by Neil Daniels
Scripted over the course of two months by the Sprecher sisters, the film took three years to make because of funding problems. The film did not receive a commercial release until early 2002, though it premiered at the 2001 Venice Film Festival and was shown at the Toronto Film Festival and various other international festivals throughout the rest of the year and into early 2002. It had a limited US release and opened in just nine cinemas earning almost $90,000 on its first weekend of release.
A.O. Scott wrote in The New York Times: ‘It seems intuitively identifiable but strangely resistant to precise definition. Synonyms multiply by the dozen: chance, fate, coincidence, serendipity, the order of the universe – or, to give some human dimension to these chilly mathematical conceits: happiness, good fortune, kismet, grace, the meaning of life.’
Later that year McConaughey starred in Frailty, a psychological thriller marking the directorial debut of Apollo 13 actor Bill Paxton. He took on a major change in role reversals by appearing as a serial killer in the film. McConaughey plays a man named Fenton Meikis who enters an FBI office in Dallas one night and requests to speak to Agent Wesley Doyle, played by Powers Boothe. Meikis believes that his brother Adam (played by Levi Kreis) is the ‘God’s Hands’ serial killer that the FBI are tracking down. Paxton plays the widower father who is fanatically religious. As children, the brothers had been told by their father that they had been chosen by God to track down demons and destroy those whose names were given to him by an angel.
Screenwriter Brent Hanley spoke to DVD Talk’s Phillip Duncan about his experience working with McConaughey, a fellow Texan: ‘One of the things I learned most about actors and from actors, and McConaughey has been a huge mentor for the directing actors thing. The thing I’ve learned is how much can be said without saying anything. How a good screen actor can get across what you need them to get across without saying a fucking word. That to me is magical. I love that.’
The film opened in US cinemas in April 2002 and was a modest box office success with a budget of just $11 million. Reviews of the film were mostly positive. It reached the UK in September. Frailty has since become a cult classic amongst aficionados of dark thrillers and horror films. It is certainly an overlooked gem from this period of McConaughey’s career.
The Associated Press’ Christy Lemire wrote: ‘McConaughey gets top billing, but Paxton steals the show. And O’Leary more than holds his own again here. Too bad it’s in a movie that fails to live up to its potential.’
Robert Koehler wrote in Variety: ‘Pic is McConaughey’s most fully developed performance in several seasons; for Paxton, it adds to his growing gallery of nuanced, conflicted men from the heartland, while demonstrating that, in his feature helming debut, he already possesses the chops of a front-rank director… McConaughey reveals only as much about Meiks as he needs to, and never a moment too soon. It’s a poker-face performance supreme, both a portrait of a son’s tragedy and of a son absorbing his father’s legacy.’
The Guardian’s Xan Brooks said of the film: ‘Bill Paxton’s directing debut stands alone in a horror genre currently infested with pert teens and knowing plot tics. What we have here is addictive old-school hokum, an American Gothic comic-strip with a whiff of Wise Blood to its lurid design.’
Venturing deeper into mainstream Hollywood movies, McConaughey was cast as Denton Van Zan in the post-apocalyptic action fantasy film Reign of Fire about a breed of dragons that emerge from the earth setting fire to anyone and everything. It was his first action movie and his first stab at fantasy. Most of his past films had been dramas with real life characters so Reign of Fire was an altogether different movie.
‘Actually the idea came to me in a dream,’ McConaughey said to Phase9 TV. ‘Every other character I played in a movie had some sort of a biography to look at. But playing a dragon slayer in 2025 meant that there was no research I could do. It was all about imagination.’
Directed by Rob Bowman, and starring Christian Bale and Gerard Butler, the film is set in 2020 England though it was filmed in the Wicklow Mountains of Ireland with the cast and crew staying over in Dublin. It wasn’t filmed in England because at the time there was an outbreak of foot and mouth disease.
