Here, hey, have a listen. I think it’s some some tunes your character would be listening to. And I remember getting that cassette, and it’s my first time in a movie, and I’m like, ‘What a great job! My homework is to go drive around and listen to some bada– tunes in my car.’

“But what does it do? It doesn’t tell you what to do,” McConaughey continued. “It just puts you in a frame, a speed, a pace, a place. What were the lyrics about? What was the feel? All of a sudden, the stuff he had made for me, my shoulders probably went back an extra inch. You know what I mean. The head probably laid back. The eyelids probably drooped a little bit more, just from the soundtrack.”

The film was also where he found the first of what he calls “launch pad lines” — lines that help make sense of an entire character. For Wooderson, the launch pad line was, “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.”

McConaughey and Linklater reunited for The Newton Boys and Bernie.

McConaughey also landed a key role in John Sayles’ 1996 Lonestar, in which he plays a near-mythic character. When he first met with Sayles, sitting at a linoleum table with two chairs, McCanaughey felt a little self-conscious at first as he discussed the role. Sayles wanted to see more swagger.

“He said, ‘Let’s have that same conversation again. But kick your feet up on the table, like this is your room and I’m visiting you,’ and I did,” McConaughey recalled. “And he goes, ‘There it is! You want the job? Let’s do this.’”

On the set, McConaughey would try to set up meetings with Sayles, but the director would blow him off to go on long, slow jogs.

“What was he saying to me by not meeting me?” McConaughey asked. “He was basically saying, ‘I hired you for a reason. We don’t need to talk about this. We don’t need to philosophize. We don’t need to intellectualize it.’ And he was putting me on an island as well, which is a great thing to sometimes put an actor on: ‘I’m not here to give you a pacifier. I hired you for a reason.’”

On the set of Lonestar, he learned he’d gotten the lead role — his first lead role — in A Time to Kill,. He had initially been up for a much smaller part, but in a talk with director Joel Schumacher, he asked about playing the lead.

“Well, the meeting’s almost over, and I remember I had a sleeveless John Mellencamp T-shirt on, and I was smoking cigarettes at the time,” McConaughey said. “It was almost over, and I had a cigarette, and all of a sudden, I got the gumption up to go, ‘So, who’s playing Jake Brigance? And he’s like, ‘I don’t know. Who do you think should?’ ‘I think I should.’ And I remember him going, ‘That’s a great idea, but it’s never gonna happen. We have to get a name for that role.’”

Still, Schumacher set up an audition — away from the studio lot.

“He told me later, ‘If we did it at a studio, no matter how well you did, you were probably not going to get the part. I don’t want it to go on your record in Hollywood — your first test, and you didn’t get it.’ He was already looking out for me like that.”

But McConaughey did get it. Nichols told McConaughey that the 1996 John Grisham adaptation “announced you as the second coming of Paul Newman and a true-blue movie star.”

McConaughey soon worked with Robert Zemeckis on Contact and Steven Spielberg on Amistad, both of which came out in 1997. He remembers the Contact lead, Jodie Foster, joking with him that he played “the girl’s role.”

On Amistad, he remembers watching Spielberg meticulously setting up shots. For example, he once saw the director tell a background actor who was playing a slave to imagine that another character had cut in front of him in line, and gotten a bigger bowl of oats as a result. Spielberg asked the actor: “What would you do?”

The actor thought about it, then threw his bowl at the other actor. “That’s it,” Spielberg said, and created a new shot, tracking the throw.

Soon McConaughey was a leading man, specializing in romantic comedies. He explained that he loved them, but they presented his biggest acting challenge.

“They were working. They were making their money back. They were fun. They felt like Saturday. And I remember my challenge, though, was always in the third act because we know the story of a rom-com: Boy meets girl. They’re going to go through the second act. They’re going to play some mischief on each other. One’s gonna find out the other’s kind of not being straight with them. They’re gonna break apart. Then the third act begins. Boy chases girl, catches her, maybe gets a kiss, the credits roll, and we’re happy they did it, right? Some form of that.

“My challenge for my role as the male, and that was always in the third act, was when the boy comes back to girl, man comes back to woman. It was always written, like he comes back on two knees, weeping, ‘Take me back, or I am nothing.’ And I immediately went. ‘What girl wants that guy?’”

Sometimes collaborators claimed, “Oh, you’re afraid to be vulnerable.” But that wasn’t the problem.

“I said, ‘Hang on a minute… I want to show up with some dignity. I’m fine with coming back, going, ‘Hey, my bogey. I screwed up. I’m sorry. I took advantage of you. My bad, all right. And I apologize. Now look, we got something going here, and I think it’s worth giving a second chance. What do you say?’ I can do that. But to come back and go, ‘Woe is me, and if you don’t take me back, I am nothing in this world’ — I’m going. ‘What’s that guy? That’s not life.’ And it was always a battle for me, and one that I I think I fought pretty well.”

