How Buzzy Crime Drama ‘The Rivals Of Amziah King’ Wooed Matthew McConaughey Back To Acting

L-R: Amizah King (Matthew McConaughey) and Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass) in ‘The Rivals of Amziah King’

Courtesy of Black Bear Pictures

Following a multi-year hiatus from acting, Matthew McConaughey is finally back in The Rivals of Amziah King (now playing).

The sophomore effort from writer-director Andrew Patterson (The Vast of Night), film explores the high-stakes world of beekeeping and honey production, which isn’t as sweet as you might imagine.

***WARNING! The following contains major spoilers for the film!***

The idea, Patterson told me over Zoom, began as a desire to make an inverted Western revenge story told from the perspective of a young Native American girl seeking revenge for the death of her tribal chief father.

Realizing that “a period Western takes a lot more resources than something in the modern era,” however, Patterson decided to contemporize the piece.

“I ended up writing a script about a young Native girl that loses somebody important in her life and goes after [the person responsible], taking justice into her own hands,” he added. “And then it became about the honey industry.”

Why the honey industry?

“I think we were overdue for that story,” said the director, citing the 2011 Belgian film Rundskop (or Bullhead in English) as a major source of inspiration because it “stayed in a genre and in a world I didn’t know anything about.”

“[It’s] about cattle hormones and the illegal underground mafia around injecting cows with hormones to get them to be beefier,” Patterson explained. “That’s a pretty small contained movie, and it’s got a very strong personal story about [the] character and his past. That was really encouraging to see a movie set in another world that was totally compelling. Because I knew people that were in [the honey] industry, I dug into everything that was possibly unseemly about it and could possibly make your life miserable if things were to go a certain way; and found the drama in what was already an established industry.”

McConaughey headlines the film as its titular character, a kind-hearted beekeeper, honey-maker and bluegrass bandleader operating in rural Oklahoma, who reconnects with his old foster daughter, Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass).

“He loved the world, he loved the characters,” Patterson said of his McConaughey’s desire to make Amizah King his onscreen comeback. “He told me two minutes into our first meeting, ‘I know these people. I think you sent it to me because you knew I know these people.’ And then he would start getting into the language and dialogue that made him kind of glow … I pretty much knew 10 minutes in that we were going to end up doing this movie together.”

From there, the two spent months going over every single scene.

“He wanted to know how I heard things,” Patterson recalled. “He wanted to know, essentially, was I the right director for my own script? Was I going to stand my ground? Was I a pushover? And we essentially found out that no, these are all things that matter to me.”

The first hour of Amziah King is a laid-back and heartwarming tale of family, friendship, community, music, and, of course, bees. But at the midway point, our eponymous protagonist dies of a heart attack when his precious colony is stolen. This shifts the story into revenge mode as Kateri, named the beneficiary of Amziah’s estate, sets out to find the party (or parties) responsible for causing her foster father to drop dead of a coronary and making them pay—à la True Grit’s Mattie Ross.

“[Matthew] knew the protagonist was going to change hands at a certain point in the movie,” shared Patterson. “He understood that. He loved that transition and was very excited to see a movie that did that … It goes back to the original thought of what is a Western? In a Western, something causes a community or a person to have to act. Usually, [it’s something] tragic. It can be a loss. It can be a theft. It can be an atrocity. It can be a genocide. It can be any number of things that cause somebody to eventually become a cowboy and go on their journey.”

It also provided Patterson with an opportunity to defy screenwriting convention by allowing Amziah to live “well into what you would consider the second act,” he said. “But I also don’t introduce the real protagonist [Kateri] until the beginning of the first act … I’m always trying to push structure and try new things in cinema. Those are always the most exciting movies to me, that do unique things structurally.”

He throws a visceral curveball at the audience in the first 30 minutes when a character (Tony Revolori) has their entire scalp accidentally ripped off by a piece of heavy machinery at Amziah’s production facility.

“I wanted something in one of my movies that was sort of Fargo’s foot-in-the-wood-chipper,” admitted the filmmaker. “I wanted that iconic thing that once you see it, you never unsee that moment. I hope that it makes people understand they don’t have a hand on the happenings of this narrative. You will not foresee how this is going to unfold. And those are always my favorite movies, the ones where I feel a form of mesmerism by the filmmaker.”

Another subversion came in the form of LookingGlass, whose relatively unknown status clashed with McConaughey’s global recognition. “I ignored a lot of other ideas about what you would do in this situation,” noted the filmmaker, “which is once you get McConaughey, why don’t you just cast another star? And there were some discussion about that, but not from me.”

Working with Angelique Midthunder, whom Patterson describes as “the top Native casting director in America,” the production discovered LookingGlass from a wide search across the United States and Canada, with the actress beating out three other hopefuls, thanks to her control and focus.

“Those are the two things I need as a director,” Patterson revealed. “I don’t need a lot of training. I just need you to have control over your face, your voice. I need you to have focus. If you’re off somewhere else in your head, when you’re supposed to be this character, in this moment, in this movie, I will not be able to direct you. Then she did a chemistry read with Matthew, and that’s when we knew we had found somebody special.”

In the course of her investigation, Kateri discovers the bee-related larceny was ordered by shady businessman Dob McCoy, played by the legendary Kurt Russell, who praised Patterson on the screenplay, comparing Kateri’s arc to that of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) in The Godfather. An apt comparison, considering just how far Kateri is willing to go for revenge. Russell was so enthused with the script, in fact, that he decided to break one of his cardinal rules just so he could be a part of the production.

“He said, ‘I don’t work in the summers, but I’m going to come out and do this, because everyone’s telling me I need to work with you,’” recounted Patterson. “[So], he came out and fell in love with how I was making the movie. He would stop me and say, ‘If the whole movie is going to look like that, this is going to be pretty special.’”

Patterson’s desire to find the best talent he possibly could also applied to the movie’s buzzing costars—the bees!

“I’m the kind of guy that wants to shoot real objects under real light at all costs,” he concluded. “I was actually ready to walk away from making the movie because there was a point where we were going to do it with no real bees. Not me. I was always going to do it with real hives, but there was a safety concern that I didn’t have, and we ultimately figured out how to schedule it in a way where we pulled it off. Anytime you’re seeing bees on a person, covering a person, next to a person, crawling all over a person, is entirely practical and real and organic.”

The Rivals of Amziah King is now in theaters. Click here for tickets.