Greenlights

by Matthew McConaughey

  I take a little walk with the sides. A twelve-minute walk to be precise. I then return to set, put the sides back in my pocket, and step to my mark. The director says “action” and we shoot the scene.

  I have never watched Scorpion Spring.

  I did learn a good lesson that day, though.

  We have to prepare to have freedom.

  We have to do the work to then do the job.

  We have to prepare for the job so we can be free to do the work.

  Knowing my man does not mean I know Spanish.

  * * *

  A few months later, having quit the acting classes but learned my lesson, I was back on the Warner Bros. lot in director Joel Schumacher’s office to discuss a possible role in his next film, A Time to Kill, based on the book by John Grisham.

  The irresponsibility of my half-cocked idea not to fully prepare for that last part had value. I was embarrassed, the embarrassment pissed me off, and that rage made me more daring.

  Joel and I were meeting to discuss the part of “Freddie Lee Cobb,” a young head of the Ku Klux Klan in a small Mississippi town. I had read the script this time, I’d even read the book. “Freddie Lee Cobb” was a strong and stirring role, but it wasn’t the one I wanted. No, the man I wanted was the lead, “Jake Brigance,” a young lawyer who defends a black man for killing the men who raped his daughter. I showed up in Joel’s office that day with a plan.

  Wearing a sleeveless John Mellencamp T-shirt and casually smoking a Marlboro, I sat across the desk from him.

  “I think you’d be a great Freddie Lee Cobb, Matthew,” he said.

  “Yeah, I do, too, Mr. Schumacher. I understand where he came from and why he is who he is but…Who’s playing the lead role of Jake Brigance?”

  Joel paused and cocked his head a bit. “I don’t know,” he said. “Who do you think should?”

  I leaned back in my chair, took a healthy drag, and on the exhale, looking him dead in the eyes, said, “I think I should.”

  Joel burst into laughter. “Ahhhh! I think that’s a great idea, Matthew, but it is never going to happen! The studio will never put a relatively unknown actor in the lead role.”

  I stubbed out my cigarette and held his gaze.

  I had pulled off the first part of my plan.

  if only

  Means you wanted something but did not get it.

  For some reason, either by your own incompetence or the world’s intervention, it did not happen.

  Sometimes this is just the breaks and we need to bow out gracefully.

  But more often than we care to admit, we don’t get what we want

  because we quit early or we didn’t take the necessary risk to get it.

  The more boots we put in the back side of our if onlys, the more we will get what we want.

  Don’t walk the it’s too late it’s too soon tightrope until you die.

  * * *

  What happened next was certainly not part of my plan, but a lot of things that were out of my control went my way.

  Sandra Bullock, who was already cast as “Ellen Roark” in A Time to Kill, had recently starred in a film called While You Were Sleeping, which had recently opened with a respectable first weekend of just under $10 million. But since I’d planted the seed with Joel, While You Were Sleeping had crept up to over $80 million in domestic box office revenue. It was a big hit and had made Sandra Hollywood’s newest “greenlight” movie star, which meant that studios believed she was popular enough to headline a film. With an actress who could now open a film already cast in the number three supporting role in A Time to Kill, Warner Bros. was suddenly free to consider a less bankable actor for the lead role.

  But did that mean Joel Schumacher started to take my suggestion seriously? Apparently not. They were considering my now great friend and brother from another mother, Woody Harrelson, for the role of Jake Brigance.

  Then the plot twisted once again. Turns out author John Grisham also had casting approval on the role of Jake Brigance, as the character was based on himself. Also turns out that on March 7, 1995, a man named Bill Savage was murdered in Mississippi. The murderers, a young man and woman, said they were inspired by Mickey and Mallory, the characters brought to life by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. Bill Savage was John Grisham’s friend, and there was no way the guy who played Mickey in that film was going to play Jake Brigance in this one.

  Filming was scheduled to commence in six to eight weeks in Canton, Mississippi. All the roles were cast. Except for Jake Brigance.

  A couple of weeks later, I was on the rooftop of a Mexican restaurant in L.A. having a 4:00 p.m. margarita with my manager, Beth Holden, when my phone rang.

  “I want you to come in for a screen test,” Joel Schumacher said over the phone. It had been two months since I’d planted the seed. “We’ll do it next Sunday in a small private studio off Fairfax so no one will know, because, even if you do great, it’s such a long shot that the studio will approve you, I don’t want the perceived failure to be on your résumé around town. The scene I want you to test with will be Jake’s final summation.”

  Sunday came. It was Mother’s Day. I called mine at daybreak.

  “Don’t walk in there like you want the role, Matthew, walk in there like you own it!”

  Just what I needed to hear.

  “Thanks, Mom. Happy Mother’s Day.”

  made for the moment

  we are all made for every moment we encounter.

  whether the moment makes us or we make the moment.

  whether we are helpless in it or on top of it,

  the predator or the prey.

  we are made for that moment.

