Greenlights

by Matthew McConaughey

  A total of twenty months had passed where I said no to anything that had defined my brand before:

  Rom-com guy. No.

  Shirtless-on-the-beach guy. Nope, no beaches or paparazzi in Austin.

  For twenty months I did not give the public or the industry any more of what they had banked on me to give them. No more of what they expected and even assumed to know. For twenty months I removed myself from the public eye. At home in Texas with Camila, I was raising Levi and Vida, gardening, writing, praying, visiting old friends, spending time with family, and recoiling from relapse. The industry didn’t know where I was, just what I wasn’t doing. Out of sight, I was out of mind. It seemed I was forgotten.

  voluntary obligations

  Moms and dads teach us things as children. Teachers, mentors, the government, and laws all give us guidelines to navigate life, rules to abide by in the name of accountability and order.

  I’m not talking about those obligations. I’m talking about the ones we make with ourselves. The YOU versus YOU obligations. Not the societal regulations and expectations that we acknowledge and endow for anyone other than ourselves, these are faith-based responsibilities that we make on our own, the ones that define our constitution and character.

  They are secrets with our self, personal protocols, private counsel in the court of our own conscience, and while nobody will give us a medal or throw us a party when we abide by them, no one will apprehend us when we don’t, because no one will know, except us.

  An honest man’s pillow is his peace of mind, and when we lie down on ours at night, no matter who’s in our bed, we all sleep alone. The voluntary obligations are our personal Jiminy Crickets, and there are not enough cops in the entire world to police them — it’s on us.

  * * *

  Then, after just shy of two years of being gone from the industry and sending a very deliberate message to Hollywood as to what I was not anymore, I suddenly and unexpectedly became something, a new good idea.

  The anonymity and unfamiliarity had bred creativity. Casting Matthew McConaughey as the defense attorney in The Lincoln Lawyer was now a fresh thought. Going to McConaughey for the lead in Killer Joe was now a novel notion.

  Richard Linklater called me for Bernie.

  Lee Daniels came to me for The Paperboy.

  Jeff Nichols wrote Mud for me.

  Steven Soderbergh called for Magic Mike.

  Yes, by saying no.

  The target drew the arrow.

  I was remembered by being forgotten.

  I had un-branded.

  I was a re-discovery, and now it was time to invent.

  My sacrifice complete, I had weathered the storm.

  Organized, I knew what I wanted, and I was ready to respond.

  It was time for me to say yes, and re-brand.

  Fuck the bucks. I’m going for the experience.

  Greenlight.

  time and truth.

  Two constants you can rely on.

  One shows up for the first time every time while the other never leaves.

  * * *

  The offers came in droves, almost as many as after A Time to Kill. The difference this time was that I knew what roles and stories I wanted to do and my appetite for dangerous dramatic fare was ravenous. Camila’s appetite for her man carving his own path had teeth as well.

  At one point I had offers for roles in The Paperboy, Magic Mike, and Mud, all three of which I dearly wanted to do, but their production schedules were going to be back to back to back if I did all three, leaving me only a few weeks in between each to prepare if I did them all.

  I remember saying to Camila, “I think I have to choose two of the three so I have the eight weeks I need to prepare for the two movies I choose to do.”

  “You want to do all three?” she asked.

  “Yeah, but the schedule’s too tight for me to prepare like I think I need to.”

  “If you want to do all three, then reach between your legs and grab your pair, big boy, do all three, you’ll make it work.”

  I did and it did.

  * * *

  I’d read the Dallas Buyers Club script in 2007 and immediately attached myself to it as the actor who would play the lead character Ron Woodroof. Once again, I was drawn to a character on the fringes of society, an underdog, an outlaw, doing what was necessary to survive. Being attached meant I had control of the script and could try and get it made, as well as approve the director. For the few years before and during my twenty-month sabbatical, no directors or financiers were interested in making a period drama about AIDS with Rom-Com McConaughey in the lead. Even early into my re-branding phase, with the so-called McConaissance* picking up steam, nobody was interested. Plenty of other actors tried to take control of the script away from me, and many other directors wanted to make the film with someone other than me, but I held on to it with a firm hand.

  Then, in January 2012, my agent told me a Canadian director named Jean-Marc Vallée had read the script and was interested in meeting me. I watched a film of his, C.R.A.Z.Y., and liked it for all the right reasons. Unsentimental humor and heart with anarchy wrapped around a dreamer’s humanity. It also had a badass soundtrack, which I still have no idea how he got on the low budget he had. This was exactly what I felt the Dallas Buyers Club script needed to bring it to life. We met in New York and discussed our passion for the project. Having recently done Magic Mike, I was in excellent physical shape.

  “This character, Ron Woodroof, he has Stage 4 HIV, how are you going to look like you do?” he asked.

  “Because it’s my job to and I will,” I told him. “It’s my responsibility to Ron.”

  A week later he agreed to direct.

  Jean-Marc, the producers Robbie Brenner, Rachel Winter, and I made a plan to make the film in October of that year. Weighing 182 pounds at the time, I had a lot of weight to lose. Five months out from our “agreed upon” start date, I began shedding weight. Three egg whites in the morning, five ounces of fish and a cup of steamed vegetables for lunch, the same for dinner, and as much wine as I wanted was my diet. I shed two and a half pounds a week like clockwork.

