Why Matthew McConaughey hugged his kids tighter after making his new film

Matthew McConaughey seems like a fairly pragmatic kind of guy. At 183cm tall, you’d swear he’s a few centimetres more. He’s an imposing presence, if also a charming one. And you get the impression he might not be the kind of man given to displays of emotion.

In The Lost Bus, Paul Greengrass’ survival thriller based on the real story of a busload of schoolchildren caught in a California inferno, he plays bus driver Kevin McKay, a cinematically embellished iteration of a real man.

But at some point the film becomes much more than mere action movie. A polemic on broken environmental policy? Maybe. A deeply affecting examination of a father facing an impossible choice: save the kids in his bus, and risk not being able to return to save his estranged son? Absolutely.

The role, McConaughey says, left him examining his relationship with his own children Levi, Vida, and Livingston. “It left me coming back and seeing time with my own children and going, don’t miss it,” he says. “People say it goes by fast, and it does. I’m already noticing that. Don’t miss it. Be there as much as you can.

“Hopefully as a parent, you get to maintain a relationship with your children after they leave the house, but boy, while they’re there, that’s when, as a parent, you have the chance to be a real artist with this canvas that you’re about to let go into the world,” McConaughey adds. “I have a great reverence for that.”

Complicating - or perhaps simplifying - the performance, McConaughey’s real-life son Levi plays Kevin’s son, Shaun McKay, in the film. Real-life father and son are close, but the scenes they share clearly build on their natural intimacy to tease out powerful emotions.

“After the scenes, it was so nice to come back at the end of the day and hug and be like, ‘that’s not us, let’s make sure it doesn’t become us’,” McConaughey says. “You know what I mean? [We say], ‘love you, dad; love you, son’.”

The Lost Bus is based on the 2021 non-fiction book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire by Lizzie Johnson, about one of the worst bushfires in American history, the 2018 Camp Fire in California.

Producer and actress Jamie Lee Curtis read the book, and passed it on to producer Jason Blum. Greengrass, a former journalist turned filmmaker with a peculiarly strong documentary sense, even when directing fiction, was brought in to direct.

That decision would prove pivotal, as Greengrass gives the film an unsettlingly real sensibility; even as it lurches from thriller to full-blown disaster movie, it never loses its sense of reality, dialling in to small notes and deep emotional wells.

A more literal adaptation of the truth might have given the film’s leads – McConaughey, and America Ferrera, as teacher Mary Ludwig – a more specific responsibility regarding the real town of Paradise, California. That said, McConaughey notes, their real-life counterparts needed to be navigated carefully.

“If I’m playing a biography, there’s a certain responsibility to the emulation of that character. Not the imitation, but the emulation of that,” he says. “When you go ‘inspired by’, we want to make sure we were responsible to the spirit of what really happened and what these people did, and I think Paul’s movie is true to that.

“And some of the things we’re talking about, about fathers and sons, that wasn’t a literal [interpretation of] Kevin’s relationship with his son. But for dramatic purposes, I know I needed that. Who was he before the conflict comes, before the fires come? Who is he afterwards? I needed that. I think Paul needed that.”

As an actor too, McConaughey says, he was able to dive into the mythical subtext of the movie. The most immediate parallel comes in the fire itself: a man on the brink of something, frustrated, disaffected and isolated, who finds himself through a literally hellish inferno and, perhaps, coming out the other side.

“Those mythical story points ... how I’m moving, listening, when I’m looking off the horizon when I’m not really listening, when I’m about to give up or decided no, we’re going to go through it ... all that informs a lot of unseen stuff,” McConaughey says.

“But every performer, writer, actor, or artist needs that, to understand that backstory,” he says. “It informs so much of how you move from the heel to the hair follicles on your head. [I] do literally say that line, which is beautiful, by Paul, ‘I was too late as a son, now I think I’m too late as a dad’. I grabbed onto that.”

We’re talking at the Toronto Film Festival, and outside there is a maelstrom: crowds fill the streets, packing cinemas, there are red carpets peppering the sidewalks, and planeloads of A-list stars. Inside the hotel, McConaughey is taping TV interviews but, for our conversation at least, the equipment is unmanned, and we’re left alone in the room to talk.

His sense of his faith is very present. He periodically invokes the wisdom of his pastor. And, as an actor, he seems to have created for himself a wholly complete life outside his day job. Which is not to say he does not pour himself into his work. Quite the opposite.

The Lost Bus might have started as an action movie script offered to him because he’s a handy name for the top of the billboard. But the almost overwhelming way it intersects fatherhood, failure and hope is extraordinary.

The gut-punching tension of the film swings on two extraordinary choices that Kevin is forced to make. The first, to get in his bus and drive towards the fire in order to retrieve his mother and son. The second, to turn the bus around again, leaving his son’s life in jeopardy, because a group of school children have been left behind, and his bus is the only one close enough to get to them.

“The choice to turn around and go get his mom and his son ... that’s enough to carry the entire movie,” McConaughey says. “And son of a bitch, if 20 seconds later it doesn’t come compound right on top with a new set of stakes, which are, [a radio call saying] ‘I got 22 kids stranded on the east side of town. Anyone got an empty bus over there?’

“Kevin’s just, somebody else, pick up. Not me. If he believes in God, what kind of bullshit trick are you playing on me? Now, in that moment, what made him grab that [radio] mic and go, I can get them. I don’t know. Is that the right thing to do? I don’t know.

“There’s that great phrase my pastor says, you want to find a home, start with making the first right choice. And just try to do that one in a row, then one in a row again. And I think there’s something about that that’s the first right choice, even in the circumstances that [Kevin] was in, with trying to get back, by hook or by crook, to his son and mum.”

The film also, perhaps both unintentionally and unexpectedly, makes observations about the modern malaise of men on the edge. “We don’t bring that up directly in this movie, but that definitely is some subtext for me that I notice there are a lot of men for whom the American dream did not work out,” McConaughey says.

“I’ve talked to a lot of middle-aged men that are going, ‘I’m lost here. I’m in neutral. Nothing worked out. Things that I had, campfires that I tried to build into bonfires, they didn’t. They’re still campfires. Or they’re put out.’ And what do those men start to do?

“That’s a lot of the subtext of Kevin as a man, where he is in this life,” McConaughey adds. “He’s quit. But that metaphor ... he’s forced to follow through. He’s forced to go drive. You want to get through hell, go right down the dragon’s throat, baby. Drive right through the hottest part of it. Paul wrote a great line: you were too late as a son, you got a second chance not to be too late as a father.”

Though McConaughey has made an art of almost effortlessly taking his Hollywood bows and returning home to his family in Texas, he concedes his departure from The Lost Bus was emotionally complex.

“There’s a decompression at the end of every day,” he says. “My hugs were probably a little longer with my children. They were sure a little bit longer with my son Levi, after we did our scenes together. I remember where I could feel his chest exhale as mine exhaled in the spirit of, one, glad that’s not our relationship, and two, boy, let’s make sure we do more than just maintain what we have. Let’s build on what we have together as a son and a father.”

The Lost Bus is on Apple TV+ from October 3.

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