  * * *

  A black car picked me up at 11:00 a.m. and drove me to the studio on Fairfax. There was a makeup artist, a costume designer, a director of photography, and a crew of around thirty people. Around 1:00 p.m. I walked onto the set, which was a courtroom with twelve actors, all sitting in a set-made jury box. I was nervous, but I was prepared. Everyone quieted down and took their places.

  “Whenever you’re ready, Matthew,” Joel said.

  I caught my breath and began to enact the final summation just as it was written in the script until I finished it with the now classic line, “Now, imagine she’s white.”

  I was good, not great. I had remembered my lines, hit all the beats, taken my time, and told the story well. More than passable but nothing special.

  “Great, Matthew,” Joel said, “now throw away the script and say what you’d say.”

  Therein lies Joel Schumacher’s genius. Be you. You are the character. I loved that note. What I would say and do. How do I feel about a young virgin girl being raped by three vile men? What did they kill in her that day? What if it was my sister? What if it was my daughter? It was Mother’s Day.

  I tossed the script off the set and out of my mind. I began to slowly pace, my eyes began to burn, and with rage building, I painted the dreadful pictures in my mind, then said what I saw. Not yet a father myself, but a father being the only thing I ever knew I wanted to be, I imagined my daughter getting raped. I forgot testing. I forgot time. I said and did things a lawyer in a courtroom would never say or do. I cussed. I spit. I painted cringeworthy pictures of a child’s lost innocence with bloody words that could have put me in jail alongside those I was condemning. I got sick to my stomach. I got violent. I broke a sweat.

  I nailed it.

  Two weeks later, working on the set of Lone Star in Eagle Pass, Texas, in the full-moon desert at midnight, I got a phone call. It was Joel Schumacher and John Grisham.

  “You wanna be Jake Brigance?”

  “You’re damn right I do!”

  I ran off into the night until I was about a mile away from anyone. Then, with tears in my eyes,
I dropped to my knees, faced that full moon, extended my right hand up to it, and said,

  “Thank you.”

  Greenlight.

  January 3, 1993. NFL playoffs. Houston Oilers vs. Buffalo Bills. Oilers up 28–3 at halftime, 35–3 early in the third. Frank Reich and the Bills come back to win 41–38 in overtime for one of the greatest comebacks in NFL history. Yeah, the Bills won, but they didn’t really beat the Oilers. The Oilers lost that game, they beat themselves.

  Why? Because at halftime they put a ceiling, a roof, a limit on their belief in themselves, aka the “prevent defense.” Maybe they started thinking about the next opponent at halftime, played on their heels, lost their mental edge the entire second half, and voilà, they lost. In a mere two quarters, defensive coordinator Jim Eddy went from being called defensive coordinator of the year and “the man first in line to be a head coach next year” to a man without a job in the NFL…or even college football the next year.

  You ever choked? You know what I mean, fumbled at the goal line, stuck your foot in your mouth when you were trying to ask that girl on a date, had a brain freeze on the final exam you were totally prepared for, lipped out a three-foot putt to win the golf tournament, or been paralyzed by the feeling of “Oh my god life can’t get any better, do I really deserve this?”

  I have.

  What happens when we get that feeling? We clench up, get short of breath, self-conscious. We have an out-of-body experience where we observe ourselves in the third person, no longer present, now not doing well what we are there to do. We become voyeurs of our moment because we let it become bigger than us, and in doing so, we just became less involved in it and more impressed with it.

  Why does this happen?

  It happens because when we mentally give a person, place, or point in time more credit than ourselves, we then create a fictitious ceiling, a restriction, over the expectations we have of our own performance in that moment. We get tense, we focus on the outcome instead of the activity, and we miss the doing of the deed. We either think the world depends on the result, or it’s too good to be true. But it doesn’t, and it isn’t, and it’s not our right to believe it does or is.

  Don’t create imaginary constraints. A leading role, a blue ribbon, a winning score, a great idea, the love of our life, euphoric bliss, who are we to think we don’t deserve these fortunes when they are in our grasp? Who are we to think we haven’t earned them?

  If we stay in process, within ourselves, in the joy of the doing, we will never choke at the finish line. Why? Because we aren’t thinking of the finish line, we’re not looking at the clock, we’re not watching ourselves on the Jumbotron performing. We are performing in real time, where the approach is the destination, and there is no goal line because we are never finished.

  When Bo Jackson scored, he ran over the goal line, through the end zone, and up the tunnel . The greatest snipers and marksmen in the world don’t aim at the target, they aim on the other side of it. When we truly latch on to the fact that we are going to die at some point in time, we have more presence in this one.

  Reach beyond your grasp, have immortal finish lines, and turn your red light green, because a roof is a man-made thing.

  * * *

  The day of the opening of A Time to Kill, I strolled to my favorite deli on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California, to get a tuna fish sandwich on toasted sourdough with extra pickles and ketchup on the side.

  It was like any other stroll down that Promenade for me. Four hundred or so people milling about. Three hundred ninety-six made nothing of me. Four did. A few girls who thought I was cute and one dude who liked my shoes.

  That night, A Time to Kill premiered in theaters across America and grossed fifteen million dollars in its opening weekend—a box office hit in 1996.