‘Reign of Fire was a whole other fun thing,’ McConaughey told The Film Experience’s Nathaniel R., ‘but that was all from the imaginary dragon slayer future. And if anyone disagreed with anything I was doing there, I could always just go, “You know any dragon slayers?” and no one answered yes so I was always safe with that one, right? [Laughter…] Here’s the deal: it’s really part of the fun. We get one day a year where we can dress up and be what we want to be. Halloween. It’s a costume. Well, the next thing is when you get to go perform and play and be someone else.’
There are lots of action scenes in the film and some fantastic computer generated effects, but also some lousy dialogue. It was rather odd to see McConaughey with a shaven head, beard and tattoos like a character out of the Mad Max films. He certainly got a few interesting reactions from family and friends as well as members of the public when he went outside. He just didn’t look like himself. He looked evil, like some sort of satanic cult member.
Having tattoos in the film tempted him to get them for real. ‘The tattoos were an idea that I came up with and worked on with a guy in a Dublin tattoo parlour,’ McConaughey admitted to Phase9 TV. ‘The tattoos are actually two dragons that wrap round my shoulder and come down to my navel. It was something very tribal that I was going for. They were painted on every morning and it took about two hours.’
When he shaved his hair he got a suntan on it to make him look darker. It took him eight months to grow the beard, and to get into shape he worked out at his ranch in Texas. He worked out with weights, ran four miles a day and boxed – which he continued to do during filming in Dublin. He has seventy cows at his ranch in Texas and he’d wrestle with them by throwing his shoulder into them trying to boost his strength. They didn’t bite too much. He even tried to get them into headlocks. It was fun and got him into the sort of shape he needed to be in for the film.
‘It’s easier at night when they’re kind of asleep, standing asleep,’ he elaborated to Total Film. ‘I wrestled some of the calves, some of the mid-sized cows, and then there are some big boys that I just booted around with. I got hit in the hip – pretty much had a black and blue hip for three weeks. It put me on my ass, for sure.’
He got some bumps and bruises on set too but he didn’t hurt himself too seriously. The scene where McConaughey head-butts Bale was real, though it was an accident and a heat of the moment move. It gave Bale a lump. Bale worked through and finished the scene. Both actors tried to make the fight look as real as possible. They got their fair share of bloodied knuckles and knees.
‘It dropped me like a sack of potatoes,’ Bale told Alec Cawthorne of the BBC, about the fight seen between his and McConaughey’s characters. ‘In the movie you see me crawl around the ground for a couple of seconds to try to find my bearings – that is real! Then I thought I had to get up and finish the scene or it was going to be no use. I could see that the film crew were staring to see if I was all right. When we finished I asked Matthew if he was OK. He said, “Yeah, you mad bastard – I headbutted you!”’
McConaughey had a blast making the film and was eager to jump right back into another action film. He’s not Arnold Schwarzenegger nor Sylvester Stallone and some could argue he looks a little bit out of sorts in an action film, but he gave it a good try.
McConaughey joked with About.com: Hollywood Movies’ Rebecca Murray and Fred Topel that dragons were easier to deal with than women: ‘Dragons you know. Dragons are simple. They’re in the sky, bang, bring them down to the ground, simple. Women, man, we’re never going to figure you all out. I think if we can enjoy trying to figure you all out, that’s the ticket. Forget trying to figure you all out – it’s impossible.’
McConaughey enjoyed his time in Dublin and devoured some of the local customs, including pints of Guin
ness. He had to be careful of his weight, though, because Guinness is heavy on the stomach. His favourite aspect of Ireland, however, was the people and the culture. He loved the local music and enjoyed sitting in pubs listening to bands and chatting with the locals. It’s a testosterone-fuelled film dominated by a male cast but what was life like together behind the camera and off set? ‘We went out in Dublin a few times,’ Bale told Alec Cawthorne of the BBC about his relationship with his co-stars, ‘and Matthew had parties at his place, but most of the time he was down at the boxing gym – sparring and just hitting somebody.’
It opened at number three at the box office in July 2002 behind the Tom Hanks led gangster drama Road to Perdition and the Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones blockbuster sequel Men in Black II. Reign of Fire grossed over $80 million and had a budget of $60 million. Reviews of the film were modest at best. It reached UK cinemas in August.
