Yahoo Movies George Clooney feared The Boys in the Boat was 'dead' when he first saw the cast row
The biopic tells the true story of the University of Washington rowing team and their journey to the 1936 Olympics
Watch: George Clooney, Callum Turner and Joel Edgerton discuss making The Boys in the Boat
George Clooney worried that The Boys in the Boat was "dead" when he saw the cast rowing for the first time, he tells Yahoo UK, because they were "trying to show off" for the director and it failed spectacularly.
The actor went behind the camera for the film, his ninth as director, which dramatises the University of Washington rowing team's path to greatness that culminated in their appearance at the 1936 Olympics. Clooney spoke about the film alongside Callum Turner, who plays rower Joe Rantz, and Joel Edgerton, who portrays the team's coach Al Ulbrickson.
It is an unlikely underdog tale that chart the team's difficult journey from novices to champions and, the way the director and actors tell it, the cast's experience preparing for the film almost mirrored that of their real-life counterparts.
Clooney quips: "The way they started out was shocking. It was literally like, 'dudes, you know you're all rowing together, right? You understand that?'"
Turner concurred with Clooney's initial reservations, saying: "Grant [Heslov, the film's producer] and George came down to check in after four weeks or something, and we were awful."
"It's funny, they had actually rode better before, they were trying to show off.George Clooney
Clooney went on: "We got there they said 'yea they're doing a pretty good job' and I watched them and Terry said 'that's the worst they've ever [rowed]', and I was watching [shocked], I'm like [smiling and giving a thumbs up]."
Turner joked that he "could see the pain through the smile"at the time as Clooney adds: "Grant and I literally got the car driving home and we're both [with our heads in our hands thinking] 'OK, we could maybe we could replace their heads? What can we do?
"What are we going to do? I was like 'we're dead', and then they got it together."George Clooney
Preparing for the race
Getting it together took a lot of work, as Turner explains they practiced in all kinds of weather to be match ready for the production: "We trained for two months, we did four hours a day and it was an arduous process, we rode in the snow, in the rain, and the sunshine.
"Eight actors who don't know how to do something, all learning at the same time in different places and different ways, and it was an incredible experience."Callum Turner
"I read the book a couple of times in preparation and I thought I understood what they were talking about," the actor adds. "Now, in hindsight, reading the book again it's so profound what we did and what we were able to achieve, especially as we started out with nothing."
Clooney explained his approach to filming the intense rowing scenes too, sharing that as a director he "wanted to make it exciting" even if, on paper, the sport isn't always seen that way.
He explains: "Rowing is a hard sport, it's one of the hardest sports to do physically in the world. You have to be one of the greatest athletes in the world, on the other hand it doesn't look fast from far away, and it's hard to get close because the ores are so long and the boats are so [big].
"And so it became a math of trying to figure out how to get close and it's like F1, right? You're trying to get close enough to let you appreciate how fast they're actually going, and that was the big thing because you guys were moving by the end."
Turner agrees as he says: "We're moving fast, I think we got up to 46 strokes per minute which is what the boys did in the last race to win the gold."
Egerton predominantly watched the races in a different boat or from the sidelines as his real-life counterpart would have done, but he also had his own fears when cameras rolled on the film's many races.
"I've shot on boats before and I was terrified before the shoot, I'm not scared of water or boats but just knowing that boats move and trying to put a camera from one boat to shoot another boat you just figure like 'this is gonna be a disaster' and it wasn't at all," he says.
"It was still incredibly efficient. Rowing is one of those sports, it's probably far more exciting to do than to watch and yet in a movie you have the chance, editorially, to really put the scissors in and build a momentum, and build a point of view and a narrative structure around even just the sequences.
"I was [recently] looking at the film for the first time properly just going 'oh these are all really exciting and each race feels different' and this question I'd had in the beginning before making the film, which was 'how do you make rowing look cinematically exciting?' knowing it's not, in theory, one of the most [exciting sports]. You don't imagine it being the most exciting sport to watch — They've done an incredible job."
A feel good film in dark times
For Clooney making the film came down to one thing, it was a "really good story" that was a lot more light-hearted than the kinds of movies he's directed previously.
"I like sports films, I always have," Clooney admits. "But I also like to do films that are darker a lot. I find those to be fun and interesting and sort of things to play with as you get older.
"We've all felt a little beat up over the last few years and Grant and I looked at things saying: 'Let's do something that makes us all feel good, reminds us who we are as a people.'George Clooney
"'That we're not so divided that we're actually on each others sides, and that when we're pushed, we can we can accomplish pretty great things', and it's a holiday film and it feels like the kind of film that you can take your family to."
Making the film was a delight for the cast, too, as both Turner and Edgerton heaped praise on the director, with the former complimenting Clooney as "intelligent" and "handsome" while the actor handed him cash as a joke before saying: "I did it for free and I'd do it all again, I loved it."
Edgerton also praised Clooney, sharing: "It was wonderful. I was a huge fan of George's, I remember when he first directed a movie, his first couple of movies I was like 'oh my God, he really knows what he's doing', and he does know what he's doing... his wealth of experience behind and in front of the camera is huge.
"Interestingly, for all the movies that he's directed he does put himself in quite a number of them, but there are the ones that he doesn't which, for me, I took as a clue. If he was going to take a year of his life out to make a movie that he's not in front of the camera —he could be doing a lot of other things with his life and making a move is not easy— [shows] he really cared about this story enough to go through all of it.
"It's wonderful to be directed by an actor who has such a command of his own work."Joel Edgerton
"To be guided from his perspective without being given an exact road map about how he might play a character in there, [he's not saying] 'you should do it like this'. So it was great and he's on top of all that. He's fun to be around, he's got really good energy, he's very mischievous and that's great."
The Boys in the Boat premieres in cinemas on Friday, 12 January.
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