“The characters I play always ask, ‘What is their monologue?'” says Matthew McConaughey. “Whether it’s subtext or whether it’s being spoken or not, you need to have your monologue before you say your dialogue.”
And the dialogue is McConaughey’s, with a Southern draw between the fascinating and evangelical, and is excellent at delivering. However, when he read the script for his new film, The Lost Bus, McConaughey wasn’t sure it was for him. As a fan of “Captain Phillips” and “United 93,” he wanted to work with Director Paul Greengrass and Topic, a true story about a bus driver named Kevin McKay who rescued 22 children during the 2018 camp fire. But McConaughey had nothing to access. There was no internal monologue explaining what turned Kevin from a normal man into an extraordinary hero.
After talking to Greengrass, McConaughey realizes he’s wrong. Kevin, who grieves his father’s death and struggles to connect with his teenage son, who the actor understood, had a wounded heart.
“There was a line that Paul came up with,” recalls McConaughey. “Towards the end, Kevin says, “It’s too late as a father, now it’s too late.”
McConaughey may have doubted at first, but Greengrass felt that the actor was the only big star that could hold a man floating and hustling to keep his family together.
“Matthew comes from the background of the blue collar,” says Greengrass. “He understands what it means to do work and still can’t achieve his goal.”
“The Lost Bus” is released at a time when ecological catastrophes are common. As Greengrass edited the photos, he ran across Palisades and Altadena in the Pacific Ocean in Southern California, killing residents and destroying homes.
“I’ve created these images on screen for months and I found it shocking to see them playing in communities I know,” says Greengrass. “But that’s part of our world right now. Places like France, Spain and Greece have been causing the worst bushfires in 100 years.”
McConaughey and Greengrass are not only interested in portraying the effects of warm planets. They also want to show how ordinary people can meet catastrophic challenges.
“Kevin is just passing through Hoham on a normal day when everything was interrupted by this crisis,” McConaughey says. “He didn’t want to answer the phone to pick up those kids. But there was no one on that side of town, so he called, but that was his salvation.”
“The Lost Bus,” which will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival on September 5th, marked McConaughey’s return to the big screen after a six-year break, during which he wrote a memoir. I think he’s separated and made him a better actor.
“Real life is an inspiration for me,” he says. “Art mimics life rather than it turns out the other way around.
As he weighs what he should do next, McConaughey is excited that his friend Nicholas Cage, the headline for the fifth season of “The True Detective,” has launched the early 2010s McConaughance. “He is a great actor and I want to meet him in that world,” he says.
McConaughey says he is open to changing his role as the philosophical detective’s Last Kore if opportunities arise.
“We nailed that first season,” he says. “But if that was that first script, I do it with that fire and originality. And you talk about monologue. Well, at the end of Kore, there was a monologue. He talked about everything that’s in him.