Alec Cawthorne wrote on the BBC website: ‘The grimness of the wiped-out world is offset by the campy posturing of a tattooed McConaughey, and while Bale is earnest as the guilt-stricken leader Quinn, he also gets the best Star Wars gag you’ll see in years, distracting the ragamuffin kids from the misery of their predicament.’
The Guardian’s Joe Queenan said: ‘Reign of Fire falls into the category of bad movies that are not nearly as bad as they could have been, and not nearly as bad as some of us would have liked them to be. This is a phenomenon often referred to as the Sandahl Bergman Conundrum or the Van Damme Anomaly. Shunning the camp qualities that usually permeate this genre of motion pictures, the film could have used a few more laughs.’
Elvis Mitchell wrote in The New York Times: ‘The movie might have been a minor classic if it had maximized its own possibilities. But until the rush wears off, the picture is as much fun as a great run at a slot machine: even when your luck runs out, you’re losing only pocket change.’
In 2003 McConaughey joined a cast of noted actors, including Tom Hanks and Stanley Tucci, to narrate an episode of the sixteen part series on the history of America, Freedom: A History of Us.
U-571, The Wedding Planner and Reign of Fire were reasonably successful box office films but they were certainly not enough to gain McConaughey critical praise after some of his highlights of the previous decade.
He’s an actor who enjoys playing character roles as much as lead roles as he told Crazed Fanboy’s Michael A. Smith: ‘I mean for me it’s not one or the other. In Reign of Fire, that was a real character role. My character in Larger Than Life was a character role. I love doing that kind of stuff. And I like playing a character where I say, “I know that dude.”’
*****
Simply put, too many of his early 2000s films were throw-away productions that gave him next to no credence or respect, with the exception of Frailty, which is often thought of as a minor classic and one of the most underrated horror films of the decade. Still, for an actor whose career was looking so prosperous in the 1990s he was appearing in one too many bad films. He needed a hit. The studios came calling with another rom-com. The money was good and the lead female co-star was bound to be sexy. He said yes.
‘We needed sexy, hot, charming, intelligent – really, how many guys are there out there like that?’ How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days producer Christine Peters told Variety’s Jenelle Riley. ‘He’s a true Southern gentleman.’
McConaughey knows how hard it is as an actor to take a role that is so well known in such a popular genre and make it work. If you fail as an actor to provide the laughs the whole film can sink. ‘I take the comedy real seriously,’ McConaughey admitted to The Guardian’s Andrew Pulver. ‘There’s a whole plan behind it. Even though those characters look like I’m just skating through, there’s a design behind it. They look easy-breezy, but if you go digging too deep into character, you sink the ship.’
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days opened in the US in February 2003 and the UK in April to mixed reviews from critics though it was a box office hit making over $100 million at the global box office. Directed by Donald Petrie it is based on a short cartoon novel by Michael Alexander and Jeannie Long, and stars McConaughey as Benjamin Barry, an advertising executive and ladies’ man who, to win an advertising campaign, places a bet that he can make a woman fall in love with him in ten days. Kate Hudson, daughter of Goldie Hawn, plays Andie Anderson, a writer who covers the ‘How To’ beat for Composure magazine and is commissioned to pen a piece on ‘How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days.’ The pair met at a bar after the bet is placed.
Like his character Ben, McConaughey has always been comfortable around women. He loves and appreciates women. McConaughey has certainly had his fair share of Hollywood beauties. He grew up in a loving family that was open about sex. He was taught about the birds and the bees from an early age when he started to date around thirteen or fourteen years old. He was told that if a woman was uncomfortable around him she wouldn’t say so, so he’d have to pick up on their mannerisms. He was taught never to push a woman into doing anything she didn’t want to do. His love and respect for women was one reason why he was drawn to the rom-com genre. McConaughey knows how to treat women and how to charm them. He knows when not to come on too strong and when to offer them space if they need it.
