As the director of the uplifting true tale The Boys in the Boat, George Clooney guides the ship as it follows the University of Washington rowing team as they vie for gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Clooney expressed to Yahoo Entertainment that he can personally identify with the team’s extraordinary voyage from junior varsity to the Olympic stage.
“At the time of my childhood in a small Kentucky town, the notion of exceeding any professional aspiration I could have ever had was inconceivable.” In this way, I can always sympathize with the disadvantaged, he explained.
The actor Joel Edgerton, who portrays rowing team coach Al Ulbrickson in the movie, shared the sentiments of the director.
“In regard to being an underdog, I never in a million years would have imagined that I would amount to a hill of beans,” Edgerton told Yahoo Entertainment. “People are frequently their own greatest obstacle,” I believe. One notable aspect of the film is its subtle allusion to the way in which privilege grants certain individuals opportunities that are inaccessible to others. These individuals, despite being at the bottom of the barrel, were fortunate enough to be admitted to the school; therefore, access is a significant topic of discussion.
The film is an adaptation of The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a nonfiction bestseller published in 2013. It was authored by Daniel James Brown and debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for 15 weeks out of a possible 117.
Although Clooney read the novel upon its initial publication, its adaptation into a film took years to complete.
“Ten years ago, he and his producer partner Grant Heslov pursued the book but were unsuccessful and did not receive it.” Three years ago, we subsequently visited MGM, where they had this in their library. “After hiring a writer (Mark L. Smith, co-screenwriter of The Revenant) and developing a script that we were satisfied with, the remaining task was to get the film produced,” Clooney told Entertainment Weekly. “This film does not have a particularly large budget; this is not a Marvel production.” In fact, the studio approached me ten days prior to the start of production and demanded that I return my salary in order to fund the budget, which I dutifully complied with.
Mastering the row
As Joe Rantz, a rower for the University of Washington, Callum Turner also appears in the film. Although Turner lacked prior rowing experience, he disclosed to Yahoo Entertainment that the actors collaborated for a period of five months in order to perfect the strokes.
Regarding the experience, he stated, “Without appearing overly sentimental, I learned to surrender myself to something greater than myself.” “It is something that you do whenever you create a film, but this instance was so particular because it occurred within a film. And I created this bond with these guys and I actually went through what Joe went through in the movie and so did these guys and their characters. Our objective was to achieve the same stroke rate of 46 beats per minute as the elite competitors in the final race.
Turner stated that the film inspired him to begin rowing.
“I think rowing is a deeper team sport than any other,” he added.
“A breathtaking love story”
Clooney had to be methodical about what he adapted from the novel to the screen. One plot point that needed to be kept was the love story between Turner’s Rantz and Hadley Robinson’s character Joyce Simdars.
“They were married for 64 years, 65 years, something like that. It’s a beautiful love story, ” Clooney said. “Seeing the two of them together … it’s important when you see people who are loved. That helps. It helps put things in perspective.”
Robinson told Yahoo Entertainment that “they have such a beautiful relationship in real life and it’s all there in the book. They’d known each other since they were kids and they were sort of each other’s support system as friends growing up. Then she sort of followed him to school and they rekindled things and it’s just this slow, beautiful building of trust which you can hopefully see in the movie.”
In addition to love, the film also speaks to learning from adversity.
“I would also make the argument that you learn nothing from success. Never. There’s nothing you learn from success. You learn everything from failing and fear of failing is what holds people back from doing anything,” Clooney said. “And when you don’t try and you wake up at 65 years old, you’re a lot angrier than if you’d failed. It’s really easy to be 65 years old and go ‘I tried to do that. Just couldn’t do it.’ You’ll really be mad if you go ‘I think I could have done that. But I didn’t try.’”
