Hearing Matthew McConaughey talk about his career at the McConaughey panel at SXSW, you couldn’t shake the perception that success came pretty quickly and easily for him, on account of him being such a handsome, chilled-out good ol’ boy. After rough couple of years where he took too many easy paychecks for crappy rom-coms (his Kate Hudson Period), McConaughey is back on a hot streak (despite his historic Oscar snub), so it figures that the biggest director in town wants to work with him. According to Deadline, Christopher Nolan has offered McConaughey the lead in his planned sci-fi epic, Interstellar. McConaughey hasn’t accepted yet, and Deadline points out that actors rarely say no to Chris Nolan, but who knows? You never know when McConaughey might want to take a year off from acting to go to St. Barth’s and drop acid and play naked bongos with spider monkeys or something, change his whole perspective on shit.
Interstellar was originally set up in 2006 by Steven Spielberg, when Paramount owned DreamWorks, and after Spielberg became intrigued by Caltech physicist and relativity expert Kip S. Thorne and his scientific theory that wormholes exist and can be used for time travel. It was Spielberg who set Jonah Nolan to write the script, which made it easy for Christopher Nolan to come aboard after Spielberg left the project. After all, the Nolan siblings have a collaborative track record, with Jonah hatching the short story that became Christopher’s first hit Memento, and following that with two Batfilms and The Prestige. Christopher Nolan signed on in January to write a script that merged an original idea of his with the script that Jonah wrote. The ambition is a film that will depict a heroic interstellar voyage to the farthest borders of our scientific understanding.
I’d love to see a film where Matthew McConaughey plays a ramblin’ spaceman, piloting his flat-bed spaceship with his dog in the back all over space and time, making good times and chill buds, never staying in one place long enough to get attached.
ALIEN LIFE FORM: Greetings, Earthling. Welcome to Melron-4.
MCCONAUGHEY: Oh hey, I remember you, man. I think I got that hoodie I borrowed in the truck.