  At 157 pounds, with more to lose, I received a call from Martin Scorsese offering me the two-day role of the broker-mentor Mark Hanna to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort in the film The Wolf of Wall Street. Remember what I said about those launchpad lines? When I read the script and saw that Mark Hanna’s secret to successful stock brokering was cocaine and hookers, I took flight. Delusional or not, anyone who believes that could have an encyclopedia written about him. So I started writing it. In what was originally scripted as a much shorter scene, I went off into a lunatic-to-the-marvelous musical riff-rap that ended up being what’s in the film today.

  Scorsese let me play and DiCaprio teed me up. And that chest-bumping hum tune? That was something I was doing before each take to relax and keep my rhythm—it was Leonardo’s idea for me to do it in the scene.

  * * *

  “We’re shooting in the fall,” I’d say to anyone who asked about Dallas Buyers Club and to everyone who didn’t.

  Like my mom, I was not asking permission.

  “There is no money to make this movie, Matthew. There. Is. No. Movie,” my agent said.

  “Yes, there is,” I said. “We’re shooting in the fall.”

  I was not going to flinch.

  I continued to lose the weight needed to tell the story properly. Now down to 150 pounds from 182, my body was getting weak but my mind was getting stronger. Every pound I physically lost seemed to be sublimating in equal amount to more mental acuity. Like Ron, I was becoming clinical, meticulous, methodical, and a perfectionist. I needed three hours less sleep a night and could drink a bottle of wine until 2:00 a.m. and still be up at four to work on the script without an alarm clock. Feverishly obsessed with my man
, I was on fire, and I loved it. The downfall was that while my mental game was on the mound in Game 7 of the World Series, the extreme weight loss seemed to relegate my libido to the dugout.

  The screenwriter, Craig Borten, had given me over ten hours of cassette recordings of Ron while he was creating and then running his alternative HIV medication Buyers Club. I listened to them constantly, picking up intonation and intention, moments of bravado and vulnerability. There was one section of recording where he and another male voice were conversing with two other women who were in the background. There was a seditiously sexual undertone in the way they talked to each other, I could tell their carnal activity with each other was recent. But how? I thought. Ron’s got Stage 4 HIV? They couldn’t be…Unless they all had HIV. Of course. How interesting, how wild, how true. I took the tape to Jean-Marc and had him listen.

  “Is there any way we can get this into the movie?” I asked.

  “Wow, there is something so sad and beautiful about it,” he said, “but I don’t know how I could touch it without it seeming ugly.” Jean-Marc and I didn’t speak of it again, but as you’ll read, he never forgot it.

  I drove to see Ron Woodroof’s sister and daughter in their home in a small rural town outside of Dallas. They greeted me with open arms and complete trust as the chaperone of their brother and father’s legacy. We watched old VHS tapes of Ron and the family, Ron on vacations, showing off for the camera, dressed for Halloween. They were honest about who Ron was, who he was not, and answered every question I had.

  As we hugged goodbye, his sister asked, “Would you be interested in his diary? He kept one for years.”

  “If you’d allow me, I’d be honored,” I said.

  While the hours of tapes gave me an insight to the man from the outside in, the diary let me know who he was from the inside out. It was my secret key into Ron Woodroof’s soul. The diary told me who Ron was on lonely nights; it was where he shared his dreams and fears with no one but himself, and now me. His diary is how I found him, who he was after contracting HIV, but even more important who he was before. I remember a guy who would lie in bed on a weeknight smoking a joint, drawing doodles in a spiral notebook, writing things like,

  “Hope I get that call back tomorrow to go install those two JVC home speakers at Tom and Betty Wickman’s house. They live across town about 42 miles away so I figure $8 gas there and back, $6 for the monster cable speaker wire I gotta supply, that’ll clear me $24 off the $38 I’m charging ’em to install the speakers. Hot damn! I’ll hit the Sonic afterwards and get me a double cheeseburger and a taste of Nancy.”

  Then he’d wake up early the next morning, iron his one pair of slacks, his short-sleeve button-down, and put a fresh AA battery in his pager while he sipped his second cup of coffee, preparing to make a $24 profit out of his day. Until his pager buzzed, Tom and Betty’s number.

  “We’re gonna cancel the speaker install today, found a company that costs a little more than you but they’ll insure their work, thanks, Ron.” His heart would sink.

  “Goddamnit,” he wrote.

  Then he’d get high and head to that Sonic in spite of it all. Buy a single instead of a double and flirt up Nancy Blankenship, who he thought was pretty cute, especially how she roller-skated out to his car door with his food order and smiled her one-brown-tooth smile.

  “She’s my lucky 16,” he wrote.

  Come to find out, “16” was the room number of the nearest two-star motel where he and Nancy Blankenship would shag from time to time. That’s why she was lucky.

  Ron invented things but wouldn’t follow up on a patent. He made plans but they never quite happened. He was a dreamer, and he couldn’t catch a break.

