CREW GRIT

and tell Total Film about the hard work (and play) that went into recreating a historical sporting moment in The Boys in the Boat. Ready all, row…

If George Clooney likes you, he’ll give you shit. And as director of the true story of a plucky University of Washington rowing team making it all the way to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin with the spectre of war hanging over proceedings, he joshed with his lead, Callum Turner, playing underdog sculling star Joe Rantz. That banter continues on a drizzly December day in a suite in London’s Corinthia Hotel as the duo discuss their project with Total Film, with diversions into shared favourite films (All the President’s Men) and poring over a phone to look at pictures of recent co-stars mucking about on set. ‘Tough love,’ Clooney smiles when Turner complains about faint praise for his rowing skills, but the fraternal bond is evident in their easy chemistry and Turner’s admission that his director called him in for post-shoot ADR just to see him. ‘He brought me in just to say hello,’ he chuckles. ‘It was five minutes. He was like, “All right, see you later.”’

Clooney, casual in a black polo shirt and jeans, shrugs. He’s still, he says, after four decades in the business, like a kid at work. ‘What we get to do for a living is fun. It’s hard work. We’ll work 16-hour days. But it’s a privilege. I love walking onto set. I love watching. I’ll sit on set, and I’ll watch smart actors finding their way.’ Turner, rangy, and dressed in a green cardigan, nods. ‘With George it was a masterclass every single day,’ he says warmly of the experience. A rising tide lifts all boats, as they say. But back to the kidding…

George, you’ve directed a couple of films set in this time period. What is it about this era that’s so attractive to you when looking for a project?

George Clooney: Well, I don’t actually run towards period pieces, but I found some very simplistic, interesting stories. I like to do films that are challenging. And then, this one, the challenge was about making the film, not about the story. This is one where we know where you’re going to stand on it. You’re against Hitler unless, you know, you’re some knucklehead! And we were rooting for this team to win. We’re rooting for these guys. That’s a fun, simplistic story.

And then it’s about trying to remind ourselves of how we acted and talked, which is different. We didn’t say ‘you know’ in the middle, and we didn’t talk about our emotions.

Callum Turner: Yeah, we’re diving into that world and that time, and immersing ourselves – thinking about those old guys like Gary Cooper and Spencer Tracy, and watching them, and how they move, and how they spoke.

George Clooney: What’s funny is that even the background actors, when [the team] win the race, the first take, they all high-fived each other. I go, ‘No high fives, dudes.

They didn’t have them.’

Callum Turner: Guys barely touched each other. Touching someone was a really big thing. You shook a hand, and that would be about it.

George Clooney: And we’ve both played organised sports. Coaches were tough, man. Right now, we’re kind of examining all those things, and whether that’s good or not. It was good for me. I enjoyed it.

Callum Turner: Me as well.

George Clooney: I liked the structure… I played baseball and basketball.

Callum Turner: He’s an incredible basketball player.

He dunked on us. He was schooling all of us. We were trying our hardest [laughs].

George Clooney: It was fun, man. I’ve got two six-year-olds. I really am focused on making sure that they get involved in some kind of organised sport, because you learn respect and discipline and teamwork.

Callum Turner: And responsibility. You have to show up for other people. You can’t let them down.

George Clooney: You also learn about losing. Losing is the most important lesson. You never learn anything about winning. You just don’t. If you were to learn anything, you learn how great you are. I remember when I was seven years old playing baseball, and I dropped a flyball to lose the game. I walked home. It was a long way – crying, crying, crying, the whole way. Then my dad took me outside, and hit me flyballs for the next six months. I came back, and I was the best player on the team. And I was determined to be the best.

Callum, you trained with the cast of Masters of the Air before this [pages 44-49] and learned to become a unit there. Did that prepare you for becoming a team on this?

Callum Turner: I would say yes, but then this was also a completely different experience. George set us up to succeed. We had two months of training prior to shooting in which we rowed for four hours a day, and we worked out for an extra hour. We ate together. We rode home together. We drank together.

George Clooney: Fought.

