The Boys In The Boat Interview: Daniel J. Brown On The Research Process For His Novel

The Boys In The Boat Interview: Daniel J. Brown On The Research Process For His Novel

The Boys in the Boat tells the incredible true story of how a group of young men became the University of Washington crew team during the Great Depression and their journey to the 1936 Summer Olympics. The story focuses on student-athlete Joe Rantz and coach Al Ulbrickson. What sets this team and movie apart is that they aren’t simply motivated by the desire to win, but by their need to pay for their education.

The Boys in the Boat stars Joel Edgerton, Callum Turner, Jack Mulhern, Sam Strike, Alec Newman, and Peter Guinness. Geroge Clooney produced and directed the movie. The Boys on the Boat screenplay was written by Mark L. Smith based on Daniel James Brown’s non-fiction novel.

The Boys In The Boat Interview: Daniel J. Brown On The Research Process For His Novel

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Screen Rant interviewed author Daniel J. Brown about the adaptation of his novel, The Boys in the Boat. He explained how he came across this story in the first place and why he was excited when Clooney signed on. Brown also praised Turner and Edgerton’s performances in the movie.

Daniel J. Brown Talks The Boys in the Boat

Screen Rant: The Boys in the Boat is absolutely phenomenal. I feel like this is one of those types of inspirational movies that I absolutely love. This is the ultimate underdog story, and I find this period of time very fascinating because not only did the JV Boys, University of Washington boys face off against the university seniors, but they also faced off against rich fraternity kids and then the Nazis. Now, what inspired you to delve into the story of the University of Washington rowing team during the 1936 Olympics?

Daniel James Brown: So this story literally walked into my house. My neighbor Judy came to me, this is 14 years ago, and she said, “Would you come down and meet my dad?” She’d been reading one of my earlier books to her dad, and he wanted to meet me. So I went down and I met this elderly gentleman named Joe Rantz, and as it turned out, he was in the last couple months of his life. But we sat down and he started talking to me about his family situation growing up during the Great Depression, and he had a really pretty horrific family situation.

But then he started talking about how in 1933, he’d come to the University of Washington and gotten on the crew team, mostly because if he was on the crew team, they would give him a part-time job and that would pay his way through school. So we started talking about that and how he came together with this bunch of kids in the mid-1930s, and they became this phenomenal crew, and how they had wound up going ultimately to Berlin, to the 1936 Olympics and rowing against, amongst others a German boat in front of Adolf Hitler.

In that first conversation of a couple hours I had with him, I was just blown away by the story. This was just a beautiful story just on the first telling of it. So the next day I dove in and started what turned into about a four-year project of researching and writing this story.

Talking about the research and writing, can you describe the research process involved in uncovering the intricate details from the historical narratives?

Daniel James Brown: Yeah. So the first thing I wanted to do, there were nine guys in this boat, I wanted to connect with the family members of all of them, or as many as I could find. And so through Joe’s daughter, I got introduced to different family members. So I spent a lot of time running around tracking down family members, talking to them, and all the families were very forthcoming, very helpful. They had diaries and letters and photographs and news clippings. So that was the baseline research was just getting to know these guys through their families.

And then I didn’t know anything about rowing, and that’s at the center of it. So I went down to the University of Washington Shell House and they put me in a boat and took me out in the water, and I spent a lot of time talking to rowers, learning about the sport because I knew nothing about it at all to start with. And then just basic archival research. I spent countless hours in the library, hunched over microfiche readers, reading newspapers from the 1930s, just absorbing everything.

I looked for stories about the crew first, but then I’d spend hours sometimes just reading random newspapers from the 30s to get a sense of what life was like in Seattle and in the country during those years. And so that really paid off I think because I had to get my head into the mid-1930s.

Yep. This is a project that George Clooney has been after for a while. How did this eventually end up in his lap?

Daniel James Brown: Yeah, I had a long, convoluted backstory. Actually, Kenneth Branagh called me originally and he wanted to direct it, and then it went through ups and downs, the Weinstein Company had it. So eventually it wound up at MGM and George Clooney. I was really excited when Clooney signed on to direct.

He actually called me right away and we had a long, very heartfelt conversation about the story and how he wanted to approach it. And so after this long saga of it going up and down and then going nowhere for a long time, it just felt really good when he was excited to do it.

Now, I think Callum’s performance as Joe was absolutely incredible. I feel like Joe’s seen so much in his life that he has this quiet emotion about him, but Callum displays that amazingly. What did he bring to the role of Joe that wasn’t on the page, and what kind of essence did he bring from the man that you met?

Daniel James Brown: Yeah, I thought he nailed it too. And it would be hard to nail because he’s got all this internal pain from his childhood, and you have to show that without a lot of discourse and exposition about it. It just has to be there basically in the character. And so I think I read someplace that he’d read the book several times, so I think he did internalize… A lot of the backstory’s not in the film, so he had to internalize it and make it part of his character. Yeah, I knew the real Joe Rantz and I was very persuaded by Callum’s performance.

