Matthew McConaughey: The Sea Of Trees

An Interview with Matthew McConaughey: The Sea Of Trees

Texas native MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY is one of Hollywood’s most sought-after leading men. A chance meeting in Austin with casting director and producer Don Phillips led him to director Richard Linklater, who launched the actor’s career in the cult classic Dazed and Confused. Since then, he has appeared in over 40 feature films that have grossed over $1 billion; and has become a producer, director, and philanthropist – all the while sticking to his Texas roots and “jk livin” philosophy.

2014 was a game-changing year for McConaughey. For his riveting portrayal of Ron Woodruff in Dallas Buyers Club, McConaughey received an Academy Award, Golden Globe Award, Screen Actors Guild Award and Gotham Award for Best Actor, the Best Actor Award at the Rome Film Festival as well as the Desert Palm Achievement Actor Award at the Palm Springs Film Festival. He also made the move to TV starring alongside Woody Harrelson in the HBO dramatic series True Detective. The show was met by rave reviews from critics and fans alike and earned Matthew a Critics Choice and TCA Award for Best Actor in a Drama Series as well as an Emmy Nomination. Later that year he starred in Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan, and also starring Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain.

In 2008, Matthew McConaughey started The just keep livin Foundation (www.jklivinfoundation.org), which is dedicated to helping boys and girls transform into men and women through programs that teach the importance of decision-making, health, education, and active living. The Foundation has partnered with Communities in Schools (CIS) – the nation’s largest, non-profit, dropout-prevention organization –in West Los Angeles to implement fitness and wellness programs in two large urban high schools.

OMTimes was thrilled to connect with Matthew McConaughey and Ken Kao, the Co-founder and CEO of Waypoint Entertainment, a production, development company and Producer of the acclaimed The Sea of Trees movie.

The Sea Of Trees was the best script I remember reading in the last five years.”

“It felt like a bunch of beautiful haikus, back to back. It was incredibly surprising. I got chills just in my reading of it.” ~Matthew McConaughey

In this powerful story of love and redemption, Matthew McConaughey stars as Arthur Brennan, an American professor who travels to Japan in the midst of a personal crisis. As he wanders through a mysterious forest with a dark past, he experiences flashbacks of his fraught but loving relationship with his wife, Joan (Naomi Watts), and meets an enigmatic stranger, Takumi (Ken Watanabe), who is lost and injured. Arthur devotes himself to saving Takumi and returning him home to safety, and the two embark on a spiritual, life-changing journey of friendship, discovery, and healing—one which may ultimately re-connect Arthur with his love for his wife.

When asked why he chose this movie, Matthew McConaughey shares his own perspective:

“Lately, I’ve been choosing roles that scare me… and this one definitely scared me!” The actor recalls, “Interstellar had just wrapped filming. It was early 2014, prior to the Golden Globes and months before the Academy Awards… before Dallas Buyers Club received awards don’t remember when. I just immediately knew then that I wanted to be a part of it. It was not one of those projects that I really had to deliberate. I loved the pedigree around the project. I loved the story itself. I loved the fact that Gus Van Sant was attached to direct and I loved the ‘Arthur’ character and the fact that this was something that was going to be highly challenging for me.”

“The Sea of Trees was a very internal and intuitive choice for me. I’d just come off shooting of Interstellar, which was ‘let’s go on a voyage way out there,’ and this one was all about ‘let’s take an internal voyage deep inside.’ At that time, I had just completed a very public month campaigning for Dallas Buyers Club and I was looking for a long quiet walk with myself in the woods. I needed some meditation… some introspection.”

“After reading Sparling’s script, I said, ‘Guess what? This is a beautiful story and also get to go have a job and get that introspection.”

OMTimes asked Mr. McConaughey about the Sea of Trees, and what was it all about.

“The Sea Of Trees is a life-affirming story that should leave a lot of people questioning their own lives, in good ways. When they leave the theater, they will ponder: what have they taken care of since they’ve been here on this earth? What do they still need to take care of while they’re here? What do they need to make amends for?”

Mr. McConaughey continued the sharing:

“The Sea Of Trees deals with something spiritual. Some may see it, as it has to do with God. Some may say it has to do with reincarnation… literal purgatories, what have you. Many films that deal with that subject matter become very heavy-handed in effort to impress a message. This thing is just poetic. It’s going to let everyone leave the theater and have his or her own talk through the parking lot to philosophize about what it was about and what it wasn’t about, who Takumi was — was he my spirit, was he Joan’s spirit? Was the forest actually an existential place? The screenplay was poetic and it didn’t preach, but yet it was elegant and at the same time… gnarly. You’ve got to go through annihilation to get to salvation. And we get annihilated. I get annihilated. So it’s one hell of a survival story as well.”

don Miguel Ruiz Jr: The Path of Wisdom

There’s a quite a bit of action in The Sea Of Trees, McConaughey explains why: “The story drives along. It’s Biblical… there’s fires and floods and cold and loss of blood and near death.”

OMTimes asked how Mr. McConaughey would describe his character On Sea Of Trees.

“Arthur is someone who finds out that he’s got to make amends for a whole lot of things that he thought he didn’t have to. Arthur’s wife is violently taken from him. He decides he wants to fulfill a promise that he’d given to her as to when it’s time to go; he’ll go and die in a beautiful place, a perfect place. He finds this forest and those good intentions are interrupted by a man walking through the woods.”

OMTimes asked Matthew McConaughey what were his expectations about how the audiences would perceive the message of The SEA OF TREES Movie.

“I hope audiences walk away and just check in a little, clock their own life, clock their own relationships, clock their relationships with people they’ve loved that aren’t even here anymore. Looking at themselves in the mirror… that’s really what the picture does is it’s an honest reflection for each one of us, in our particular way, to say, “How am I doing with my relationships? How am I doing in my relationship with myself?”

“If you believe in reincarnation, there are versions of that that say, you know what, you’re reincarnated to come back and learn lessons you did not learn the first time around. It’s another—in this story, it happens in Arthur’s life live. He doesn’t die and resurrected to come back and learn lessons, he’s learning them through purgatory…going through death to get to life. So I think it’s a good picture to take a little inventory for people and everyone will be able to take a little inventory, not in a heavy way, but in a spiritual way.” ~Matthew McConaughey