Callum Turner: We did, yeah. We really fought together. We learned a skill, and we did it all together. We had to look after each other. And that’s what the boat is. It’s about being part of the team, and being one.

George Clooney: The rowing is really important – right? If we don’t get the rowing right, we’ve messed up. But if you don’t care about the guys, you lose – period. So part of the camaraderie of them learning to row was also them learning to be together. They fight, and they laugh, and they have a drink, and they do all the things that these boys did.

Had you ever rowed before this?

Callum Turner: Never rowed before. None of us had. We thought we were amazing. George would come down with Grant [Heslov, producer], and, oh my God, we were awful [laughs].

George Clooney: We’re following them in a motorboat. I’m watching them, and the paddles were all flying. It was over, and I gave them a thumbs-up, like, ‘Way to go.’ Grant and I got in the car, and I said, ‘What are we going to do?’ I literally didn’t know what to do. I was like, ‘We could try replacing their heads digitally. I don’t know.’ Because it was like, ‘This is a disaster.’

Callum Turner: They were in the car thinking that, and we were in the gym, silent, thinking that. Because we felt like we had come a long way, and we could see, through the smile, the pain from George’s soul.

George Clooney: My acting was not very good that day.

As Coach Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton) says in the film, this is the hardest team sport in the world, and it’s going to test your body. Can you attest to that?

Callum Turner: Absolutely, yeah. I was exhausted.

George Clooney: Their hands were bleeding. All of them.

Callum Turner: But physically – you know, after five or six hours or seven hours of work, I’d get home at three in the afternoon, and I’d just sit in the bath, and watch Going for Gold, with my dog laying there.

George Clooney: Also, when these guys are rowing in the real world, they row for a couple of hours. When we’re shooting a movie, we’re rowing for eight or nine hours. So that’s hard. And they’re rowing in these wooden boats with wooden oars. So they’re not using the same equipment that the guys use now. They’re much heavier and much clunkier.

You had pro rowers racing you in that final. So how did you do against them?

George Clooney: Well, there was one moment where they actually thought they were kicking ass, and then I literally walked over to Callum, and I said, ‘You know I told them to slow down, right?’

Callum Turner: We plummeted back down to Earth.

George Clooney: Rowers take this stuff very [seriously]. I’m a basketball player, right? When I watch a certain actor in White Men Can’t Jump – for instance, Woody Harrelson is a good basketball player. I’ve played basketball with him for 35 years. He’s a good basketball player. But other people in it, if they’re looking at the ball when they dribble, you watch it going, ‘That’s not a basketball player.’ And it makes a difference, because people do know the sport. So we were very aware of making sure that these guys looked like they knew what they were doing. And they did. By the time we finished, these guys all wanted to go to Henley and compete.

Callum Turner: There was maybe some overestimating!

How was it filming on the water, because obviously Spielberg didn’t have a great time with Jaws. Tricky? George Clooney: It’s not the easiest, was it?

Callum Turner: No, but you planned it so well, and worked it out.

George Clooney: I did The Perfect Storm 25 years ago, so I knew it was going to be ugly. And it was rough. I’d forgotten how bad it was. You forget after 25 years. It’s like having children. After 25 years, you do it again. No, it was hard because everything slows down. You can’t anchor the boats down. The wind will blow them all off. And if you have eight of them across, it just gets to be too hard to do.

And, remember, we probably had seven or eight motorised boats following them. We’ve got a sound boat. We’ve got three camera boats. We’ve got a drone boat. We’ve got all these things moving. You can’t have these guys row full-out for eight hours a day. You can’t do it. The pros couldn’t do it. So we really had to consolidate what we were shooting.

George, did you ever consider acting in the film, too? Maybe taking the role of the coach?

George Clooney: No, I’m way too old for that guy. And, also, it’s not fun directing yourself. It’s so much more fun to watch other people and be critical of them than be critical of yourself [laughs].

Callum, what is it like being directed by an actor who knows what he’s doing on both sides of the camera?

Callum Turner: I was going to make a joke but it was lovely. It was wonderful.

George Clooney: You can make a joke.