In the film, his character cooks a delicious meal. McConaughey is himself a pretty good cook as he confessed to People magazine: ‘I’ve got some culinary skills! I would consider myself a bit of a saucier. I make barbecue sauces, marinades, salad dressing. I like to eat healthy, and how do you make healthy food taste good? Because usually it’s boring. That’s why I got into the sauces.’
Dating for McConaughey can be an odd experience if the other person is not famous. It means they know things about him and he’s not aware how much knowledge his date has of him. What McConaughey likes about dating is the courtship between two strangers. It starts off with general things like name, family and job before the conversation gets deeper. If he meets someone who knows about him, and they ask him about his Airstream collection or his dog, he gets a bit freaked out because they know his biography.
‘I’m not much on the “direct” romantic,’ McConaughey admitted to About.com: Hollywood Movies’ Rebecca Murray and Fred Topel. ‘I’m not much on moves or lines or things like that, but I love to cook. It’s a great comfortable place that I find to get to know somebody, [to] have a date over to my house and cook. It’s a great place for conversation. I love conversation in the kitchen. I love having that one thing that I get to do, cooking while you’re there.’
McConaughey saw Kate Hudson in Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical film Almost Famous, and thought she was great in the role of rock groupie Penny Lane. After just five minutes of meeting her he knew they’d have great chemistry onscreen. She was in her early twenties at the time and very ambitious and comfortable with her sexuality. ‘Kate is really talented and really natural,’ McConaughey said to The Tech’s Allison C. Lewis. ‘She does every take different…she has great timing. She’s very relaxed and very playful. There’s chemistry between us on screen…it’s easy to be attracted to her.’
It’s a simple story – how hadn’t it been done before? ‘The funniest thing about this movie is not the jokes,’ McConaughey, then thirty-three years old, told The GW Hatchet’s Andy Metzger. ‘It’s got a great setup… The chemistry on screen is one of the undeniable things about this flick. It’s a chick flick but it appeals to dudes.’
A.O. Scott wrote of the film in The New York Times: ‘For his part, Mr. McConaughey steps into the role of comic foil with gentlemanly aplomb. You don’t believe this scrubbed and gleaming pair are really the love-struck and ambitious young Manhattan professionals they are pretending to be, but for the most part the pretending is reasonably enjoyable to watch.’
Writing in Empire, Anna Smith said: ‘Hudson and McConaughey are a likable pair in a light but efficient comedy that succeeds where The Wedding Planner failed.’
When McConaughey was promoting the film in Australia he spoke on a talk sho
w about Eileen Crocker of the Crocker family with whom he stayed for five months as an exchange student in Australia in 1988. Sadly, she died later that year. It goes to show, though, just how family and friends are important to McConaughey in his life. He doesn’t forget those who help him.
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days was a successful enough film that Hollywood remembered Matthew McConaughey just as he was dangerously slipping off radar with a series of poor films, and it led to parts in other romantic comedies. He became the go-to-guy for romantic comedies and the cheques were good. The thing is, he was not known for his acting ability. It’s rare for a good-looking guy to be given credit for his talent. It would still be a few years before critics properly began to take note of his acting prowess. He needed heavyweight roles: a Rain Man (Tom Cruise) or a Philadelphia (Tom Hanks), or even a Pulp Fiction (John Travolta) to get the attention of the Oscar voters. Playing a handsome, charming man whom a woman may fall in love with didn’t exactly stretch his acting talents or gain him many positive notices from the pundits.
Such is the nature of the business that an actor could work on a film, move straight onto another set, and have the latter film released first, due to the fact that production and distribution times vary. Throughout this period McConaughey was working on a variety of projects, but few of them had serious credentials. It would be unfair to attack him for appearing on the cover of glossy magazines with his shirt off, or for his high-profile love life with female actors or good-looking industry types, because that is the lifestyle of a Hollywood star. McConaughey is someone different, though. He is part hippie, part Beat poet and part loner who plays the role of the lone travelling man rather well. He isn’t your usual celebrity – when he is fed up of the LA glitz and Hollywood lifestyle he goes back home to Texas where is treated as one of the locals and where he lives an ordinary life.