  Meanwhile, Jean-Marc Vallée and the producers continued to cast and crew the film and scouted locations in New Orleans. They did not ask permission. They did not flinch. Still, it does take money to make a movie, and we were running out of time on our bluff. Except we weren’t bluffing, and I was still losing weight.

  “We’re shooting in New Orleans in the fall! The start date is October first!” we declared again more loudly to anyone who asked and everyone who didn’t.

  * * *

  Finally someone believed us, or, believed in us, because that someone put up $4.9 million to finance the movie. It wasn’t the $7 million dollars the film was budgeted for, but it was enough to get us in the game. Eight days before we were to begin principal photography in New Orleans, I got a call from Jean-Marc.

  “I do not know how I am going to shoot this film for $4.9 million,” he said. “The lowest possible budget to make it is seven mil but, if you will be there on day one, I will be there on day one, and we will make what we can make.”

  We both showed up.

  * * *

  “I’ve been thinking about that cassette recording you played me of Ron and the ladies and I have an idea,” Jean-Marc said to me a couple weeks into shooting.

  “In the scripted scene where Ron’s business is doing well, what if you’re in your next-door motel-room office and you see, in the line of people coming in to buy their HIV drugs, a girl you find attractive, and you ask your secretary if the girl has HIV.

  “‘Yeah, full-blown HIV,’ she says back to you.

  “Then we see Ron and this woman in the bathroom shower stall fucking, like, for need and survival.”

  “Sounds beautiful and true; you know how to not make it ugly?” I asked.

  “I do,” he said.

  When you view the scene, you understand why he did. It’s human, it’s heartbreaking, and it’s funny. While Ron and the woman are shagging in the shower next door, Jean-Marc cuts to the office where we see the secretaries and patrons hearing them, then looking around at each other in mild surprise with mischievous grins of hilarity and compassion. With humor Jean-Marc exposed the humanity. What he did not know how not to make ugly, he made beautiful.

  * * *

  We made Dallas Buyers Club for 4.9 million dollars in twenty-five days.

  We did not ask permission.

  We did not flinch.

  We took the hill.

  I got down to 135.

  Greenlight.

  * Did you know I made up, coined, and created the term McConaissance? I did.

  I was at Sundance with Mud in 2013 when I sat down for an interview with MTV. I’d been on a pretty good career run and I figured it needed a campaign slogan, an anthem, a bumpersticker, but I knew it couldn’t come from me.

  “You’ve been on quite the run, Mr. McConaughey. Killer Joe, Bernie, Magic Mike, now Mud. Congratulations,” the journalist said.

  “Thank you, yeah, I’m on a great ride, I actually did an interview the other day and the journalist called it a ‘McConaissance,’” I replied.

  “Oh my gosh, the ‘McConaissance.’ That’s brilliant. That may stick.” It did.

  I’ve never told anybody that story until now.

  NOVEMBER 7, 2011

  “Why isn’t Momma a McConaughey?” my inquisitive three-year-old son, Levi, asked me one day.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I’m Levi McConaughey, Vida’s Vida McConaughey, but Momma is Camila Alves. Why doesn’t she have our last name?”

  I thought for a second.

  “Because we’re not married yet.”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  If you’re a parent, then you know there are questions our children ask us that, as soon as the words come out of their mouth, we know we better have a great answer, because what we say next is going to be branded in their memories for life. This was one of those times.

  “Good question…I do want to marry Momma. I just don’t feel the need to. If I marry Momma, I wanna feel like I need to. I don’t wanna do it because that’s what we’re supposed to do, or because I merely want to, I wanna do it when that’s w
hat I need to do.”

  “Are you afraid to?” he asked.

  Another one of those questions. I was on the stand. Apparently my three-year-old son inherited my debating skills and cross-examination capabilities. I thought again.

  “Yeah, I guess I am a little bit.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “…Of losing myself,” I said.

  * * *

  The next day I went to my pastor.

  We talked about the sacrament of marriage and getting beyond my fears. He talked to me about the mystery of marriage, and how when two people who are meant to be together unite, the adventure of livin side by side does not steal the individual’s sense of self, rather it enlightens and informs it. How, when two people come together to marry, they each arrive as one whole being, and in marriage we don’t lose half of ourselves, we become more of ourselves. Through this covenant with God and our spouse we actually triple our existence and become three times what we were. Three entities: wife, husband, and God, in unification, unanimous. 1 x 1 = 3. A mystical multiplication.

  “It takes courage and sacrifice,” he said.

  Then he challenged me. “What’s the bigger risk for you, Matthew? Going on this adventure or continuing the one you’re on?”

  The dare. It got me thinking. I spent the next few weeks talking to my pastor, my brother, and successfully married men about it. Soon, for the first time in my life, I got the courage to look at marriage not as a final destination, rather as a new expedition, an affirmative and heartfelt choice to become more, together, with the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, and the only mother I wanted to be rocking with on my eighty-eighth birthday. For the first time, I began seeing marriage as more than only a biblical and legislative sanction that I was supposed to feel responsible for enacting. Marrying Camila became something I needed to do.