A Depression-era rowing team gets thrust into the spotlight in Director George Clooney’s biographical sports drama, The Boys in the Boat.
Based on the best-selling non-fiction novel of the same name, Clooney’s 1930s-set film tells the story of the University of Washington’s rowing team as they compete for gold at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
On December 9, after the DGA membership screening in Los Angeles, Clooney discussed the making of The Boys in the Boat during a Q&A moderated by Director Jon Watts (Spider-Man: No Way Home).
During the conversation, Clooney spoke about the challenges of making the sport of rowing cinematically exciting and the risks involved in retelling a true story.
“It’s not the most exciting sport if you’re sitting back and watching. It looks slow. If you watch F-1 races, it doesn’t look all that fast until you get in tight — like the “Need for Speed” series — so we took a lot of that with the idea of trying to get in tight enough, move the camera a lot. I think we have 600 cuts of that last race, so that’s a lot of cuts. Part of the danger with telling a sports story that’s real is people know how it ends. It’s a little like a romantic comedy. You know what’s going to happen, they’re going to kiss at the end and it’s whether or not you dig the journey. And so, I think that was the challenge, and we’ll see how that plays, but it felt right to us.”
Clooney’s other directorial credits include the feature films The Tender Bar, The Midnight Sky, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Leatherheads, The Ides of March, The Monuments Men and Suburbicon; and episodes of the mini-series Catch-22 and the series Unscripted. Clooney was nominated for DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures for his 2005 feature, Good Night, and Good Luck. He has been a DGA member since 2001.