  The following Monday I went back to the Promenade to get another tuna fish sandwich on toasted sourdough with extra pickles and ketchup on the side.

  It was not like any other stroll down that Promenade for me. Four hundred or so people milling about. Three hundred ninety-six stared at me. Four did not. Three babies and a blind man.

  I checked my fly and lightly thumbed my nose to see if I had a booger hanging out.

  I didn’t.

  What the fu-uuuuck?

  I was famous.

  sometimes you have etc.

  sometimes etc. has you.

  —Fatima Alves

  * * *

  The hype surrounding my “arrival” was off the charts. Being hailed as the next big thing, “Matthew McConaughey Saves the Movies” was the boldface caption behind my head on the cover of certain industry magazines. Save the movies? Hell, I didn’t know they needed saving, and if they did, I wasn’t sure I was or wanted to be the one to save them. I just wanted to act, to play roles that interested me in stories that mattered to me.

  From that day on, the world became a mirror. Strangers laid their hands on me and spoke to me like they knew me well. Actually, they weren’t strangers at all anymore.

  People I’d never seen or met before would approach me and say, “My dog had cancer, too, I’m so sorry about Ms. Hud…”

  How’d you know I had a dog? How’d you know her name? How’d you know she might have cancer? What happened to introducing yourself?

  Everyone had a preconceived bio of me now.

  Honest first impressions were a thing of the past. That check had been cashed.

  My world had changed. In the words of James McMurtry, “Now it’s upside down and backwards, the foot’s on the other shoe.”

  Everyone loved me now, and they weren’t shy to say it out loud and often.

  Me, I’d only said it to four people in my life.

  Anonymous no more and forever.

  The same happened with scripts.

  The Friday before opening weekend there were one hundred scripts I wanted to do. Ninety-nine nos. One yes. The Monday after?

  Ninety-nine yeses. One no.

  Wow.

  Awesome.

  Shit.

  What was real? What was not? The sky just opened up to me and it was tough to feel the ground beneath my feet. My differential split, my spiritual foundation in flight, I needed some gravity. It was time to bend my knee bone.

  Noise-to-signal ratio.

  We are more constantly bombarded by unnatural stimuli than ever before.

  We need to put ourselves in places of decreased sensory input so we can hear the background signals of our psychological processes.

  As the noise decreases, the signals become clearer,

  we can hear ourselves again, and we reunite.

  Time alone simplifies the heart.

  Memory catches up, opinions form.

  We meet truth again, and it teaches us,

  landing on stable feet between our reaching out and retreat, letting us know we are not lonely in our state, just alone.

  Because our unconscious mind now has room to reveal itself, we see it again.

  It dreams, perceives, and thinks in pictures, which we now can observe.

  In this solitude, we then begin to think in pictures, and actualize what we see.

  Our souls become anonymous again,

  and we realize we are stuck with the one person we can never be rid of: ourselves.

  The Socratic dialogue can be ugly, painful, lonesome, hard, guilt-ridden, and a nightmare vicious enough to need a mouth guard not to gnaw our fangs into nubs while we sweat cold in feverish panic.

  We are forced to confront ourselves.

  And this is good.

  We more than deserve this suffrage, we’ve earned it.

  An honest man’s pillow is his peace of mind,

  and no matter who’s in our bed each night, we sleep with ourselves.

 
We either forgive or get sick and tired of it.

  Herein lies the evolution.

  With nowhere to run, and forced to deal with ourselves, our ugly everyday suppressions break out of the zoo and monkey around,

  where we find our self in the ring with them, deciding, no more, or let it slide.

  Whatever the verdict, we grow.

  It’s us and us, our always and only company.

  We tend to ourselves, and get in good graces once again.

  Then we return to civilization, able to better tend to our tendencies.

  Why? Because we took a walkabout.

  * * *

  The Monastery of Christ in the Desert sits in miles of undisturbed desert, on the banks of the Chama River, in Abiquiu, New Mexico. The thirteen-and-a-half-mile dirt road from the highway that leads you there is usually washed out, so you can’t bring a car. Thomas Merton loved it there. He said this monastery was a place where people can go to “re-adjust their perspectives.” I read about it in a book and thought, That’s what I need at this time. A spiritual realignment. I was all messed up in the head. Lost in the excess of my newfound fame and struggling with a nondeserving complex, my now roofless existence not only had me searching for my bearings, it was bearing down on me. How could a working-class kid from Uvalde, Texas, be deserving of all this opulence and accolade? I didn’t know how to navigate the decadence of my success, much less believe it was mine to enjoy. I didn’t know who to trust, including myself. In the book, the brothers said that, “If you can get to us, just ring the bell, we’ll take you in.”

  A good friend and I drove from Hollywood to that dirt road, where he dropped me off, and I made the thirteen-and-a-half-mile march to the monastery. I arrived an hour after sundown and rang the bell. Dressed in cowl and tunic, a short man named Brother Andre greeted me, “Welcome, brother, all travelers have a place to stay here.”