Matthew McConaughey and Andrew Patterson attend the The Rivals Of Amziah King world premiere during the 2025 SXSW Conference and Festival in Austin, in March, 2025.Tibrina Hobson/AFP/Getty Images
The new Matthew McConaughey film The Rivals of Amziah King not only boasts a mouthful of a title, but enough genres to choke a kingdom. It is at once a musical, a heist thriller, a dark comedy, an action epic and a revenge flick – and all accented with a particular sense of Oklahoma pride. That pride of place is partly why it took writer-director Andrew Patterson so long to craft the film, which follows McConaughey’s title character, a beekeeper and blue-grass band leader who gets pulled into the criminal underworld.
After breaking out with his 2019 UFO film The Vast of Night, the Oklahoma-based Patterson was inundated with offers to go Hollywood. But he was insistent on staying put, spending the next few years building up Amziah’s world – a world that resembled the filmmaker’s own, to a degree. Ahead of The Rivals of Amziah King’s Canadian release this Friday, Patterson spoke with The Globe and Mail about the hiccups of filming with hives.
While watching this film, I truly did not know what was going to happen next. But at the same time, I got the sense that this was a setting you knew intensely well and perhaps grew up around.
I would say there’s some truth to that – but also I just love to write crazy stuff. All the personalities are very real. The way that people talk, the irreverence, the importance of community and family. And I am very close to a family of beekeepers. But it was more a general recollection of growing up around folks who were iconic in their own small-setting way.
Review: Matthew McConaughey musical thriller The Rivals of Amziah King is delightfully sticky stuff
How critical then was it to make this an explicitly Oklahoma-set story?
This is where I grew up, where I lived, what I know. My mom and dad are Texans, but my grandparents on my dad’s side are Oklahomans, farmers. I’m a couple generations removed from being part of the agricultural life, but the sentiments are still there. I don’t want to say that the story could be universal, because there are certainly places in parts of America where you couldn’t set this story. But I do believe that there are universal things about living off the land, living in a small community.
Was there ever any moment after The Vast of Night where you thought, maybe I should take those shiny Hollywood offers instead?
Oh, you’re going to get me in trouble. But the reality is, I hadn’t seen things getting made that looked like what inspired me to get into making movies in the first place. Meetings happened, offers did come in. But there wasn’t really a system in place for writer-directors with a real unique vision to work their way through the system. We’ve seen festival darlings come out and be offered the big shiny thing, and we’ve seen those careers get completely wrecked and turned into dust. So I’m perfectly happy to be telling small stories with high creativity that will connect to larger audiences.
Patterson at the premiere of The Rivals of Amziah King in Austin.SUZANNE CORDEIRO/AFP/Getty Images
McConaughey is perfect here – almost supernaturally so, as if the entire project was built around his participation. But I understand you almost didn’t land him.
He wasn’t originally available when the script was finished. We didn’t even approach him, because he was in the era of his career where wanted to be at home with his family. But then he became available and everyone who knew me and who knew him thought that we were going to connect and click. The script was written independently of him, but when he read it on, I think, a Thursday, we were on a four- or five-hour Zoom by Tuesday. I never dreamed that was going to happen.
And yet I hear that he’s allergic to bees.
Yeah, we found that out the hard way. There are a number of ways to interact with bees ... oh, and I’m also allergic to bees.
You’re allergic, too? Did you both have a death wish?
You might be the first person I’ve told that to. Oh my god. I’m not hiding it. There’s a joke in the movie about getting stung in the jugular, and that happened to me. I wasn’t splayed out, but I definitely cannot get stung any more. I learned very quickly to be super careful and keep the EpiPens and allergy medicine around. McConaughey was around a hive during prep, and it was left open too long. You get about 30 or 40 minutes with bees before they start to get angry that you’ve opened their home. So this went on for 90 minutes, two hours, and they eventually chased him down and hit him in the forehead. That’s no big deal, until his eyes swelled shut. He looked like a basset hound.
The Rivals of Amziah King opens in select Canadian theatres Aug. 14.
This interview has been edited and condensed. But no bees were harmed in the process.