by Anthony Frajman
In Andrew Patterson’s Oklahoma-set The Rivals of Amziah King, McConnaughey is a beekeeper and even plays the mandolin.
Daringly mixing genres, including comedy and crime thriller, The Rivals of Amziah King follows its titular character (played by McConnaughey) as he reunites with his former foster-daughter Kateri (newcomer Angelina LookingGlass).
You live in Oklahoma. Why did you want to make this film?
“I don’t know that I set out to go, ‘I want to make a movie in Oklahoma’. I think I originally just wrote something that I hadn’t seen depicted yet, which would’ve been rural America, where I feel like you would know everybody within 30 seconds of their intro on screen. Not that they’re archetypes, but just familiar.
“The city I grew up in, there were goat farms on the drive to school. And there were feed stores where you could buy grain and baby chickens and the train that came through town stopped everybody. If you were wanting to go east west, you had to wait on the train for five, 10 minutes. I didn’t grow up in the most densely populated part of America. And it has grown up and it’s got more people living there now. But I think that the core idea was just to try to tell a story I hadn’t seen, but also make it feel familiar. I would say that was the whole goal.”
The film daringly balances a range of genres. Was that initially a goal of yours?
“Balancing genres inside of one movie is interestingly enough, something that I would say I have more faith in the viewer to handle than your traditional movies that we see put into cinemas all over the world. Those are going to be homogenised. Or they’re going to be less interesting and they’re going to have fewer chances to change directions than I like to see in a movie.
“I’m a big fan of almost micro-movies inside of a bigger one, where you’ll feel something completely different for three or four minutes and then go back to the master genre. I have more faith in people because I’ll watch somebody that’s a standup comedian that will make you laugh for 20 minutes, and then they will change directions and carefully move to something very moving and close to them, and then cap that off with a very irreverent joke about the thing that they just made a sacred place for.
“I feel that in music, that exact thing where it can be one genre of music and then it can change really quickly into something else. Weirdly enough, I’ve always been inspired by Pete Townsend, who was the lead songwriter, sometimes singer of The Who. He’ll have an album like Tommy, and every genre you can imagine is in that, and no one questions it. And then you’ll have a song like ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’. That starts off acapella with just voices, and then it goes into traditional rock, and then it becomes almost honkytonk or Western. And, then it sort of wraps up as a big rock opera type-of finish. It’s like a nine-minute song. And I love every genre inside of those nine minutes.
“When I’m working on a movie, I’m always wondering, why does something have to feel one way for two hours? Can it feel several ways? Can we feather off of suspense and go into comedy? Can we come out of comedy and go into heartbreak? And I think it’s going to be a subjective experience for everybody. Some people adore that type of gear switching and genre switching. Other people sometimes can’t process it.
“Where I’m from, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arkansas, what we call the Southwest, people can pinball through that journey and really go on that path and get along with that rip-roaring ride and come out on the other end adoring it. If I do that well, then I’m going to be very happy, but I do know that it takes some work on the part of the viewer to go along for that ride.”
You’ve previously said that part of your aim was to play with the Western genre. Can you expand on that?
“I think Westerns are extraordinarily interesting as a genre. I think you can hide a Western in a lot of different places. Akira Kurosawa was doing Samurai Westerns so good that Sergio Leone ripped them off and just remade them as Westerns. Winter’s Bone was a Western, Jennifer Lawrence’s first movie that got her on the scene.
“I thought it would be interesting to see what it looks like when somebody that lives in the Western landscape of America wants to basically take on a system that isn’t built for them to succeed. And that’s where this movie went. That’s where this took me.”
Matthew McConaughey’s casting as Amziah is a huge component of the film. How did you arrive on McConaughey?
“Matthew is extraordinarily authentic, whether he’s frustrated or joyful or challenging you. He was not available early on. Then, through a series of people that wanted him in the movie, including his team and including my team, worked to put this in front of him. He hadn’t been inspired to work in movies for a while, and I think he would be on the record saying that he hadn’t been a real big fan of seeing what was being made and the politics and the reasoning for why things were being made and the stories that were being put in front of him. When he read this, he said it was the best thing he had read in four years.
“He read this over a weekend in January of 2023, and we were talking on a three hour zoom by that Tuesday. That’s how quickly he fell in love with the work. And then it was just making sure that what was on the page and how he was hearing what was on the page was aligned, and that there wasn’t going to be any artistic differences. He and I got under the hood of the movie and talked about it, and fought about it, and wrestled over it and talked deep into the night.
“I went to his home, he kicked his family out, sent the kids away, sent the wife away. And we basically just interpersonally wrestled over what this movie was for a while, and I knew he loved it when I heard how passionate he was about how he heard this character behaving. He heard the voice of the character. He had opinions about what he would wear. He had a strong point of view about the father daughter component. And so, it was never even a question of whether or not he would be right for the role. It was, would he want to do it, was he available to do it, and would he and I see eye to eye on what the movie was and what the character was. I think the results speak for themselves.”
The film seems very different to anything McConaughey has done before, not to mention that it’s rare for him to take on a comedic role. How aware of this was he?
“The first time we spoke, that’s the first thing he noted. I think his exact words were, ‘this is really fucking funny’. I wanted to see Matthew McConaughey play a comedic role in a mostly dramatic movie. I also wanted to see Matthew McConaughey pick up an instrument and play and sing. I wanted to hear that voice sit down with his buddies and wail, because I actually think we all kind of feel like we’re friends with him before, or if we ever meet Matthew, which is a testament to how much he has put of himself out there, how much of his life he shared with us, how much of himself he’s exposed.
“I hope that we threaded the fine line of the familiarity of who Matthew is but created a new world and a new character for him to inhabit that felt authentic; to where we can still suspend our disbelief of being aware of who he is. We fall into the spell of who Amziah is, hopefully. And that, to me, was a great honour to get to direct somebody whose ability as an actor was so good that you could use every single take and you could dial in scenes and make him more approachable here, or have him be a little bit more bristly in another scene, or push him to be warmer, but that man can really do anything on camera. I learned a lot watching how he worked and getting to direct him and getting to challenge him; to help him find a new place to inhabit was almost like a life dream fulfilled. He’s obviously one of the last movie stars in the world. Yet he’s willing to trust a younger director.
“I’ll give you a good example. In this movie, there is a scene where Matthew goes into the bee yards, and we practically covered him in bees. And the day that we were going to do that, he asked me, ‘can I wear a mask, and can I wear a hat?’ And I said, ‘you can, but the kind of beekeeper you’re portraying, would never do that’. And he just looked off in the distance and he nodded his head a couple times. He goes, ‘okay’. So, I challenged him. Because I didn’t want him to do something that I thought later on, he would regret. He would do anything for authenticity, but we also learned that he was allergic to bees. So, I said to him, ‘I don’t think they’re going do anything nefarious if you treat them okay, they’ll come to be a part of you and your experience, and then we can get them to leave’. And he trusted me on that. Those kinds of things became normal for us. And he didn’t have to, he’s the movie star. He’s the personality. He’s a person that gets movies like this made. He could have said ‘No, Andrew’. And yet when I pushed back and told him why, he became the best partner I could have imagined.”
The Rivals of Amziah King screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival, with its final screening on Sunday 24 August 2025
