Matthew McConaughey calls the eponymous 'Mud' an 'aristocrat of the heart'

The actor was endeared to his character's streak of romanticism

By Kristopher Tapley Saturday, Jan 19, 2013 11:41 PM

Matthew McConaughey at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival

Credit: Getty Images

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The piece reminded McConaughey of certain films from the 1980s with its deliberate pacing, he says, and its tendency to allow the audience time to breathe with it. The imagery, the sound, the pacing and the words are all part and parcel of the poetry of it, he says. But he also went back to that period in his mind because that was when he was Ellis. He remembers having his heart in his throat asking a girl named Gretchen to go out with him once upon a time.

"That was the big thing then, to ask someone to 'go with you,'" he says. "And I remember someone going, 'You can write a note.' And I was like, 'No. After school I'm going to go to her in front of the buses and I'm going to ask her eye to eye. That's going to be so hard but I've got to feel that.' I went and did it and she said yes, thankfully.

"There's also the magical realism, which you wrote, and that's a very good two-word synopsis to let someone know what this has a lot of. Not as extreme as, say, 'Beasts of the Southern Wild,' but, you know, boat in a tree. Practically, yeah, that could happen. Hadn't seen it, but yeah, that could happen. And, 'I want to get this boat in the water.' Uh, okay. I guess that could happen. I'd like to see how this goes down. There's just such an innocence to the whole thing. Jeff wrote a beautiful script and I think he made a great movie."

Nichols had pursued McConaughey for the role at a busy time. The actor's agent passed the script along, particularly noting the writer/director's strong Southern voice, and McConaughey was keen to do it. "I talked to Jeff and I wasn't able to find a spot where I could release my work and really dive into the script," he recalls. "I said, 'Jeff, man, I'll get on it. Please don't haul ass with it. Stay on me. I'm gonna read this thing. I just need to finish up a bunch of work.'"

On the set, McConaughey says Nichols was "confident in that he could trust what he had on the page and he trusted what we got in the shot. He didn't over-complicate things. He didn't try to make a straight line crooked. Sometimes when it's working, directors and people in general can try to make it complicated. It was working and he let it evolve and let it roll out. And again, he wrote such a good script that we weren't going off page trying to make scenes into something they weren't. He knew what he wrote and why he wrote what he wrote."

And as for his young co-star, McConaughey says he treats Sheridan as a peer. "In a lot of ways, he's an intuitive old man," he says. "But when he acts, he doesn't have any attitude, yet he's old enough to know what having an attitude is. He's got a lot of poise and a lot of patience for a young man his age. And the other thing is he's not on screen acting older than his age. You can see him process things in a more mature way than a lot of kids his age do, but, again, he's not playing an attitude. And you see a lot of younger actors do that sometimes. He's wonderful."

From here McConaughey is off to New Orleans to begin work on the new HBO series "True Detective" with his friend Woody Harrelson. But for a blip here at the 35th annual Sundance Film Festival, he's a wonderful steward for a film looking for its second wind after launching at the Cannes Film Festival eight months ago.

"Mud" opens nationwide on April 26.

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Kristopher Tapley
Editor-at-Large

Kristopher Tapley has covered the film awards landscape for over a decade. He founded In Contention in 2005. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Times of London and Variety. He begs you not to take any of this too seriously.