Trying to recommend “The Rivals of Amziah King” without sounding like you are making it up as you go along presents a real problem. It begins as a warmhearted Oklahoma bluegrass movie about beekeeping, honey production, and family. Then it takes a very sharp turn into a coming-of-age epic and crime story. Every description sounds slightly insane. Somehow, director Andrew Patterson (“The Vast of Night”) makes all of that work.
Matthew McConaughey plays Amziah King, a beekeeper and bluegrass musician running a honey operation in rural Oklahoma. When Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass), a girl he briefly fostered as a child, returns after years apart, Amziah begins teaching her the family business just as his rivals threaten everything he has built. The film also stars Cole Sprouse, Scott Shepherd, Rob Morgan, Tony Revolori, Jake Horowitz, and Kurt Russell.
During an interview with The Playlist, McConaughey has found a much cleaner way to describe it.
“A jolt of joy and mischief,” he told The Playlist. “You leave with more soul than you showed up with.”
Getting that jolt of joy and mischief onto the screen required a lot of live bees. That became a slightly bigger concern when McConaughey learned, only one week before filming began, that his body parts could swell dramatically after a sting. He and Patterson responded with an admirably practical combination of caution and “f–k it.”
“Well, part of it is ‘f–k it,’” McConaughey said. “The other part of it is, let’s be smart and schedule that scene for the last scene of the movie. So, if McConaughey does get stung, we don’t need him on camera anymore.”
Patterson quietly prepared a visual-effects backup, shooting an empty version of the scene in case putting McConaughey inside the swarm became impossible. The real version was still the goal.
“We went out and shot an empty version of it for the ‘VFX version’ we weit became impossible to putg to do,” Patterson winked. “Five minutes because I was like, ‘Okay, all right, let’s go.’ We got the plate, and then we‘totally jus’ planned on coming back.”
They did come back. McConaughey picked up the queen, bees swarmed, the cameras rolled, and he finished the day without getting stung.
LookingGlass was considerably calmer around the bees than most reasonable people would be, although she admitted there were still a few nerves when the time came to let a live swarm cover her.
“I mean, I wouldn’t be human if I wasn’t just a little bit nervous about it,” she said. “Such a surreal thing to kind of know that you’re going to be covered. I really do love those bees. It taught me a lot about just how wonderful nature can be. I absolutely just loved getting to be a beekeeper for, like, three months.”
That scene would be a fairly wild assignment for an experienced actor. For LookingGlass, it was part of her first major introduction to the film industry, alongside McConaughey, Russell, and a director making a movie that refuses to stay inside one genre for very long.
“I mean, it’s my first kind of introduction to this whole industry,” LookingGlass said. “So, I took everything in stride, and I was just super excited to do everything.”
When Patterson asked whether she wanted to enter the swarm without a bee suit, she did not need much convincing.
“I really wanted to do it because it’s just, you know, it’s so once-in-a-lifetime,” she explained. “I don’t think I’ll ever do that again. So, getting to do that scene was amazing.”
Keeping the movie’s unusual shape intact presented a different challenge. Patterson said multiple versions were considered during the editing process, some of which dramatically changed the story he set out to tell.
“There was a whole lot of visions that weren’t the vision for this movie,” Patterson said. “The best way I can describe it is, when you’ve been around the movie industry long enough, everyone’s trying to hit a target no one else can hit. I’m trying to hit a target no one else can see. In doing that, you kind of have to keep letting people know, ‘All right, it’s out there. We’re going to hit it.’”
At one point, Patterson opened the edit to see what a different version looked like. He walked in to discover that one of the movie’s most important communal sequences had disappeared, while a major set piece had been reduced to a quick montage.
“I opened up the edit so that I could see what people wanted to change,” he recalled. “And it happened. I walked in one day, and they just cut the potluck out. Oh, damn. That’s a different movie. They had truncated the entire river heist into a montage. Okay, that’s not storytelling. There’s nothing involving in that.”
Patterson eventually had the opportunity to test both versions. The studio sided with his cut.
“What ended up becoming true was, okay, no, what I had envisioned was the strongest version,” he said. “And I just had to show people. I had to demonstrate my ideas. When I was able to do that, we were able to test two versions, and what you see was my cut. We were very, very happy that the studio saw that and backed my vision.”
The film’s trickiest move may be the way it gradually shifts its weight from Amziah to Kateri. McConaughey’s natural gravitational pull makes Amziah the obvious center at first, but LookingGlass slowly emerges as the heart of the story.
“Because you fall in love with her, the viewer does as well,” Patterson said. “That became how the transition worked. Yes, they fall in love with you, but because you fell in love with her character, it lets us take on a new side of the story.”
McConaughey described the shift through the movie’s own beekeeping language.
“It lets us take on a new side of the story and hand off the baton,” he said. “In her journey from princess to queen, Amziah was the queen, the first queen, and then she becomes the queen. You hear all the callbacks, and the worker bees choose their queen. When it’s time for a new one, they choose.”
The conversation eventually moved from rural Oklahoma to Taylor Sheridan’s “Yellowstone” universe. McConaughey was once widely expected to lead a new series set inside Sheridan’s world, although nothing was ever formally announced. Asked whether the project remains possible, he said the door has not closed.
“No, I mean, it’s not any more of a thing than it was, or probably any less of a thing than it was,” McConaughey said. “That did hit the headlines there for a while. Taylor and I have spoken and continue to have conversations about what that would be, and if it ever would be. But nothing’s real yet.”
Watch the full interview with Matthew McConaughey, Angelina LookingGlass, and Andrew Patterson below. Black Bear Pictures opens “The Rivals of Amziah King” in limited theaters on August 14.
Mike DeAngelo is a film writer, podcaster, and entertainment journalist whose work has appeared in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire, and beyond. He is the host of The Playlist's podcasts The Discourse and Bingeworthy.