He said it was harder for him to make those rom-com reunions convincing than it was to play a dying AIDS patient in the film that won him his Best Actor Oscar.

“What were the hardest roles? Not Dallas Buyers Club, losing 55 pounds. Hey, that made sense. What what was hardest was fighting the battles for the third act of those rom-coms,” McConaughey said. “That’s the hardest work I’ve ever done on film.”

Another of the films that led into the McConaissance was 2012’s Magic Mike, in which he played a very entrepreneurial club owner with male dancers catering to female clientele.

When he first talked with director Soderbergh about the role, the script wasn’t ready yet, so McConaughey asked for any launchpad lines or character traits he could start thinking about.

So Soderbergh told him: “Well, this guy Dallas… He’s kind of connected to the UFOs, man.”

McConaughey was delighted. “For a first piece of direction, you want to take the lid off an actor and go, ‘Oh, let the imagination run’? That was that.”

Later McConaughey became interested in the idea that his character was “an absolute capital-C Capitalist,” trying to wring as much money as possible out of the male club’s female customers.

“When he’s letting people in, he’s got to clock: What kind of car did they pull up in? Did they pay with twenties? Did they pay with a Benjy? Did they pay with an American Express Platinum card? Those ones that got a platinum card or pay with Benjys, who pulled up in a Mercedes Benz or a BMW. let me know in the back, because I’m gonna make sure I get Mike out there, who’s our stone cold killer, so he can get them in the back with 500 more bucks in the pocket. Let’s go get the money out of their purse.”

McConaughey started sending long emails to Soderbergh, laying out these details, and would excitedly anticipate the director’s replies.

When he saw that an email from the director had come in, he said, “I’d be in the middle of my day, and I was like, ‘ah, no, I’m not reading this now. I’m gonna wait to get all my work done. I’m going back to my office and I’ve got some privacy. I’m gonna give this thing the justice it deserves — I’ve got myself two hours to just look at this return email from Steven Soderbergh.’”

He said he would even ask his wife, Camila, to keep an eye on their kids, so he could maximize his time with Soderbergh’s email.

But when he opened Soderbergh’s replies, McConaughey said, the director would inevitably reply with one word: “Sure.”

It was another way of putting McConaughey on an island, to figure things out himself — a situation he doesn’t mind.

In Mud, his collaboration with Nichols, he was truly on an island. He plays a fugitive hiding out on an island in the Mississippi River. Nichols recalled McConaughey telling him, “”You know, Nichols, there’s something interesting about your script. There’s nothing to fix.”

What he meant was that there were none of the tough third-act challenges he had faced in his rom-com years.

So began the run that included Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street in 2013 and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar in 2024.

In The Wolf of Wall Street, his launchpad line was “cocaine and hookers” — the two things that his Wall Street master-of-the-universe character uses to stay energized, and then come down, respectively.

McConaughey’s big, unforgettable scene — in which he leads DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort in a kind of trancelike chant — came from McConaughey’s vocal warmups before the scene. DiCaprio urged him to work them into the film.

In Interstellar, McConaughey was impressed that Nolan had a big budget at his disposal, but was always trying to do things efficiently and inexpensively. He likened the director to a general.

“He was first there, last to leave. LIterally first up the mountain and last one down the mountain.”

He recalled that at one point while filming Interstellar, “I’m on a 16-foot or 12-foot gimbal, and I’m strapped in and I’m laying on an end, and he’s on the other end moving me around with a little projector on a screen — about a 12- or 15-foot screen behind me with outer space.” There were more expensive ways to do it, but Nolan told him, “It’s a waste of money, and this looks just as good, if not better.”

Nichols asked if he felt “in the pocket” during the McConaissance stage.

“Hell yeah,” the actor said. “100%, fangs out, playing offense.”

It was also a period of fluctuating size. He buffed up for Magic Mike, but not long after was shedding weight for Dallas Buyers Club.

“Weight going down — Wolf of Wall Street — 154. Get down to 135, Dallas Buyers Club. Come back up, True Detective, at 174,” the actor recalled.

McConaughday ended with audience questions. At one point an audience member shared that she’d decided to pursue writing after reading McConaughey’s 2020 memoir, Greenlights. He said people often come up to him to share their stories. Nicols noted that he just seems approachable.

“There’s a kind of an unvarnished quality,” Nichols said. “We all want to be friends with Matthew McConaughey, and it it’s a bit of a curse, I’m sure, because everybody walks up thinking they’re your friend.”

McConaughey noted that there was just one point when people were more hesitant to approach — when he played the haunted Rustin Cohle on True Detective.

“That did give a little bit more distance between people coming up to me,” he deadpanned.

You canlearn more about Filmland hereandread more of our festival coverage here.

The Rivals of Amziah King is now in theaters, from Black Bear.

Main image: Jeff Nichols and Matthew McConaughey at the Arkansas Cinema Society’s Filmland. Photo Credit: Content Titan

Editor’s Note: Corrects typo.