If there’s any hope for a feature film to break out on the big screen, particularly with streaming competition from home, a filmmaker needs to break genre in order to intrigue and eventize.
With his sophomore directorial, The Rivals of Amziah King, Oklahoma filmmaker Andrew Patterson is doing exactly that. To describe the plot of the Matthew McConaughey starring feature isn’t enough. The movie is a fusion of a western, (bee-hive) heist film, blue grass musical, comedy, and father-daughter heartwarming drama. The blue-grass music filled pic’s slo-mo opening sequence at desert stop burger stand in the middle of the night is something of a ballet. The movie hits theaters on Friday, Aug. 14.
On today’s Crew Call Live we speak with Patterson about hitting the lottery with Hollywood, and making cinema, his way.
Rivals of Amziah King, technically reps Oscar winner McConaughey’s return to live-action feature film acting after a five year-break, his last pic being 2020’s The Gentleman. McConaughey plays the title character, an Oklahoma small town beekeeper who on the side is part of ragtag blue grass band. He comes back in contact with his foster daughter, Kateri, played by newcomer Angelina LookingGlass in her feature acting debut. Together, they make Amzeah’s beekeeping business thrive — until there’s a shocking twist. The movie received a standing ovation at its 2025 SXSW world premiere, which is rare as the festival’s Paramount Theatre where audience receptions are known more their cheers than people taking to their feet.
Patterson began writing Amziah King in 2018. But it’s his feature directorial debut, the sci-fi alien invasion 1950s period drama, The Vast of Night, that lit the wick on his newfound directing career, and intriguing enough, during the pandemic.
Patterson, a former multiplex projectionist and local commercial TV filmmaker, says that when it came to making his first movie, “I didn’t have a way in. I didn’t have a mentor. There wasn’t any kind of film program. There wasn’t anything that taught me how to get there. And, so, in the school of, I would say, ‘Robert Rodriguez’, I did start to get access to video equipment in my teens and early 20s.”
Vast of Night was made for $700K. Patterson world premiered the movie after being rejected from everywhere at Slamdance in January 2019. Then lightning struck. A meeting followed with Steven Soderbergh.
“He finds me in the lobby of a hotel, takes me next door, sits me down and says ‘I don’t think you know what you did here,’” Patterson shares.
Soderbergh was ready with an opportunity for Patterson to direct another script. But the director paused, keen to survey what else might come his way. Amazon MGM Studios acquired Vast of Night with the intention of a theatrical release, but Covid hit. Still despite a drive-in theater play and Prime Video, Hollywood gravitated toward Patterson with more meetings and projects to direct, i.e. Steven Spielberg’s Amblin, and even big Sony.
Matthew McConaughey and Angelina LookingGlass in ‘The Rivals of Amziah King’
But Patterson kept it indie in regards to his next project, Rivals of Amziah King, sticking to his voice, thanks in part to supporters such as 4x Oscar nominated and upcoming 007 producer David Heyman, and film finance magnate Teddy Schwarzman. It was during this time that Patterson signed with WME agent Mike Simpson whose clients include Quentin Tarantino, Park Chan-wook, Tim Burton and Bong Joon Ho.
From the start, Patterson set out to make a film that was genre bending, well aware of the rules he was breaking when it came to storytelling. His inspiration to make a Native American leading film came from his work with the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, for which he made documentary projects. Another jumping off point was flipping the narrative of the 1948 Howard Hawks directed feature, Red River starring John Wayne. In the first 20 minutes of that film, Wayne’s protagonist shoots two Latino farmers. Patterson wondered, “What if somebody turned that around? What if the daughter of one those people that got shot, got up on a horse and went after John Wayne?”
When it came to the music influence, the 2012 Belgian Felix van Groeningen directed musical drama The Broken Circle Breakdown “had a little bit of an effect on me” says Patterson. The indie folk collective, The Last Bison, also proved a significant muse for Patterson with their song “Quill,” which the group’s Ben Hardesty and McConaughey perform in the pic.
Then came McConaughey. While Patterson was prepped to consider a non-marquee actor as his lead, WME connected him with the Dallas Buyers Club star. When the project landed on McConaughey’s desk, the actor told Patterson in their first zoom, “‘I know these people’ He’s like, ‘I think you sent it to me because you know, I know these people,’” recalls the director. Patterson soon attracted the likes of Riverdale‘s Cole Sprouse and Death Proof and Hateful Eight actor Kurt Russell to the cast, the latter telling the director on a zoom that the family dynamic in Rivals of Amziah King rivaled that of Don Corleone and Michael Corleone in The Godfather.
Following the pic’s premiere in SXSW, Rivals of Amziah King financier Black Bear opted to keep North American distribution rights on the film as they were launching their own U.S. distribution arm.
On Monday, Rivals of Amziah King returns to Austin, TX for a special screening at the newly renamed Alamo Drafthouse Mueller location, the Matthew McConaughey Cinema, where LookingGlass,Patterson and the Oscar winner will be on hand for a Q&A in addition to the latter performing songs from the movie. The movie is currently 97% fresh with critics on Rotten Tomatoes.
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