How George Clooney finally made an 'exciting' rowing movie with 'The Boys in the Boat'

One can imagine George Clooney – not the Hollywood icon, but in his “Facts of Life” years – grabbing an oar, getting in the water and playing part of an American crew team taking on a bunch of Nazis on the big screen.

Clooney would have jumped at the chance back in the day, though now, as the director of the new period sports drama “The Boys in the Boat” (in theaters Monday), he wonders if he would have measured up.

“I’m 5-foot-11, so I would've been hard-pressed to be in it. These guys are giants,” Clooney says. The real rowers from Oxford University he cast as extras were upward of 6-foot-8, “so I wouldn't have been physically tall enough.”

“But, yeah, I loved that stuff when I was a young actor, man. That's the fun thing about being an actor: I shot in Bratislava (Slovakia), a place you'd never vacation. You get to go to places and learn skills and learn about people's lives that you never would in normal life.”

Based on the 2013 Daniel James Brown book, “Boys in the Boat” stars British actor Callum Turner as Joe Rantz, a homeless University of Washington student who tries out for the school’s rowing squad in 1936. His aim at first is just to make it so he can pay for school and have somewhere to live, but he turns out to be pretty good. So does his junior varsity team: When they upend the UW varsity squad, the young Huskies coached by Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton) are sent off to compete against other colleges before ending up at the Berlin Olympics and taking on the mighty Germans.

Or as Clooney sums it up, “You gotta beat the seniors, and then you gotta beat the legacy schools, and then you gotta beat the rich kids, and then you gotta beat Hitler. The final bad guy's Hitler.”

Turner loved the character of Joe from the beginning: He remembers "the thing that broke my heart” in Brown's book was reading about how the real Rantz raised himself beginning when he was 15: He came home from school one day to find his family all packed up in their car. “He says, ‘Where are we going?’ And his dad says, ‘We’re going, you're staying,' ” Turner says. “To make the decision in the moment" that he wouldn't allow the situation to define him, that "he was going to succeed in this world, and the fact that he did, really was an inspiration to me.”

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As for Clooney, he wanted another “crack” at a sports film of the era, because “I feel like I didn't quite nail what I was trying to do” with his 2008 football comedy “Leatherheads.” Also, Clooney had never seen “a really exciting version of a rowing film,” he says. “That was a challenge, but at least there was a space for us there.”

Clooney does make the sport seem electric, with heroic camera angles during races, the coxswain percussively pounding the side of the boat while oars hit the water together in propulsive, rhythmic harmony. The filmmaker looked to the Netflix car-racing show “Formula 1: Drive to Survive” for inspiration. “We had to build the constant drilling of speed because the truth is, they're flying. We couldn't keep up in our speedboat with cameras on it when they were really going.”

He also had to essentially turn his actors into Olympic rowers in five months. They spent four hours a day on the water and another hour a day in the gym. “We were a professional sports team," Turner says. "We did everything together and we created this bond that will live with us forever.”

Clooney says he saved filming the final Olympic race to the end “so they were as trained as they could be,” and Turner and Co. got up to the same speed – 46 strokes per minute – as the real boys in the boat. “Now, (the actors) did it for 30 seconds, and the other guys did it for five and a half minutes, but the truth is that's a really hard mark to hit.”

Did Clooney ever get in the boat, just for funsies? He laughs at the thought.

“Never,” Turner reports. “In fact, George did the opposite. He would stand on the shore with his glass of wine.”

“I’d get a nice pinot or a nice cabernet. I had to work my arm out just to lift the bottle!” Clooney quips. “I’m smart enough to learn. When I was a young guy, we'd do a war film and you go out and train and live out in the desert for a couple of months. I'm 62 now, dude. I'm on the sidelines.”

But Clooney, who next stars with "pretty boy" Brad Pitt in Jon Watts' thriller "Wolfs" (out Sept. 20) and will headline an upcoming Noah Baumbach Netflix movie, did get to show off his athleticism. “George is an incredible basketball player,” Turner, 33, says. “We had a day where there was a hoop next to his trailer, and he schooled us.”

The director adds proudly, “Well, I have one sport.”

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