Yeah. Well, let me ask you this: in what ways did the story about The Boys in the Boat resonate with you personally?

Daniel James Brown: Yeah. Well, so in some ways, and I seldom talk about this, but in some ways I wrote it for my own dad. My dad was born the same year that Joe Rantz was born. He never wrote, but he grew up having a very hard time. His family was very poor during the Depression. And when I first met Joe as an old man, he reminded me a lot of my dad in terms of his quiet character, his quiet dignity, this humility, this civility that he had.

And so, in the back of my mind, the whole time I was writing Joe’s story, I didn’t consciously do this, but I think my experience with my own father was always in my mind to some extent. And I think that worked well. It helped me connect with who Joe was and what Joe had gone through during those years.

In a lot of inspirational stories like this, especially involving sports, it’s usually athletic prowess that takes the team to the next level, whatever it may be. But on this team in particular, they almost had their backs against the wall because what they were fighting for was their education, because a lot of them couldn’t pay for it. Can you talk about that motivating factor for The Boys in the Boat?

Daniel James Brown: Yeah, and that’s why I connected with my father. My father struggled to stay in school during those years. They were rowing not for glory so much, to begin with at least, but literally to be able to stay in school and get an education and so that afterwards they could go out and get some kind of job in the middle of the Depression.

So they had multiple layers of motivation here and very fundamental to that, pretty much all of them, probably Joe most of all because he was really the poorest of them, I think, there was just this deep-seated need. He really needed to get on that crew and stay on that crew. And the Coach Ulbrickson was very demanding, so it was hard to do. That is a really big, important part of the dynamic of the story, I think.

I completely agree, and I actually wanted to bring up Coach Ulbrickson, mainly because I love a coach that is miserable on the sideline or whatever it may be, but he all does it out of passion to be the best. And I feel like I would play for Coach or I would do anything Coach Ulbrickson asked me to do. Can you talk about Joel’s portrayal of Coach Ulbrickson?

Daniel James Brown: Yeah. So Ulbrickson, he was very reticent. He didn’t speak a lot. He was kind of dour. They called him the Dour Dane, and he was very stern mostly. And so he wasn’t a fuzzy, warm kind of coach, but he was very good at figuring out a kid’s motivation and then mixing and matching the kids that were in the boat and finding the ones that really had the heart for it. And this is a story about heart in a lot of ways, and Ulbrickson understood that, and George Pocock also did.

And so the two of them, he was the boat builder, but also sort of a coach in fact, the two of them were very good at figuring out which combination of young men was going to make that boat go faster than any other combination. It’s kind of an alchemy putting a great crew together. You got to kind of mix the ingredients and stir them around and let the pot bubble and see what happens and then put new ingredients in. And that was really what Ulbrickson was brilliant at, I think.

Yeah, Joel nailed it. He’s absolutely incredible in this role. Last question I have for you is, what aspects of the team’s journey in the 1936 Olympics do you believe have the most relevance or lessons for today’s audience?

Daniel James Brown: Yeah. So for me, I think when I stand back from it, this whole story really is kind of a metaphor for what that generation of Americans did. Beginning of the Depression, 1929, starting from about then, all Americans found themselves in the same boat and they had to get through really dark times and face really hard problems, the Depression and then the war.

And so they had to learn to put their differences aside and pull together, and just broadly as a generation, that’s exactly what they did. They managed to put their differences aside and actually get stuff done. And I feel as if we’re in a time right now when we’re so divided, so fractured that we somehow need to find that again. We need to find that spirit of just getting along and getting good stuff done.

About The Boys in the Boat

joel edgerton instructs the crew team in the boys in the boat

The Boys in the Boat is a sports drama based on the #1 New York Times bestselling non-fiction book written by Daniel James Brown. The film, directed by George Clooney, is about the 1936 University of Washington rowing team that competed for gold at the Summer Olympics in Berlin. This inspirational true story follows a group of underdogs at the height of the Great Depression as they are thrust into the spotlight and take on elite rivals from around the world.

Check out our other The Boys in the Boat interviews:

  • George Clooney & Joel Edgerton
  • Callum Turner & Hadley Robinson
  • Cast & Crew on the Red Carpet
  • Mark L. Smith
The Boys in the Boat Poster

The Boys in the Boat

The Boys in the Boat is a 2023 sports drama by director George Clooney. The film centers on the 1930s University of Washington rowing team, who train feverishly to win the gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The Boys in the Boat is based on the book of the same name by Daniel James Brown.

Release Date
December 25, 2023

Director
George Clooney

Cast
Joel Edgerton , Callum Turner , Peter Guinness , Sam Strike , Jack Mulhern

Rating
PG-13

Runtime
124 Minutes

Genres
Biography , Drama , Sports

Writers
Mark L. Smith

Studio(s)
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer , Spyglass Media Group

Distributor(s)
Amazon MGM Studios