Delectable McConaughey pulls out all the stops

Matthew McConaughey is the epitome of Hollywood cool as Dirk Pitt, treasure hunting pirate in 'Sahara'.

Not many movie stars will rough it in a trailer emblazoned with the name of their new movie, in this case Sahara, and trek across the United States for six weeks in harsh weather conditions to reel in an audience. But because Matthew McConaughey, Sahara's leading man, has a stake in the movie's profits, he's pulling out all the stops.

Even though Paramount Studios is hyping the hell out of its US$130 million ($178 million) action-adventure movie, which it predicts will be as lucrative as the Indiana Jones series from the 80s, Sahara is the first offering from McConaughey's production company, j k livin (as in "just keep livin' ", a line taken from his character in the Richard Linklater film, Dazed and Confused, which launched his career in 1993).

"I really believe in this film. We made a good one and that feels good, man. I wouldn't be out selling a turd," McConaughey purrs in his delectable, slow, Southern twang.

The 35-year-old Texan native may sound a little on the cocky side, but he is far from arrogant. On the contrary, McConaughey is the epitome of Hollywood cool, as in the effortless, Steve McQueen genre of coolness.

When he's not responding to questions, McConaughey chews tobacco which sporadically makes an appearance at either corner of his mouth.

Buying a 8.5m Air-stream trailer and driving across country with his business partner was a McConaughey brainwave.

"I came up with this idea of wrapping up the trailer with the Sahara billboard and doing a grassroots rock'n'roll door-to-door campaign," he grins. "I even sleep in that thing in my driveway outside my home in Texas because it's pure comfort, and I grill ribeyes on a grill on the sidewalk." (After a day of promotional interviews, he threw a barbecue on the Beverly Hills pavement with his co-star and girlfriend Penelope Cruz, joined by a few homeless locals.)

Despite McConaughey's blend of matinee-idol looks with intelligence, charisma and self-effacing charm, his performances in, for example, Contact (1997), Amistad (1997), U-571 (2000) and Reign of Fire (2002) have been noteworthy, but the movies themselves have been more interesting than commercially successful.

And the actor is all too aware just how readily the flavour of the month can be the next season's aftertaste, as his "next big thing" tag has placed him within arm's reach of Hollywood's A-list one too many times.

Born in Uvalde, Texas, McConaughey comes from good stock. His father was a footballer, until injuries sent him into the oil business where he worked until his death in 1992, and his mother taught at a local school and raised Matthew and his older brothers, Rooster and Pat. Being the youngest, Matthew was precocious and took his fair share of licks.

Today, he still laughs at his good Hollywood fortune - after all, "Texas boys don't become thespians, now do they?" He shakes his head and chimes: "Nah, they play ball or make deals, usually involving construction or destruction." The plan was for him to become a lawyer, but one day, McConaughey discovered Og Mandino's The Greatest Salesman in the World, a little guide for living about as dense as a cocktail napkin. "I read the first two chapters, and I knew that I wanted to go to film school. It just hit me, and I changed my major the next day."

Then he had another stroke of luck - a random bar meeting with the film director Richard Linklater, who offered him a role in his film Dazed and Confused.

Ironically, it was his role as a lawyer in the Joel Schumacher film A Time to Kill (1996), co-starring Samuel L. Jackson and Sandra Bullock, which catapulted him from a sweet-ass bit player into a megawatt leading man. But that was almost a decade ago, and although McConaughey is one of the few young performers who actually appears to be thinking on screen, it's about time his acting efforts were rewarded. Since then, he has found a niche in romantic comedies, beginning opposite Jennifer Lopez in The Wedding Planner (2001), and successfully continuing with his onscreen love interest, Kate Hudson, in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003).

"That was pretty good, man," McConaughey beams. "The one thing you don't know you're going to have when you start one of those films is chemistry between the leads, and if you don't have that, you're in for a pretty boring romantic comedy."

Clearly, by casting Penelope Cruz to play his leading lady in Sahara, he hit the jackpot. Another schoolboy grin creeps across his face at the very mention of the 30-year-old Spanish beauty. "She was interested in the role and we were interested in her. So we wanted to meet to see if the straight line was going to turn crooked, and thankfully it didn't," he says. "It all just fell into place. She dug it for the right reasons, and our instincts on her were correct as well. It was sort of a meeting of minds."

It's a dusty swatch of West Africa that is the setting for this fun adventure featuring the novelist Clive Cussler's swashbuckling hero, Dirk Pitt. McConaughey plays him as a sex-in-the-dust hale-and-hearty fellow, who has a buddy from grammar school, Al (Steve Zahn). Pitt, an explorer for Admiral James Sandecker (William H. Macy), fronts the National Underwater and Marine Agency, and has been looking for a lost Civil War battleship, rumoured to have sunk with a cargo of gold, in of all places, West Africa.

Along the adventure, Dirk and Al run into UN relief doctors Eva Rojas ( Cruz) and Oshodi (Clint Dyer) who are investigating a raging epidemic that is wiping out thousands of villagers.

I usually worry when I see four scriptwriters given credit for a screenplay, but here it works, although, admittedly, there is a lot of techno mumbo-jumbo. Unlike Monica Bellucci's doctor in Tears of the Sun, Cruz keeps her shirt tightly buttoned and her screen romance with McConaughey is electrifying.

The director Breck Eisner, son of the Disney CEO Michael, has a great eye for unusual landscapes, and the visuals are grimy, dusty, and sexy.

"Dirk Pitt is really the ultimate Renaissance man," McConaughey says. He is hoping that this daredevil will give his career a much-needed boost, in the same way that Indiana Jones did for Harrison Ford's.

"There are already some 14 books. I had been looking for a franchise character for 10 years, but they were either a character in an action adventure, which was just about ass, or the character was too nice and never got his hands dirty. Dirk Pitt does both," the actor says.

"This is the guy who pursues the unknown, and chases down the commas in the history books."

If this film doesn't nose-dive at the box office, McConaughey could indeed be Harrison-Ford rich.

He continues: "Dirk's the kind of guy who could be wrestling alligators on a Saturday morning and then wearing a tux and dancing with a queen at a ball that night. He's a treasure-hunting pirate, a bar-room brawling, tequila-drinking scoundrel, but all the time he remains a real gentleman. That's my favourite thing about the guy."

McConaughey admits that he does have a Dirk Pitt-like alter ego. "I love the adventure of going off to foreign lands and getting myself in situations and seeing how well I can work out of them, especially when there's a language barrier and you have to resort to charades," he says.

Indeed, spending five months in the Moroccan desert resulted in some pretty hairy challenges for the film crew and cast. "We had to sit out a lot of sandstorms," McConaughey says. "You could see them coming from miles away, but you had no idea how long they would actually last. The sand blows in and it can be there for up to a week, and you can't even see your hand in front of your face most of the time.

"So, that pretty much halted production a few times. It kind of sucked, but apart from crunching everything we ate for months, the desert is a magical place."

There was also an unscheduled close encounter with some crocodiles during filming, but despite being terrified at the time, McConaughey can see the humour of the situation now: "You know what the funny thing is? If I had been eaten alive by a croc, the news would not have made it back home.

"It's a place where there isn't any telephone or electricity, but I figured, if I'm going to go that way, then I've already been written off as part of the food chain!"

On screen

*Who: Matthew McConaughey
*What: Sahara
*When: Opens at cinemas tomorrow

- INDEPENDENT