Callum Turner: It was a nightmare.

George Clooney: Yes, it was.

Callum Turner: Every day. Can’t you tell?

George Clooney: I would say, ‘That’s not how you’re going to do it, is it?’

Callum Turner: No, it was a masterclass… how prepared he is, with the camera. He edits in his head. And after about five days, we developed a shorthand.

George Clooney: Callum’s an instinctive actor. He knows what to do. He knows what the scene needs. A lot of actors know what the character needs, which is great, but understanding what the whole is, as opposed to what the micro is, is really important. And he understood that.

Callum Turner: Every single day, I was learning. I was open to it. We talked about old-school movie stars. We talked about Gary Cooper and Spencer Tracy, and Judgment at Nuremberg and Inherit the Wind and High Noon were big inspirations. We really built that together. He’s such a generous guy and such a generous director. And it was like a big-brother vibe on set. He’d tease me.

George Clooney: Well, if I was going to give anyone shit, it was him.

Callum Turner: But by doing that, that’s the most supportive thing. Nothing’s serious.

George Clooney: No, you never want to hurt anybody. But you do really want to give everybody shit.

George, you said that you learned by mistakes. Have you learned from the previous sets you’ve been on how not to run a set?

George Clooney: Well, I’ve been on sets with miserable directors. I’ve been on sets with directors who yell and scream. To me, it doesn’t matter what the product is at that point. This is a job where there’s 300 people on the set trying to do the best they can. There is no reason and no purpose for people being treated badly. I hate it, and I won’t do it.

I’ve had directors who I like personally, but I know them reputationally, and within the last few months they’ve come to me and said, ‘When are we going to work together?’ And I go, ‘We’re never going to work together, dude. I think you’re great, but I’ll never work with you because you’re mean, and I can’t be around it.’

We’re lucky. We get to not grow up. I’m 62 years old and I’m a 12-year-old. I write screenplays. I get to write ‘Rome burns’, and somebody builds Rome and sets it on fire. What a great, fun thing. It’s a privilege. And I’ve been lucky in my career. If people don’t think that I’m enjoying it, then what’s wrong with me?

Callum Turner: People warned me before I stepped onto the set that I was going to have a really good time with George. And I did. It was a harmonious set. He runs it like the leader of people.

George Clooney: We had a really good time. We also hire people that want to be there. There are also actors that can be just as big a pain in the ass as directors. I’m sure you’ve met some of them.

This is a period story, but it feels relevant to today’s world with the themes of fascism…

George Clooney: Well, here’s what I kind of hope: that the message of the movie is that we’re all in this together. I’ve always been very politically active. I’ve gotten in trouble for it over the years. I don’t mind. But I also think that what we forget, particularly in the times when it’s trickiest, [is that] the differences between us are very small. And, for the most part, everything gets amplified too big. For the most part, we all want the same things. We want our family to be happy, we want to be healthy, we want to love one another – for the most part. Perspective gets lost. That’s what we’re seeing more with the internet and 24-hour news. We start to see only these fringes, and it feels as if it’s taken over the world. I have so many people who I disagree with politically who I’m very good friends with. And when we were doing this film, we wanted to remind ourselves as we were doing it that we really like each other, and we really root for one another for the most part. And the only times we don’t is when we focus on the fringes.

So we’ve talked to you, Callum, about your next project Masters of the Air, but we’d also love to know about your upcoming thriller Wolves, George. You’ll be reteaming with your old buddy Brad Pitt…

George Clooney: Yeah, that pretty boy Pitt. That poor man.

Callum Turner: Yeah, that poor man. I feel for him.

George Clooney: He’s a sad, sad guy. He’s angry. He’s getting old. He’s turning 60 in a couple of weeks. It’s all downhill for him after that. Uh… It’s a really good movie. I love this guy, Jon Watts. What a director. It’s out there. We just did a screening of it, and the place kind of went batshit for it. So we’re excited about it. We think it’s a really fun, dark – very dark – nutty film… It feels like an R-rated Ocean’s film.

Callum Turner: I’m excited for that!