The 10-year journey of 'The Boys in the Boat' from page to screen

SEATTLE (KOMO) — It's been 10 years since the best seller "The Boys in the Boat" was first published.

It was a six-year project for renowned author Daniel James Brown and neighbor, Judy Rantz-Wilman. Her father, Joe Rantz, was part of the storied University of Washington rowing team that won the Olympic gold medal in Nazi Germany in 1936.

"For the Joe Rantz character, I had this treasure trove of stuff to work with and then she also introduced me to family members of all the other guys in the boat," said Brown.

The Weinstein Company bought the movie rights, but after several stops and starts it finally ended up with George Clooney in 2020.

I thought it was a cinematic story," Clooney told KOMO ahead of the movie’s premiere at the Seattle Independent Film Festival earlier this month. "And then it came down to, can we cast eight kids that can row

The actors trained every day for five months.

"And when we finished, I remember I got in the car with my buddy Grant and went, 'This is a disaster'," Clooney said, describing the first time he watched the cast rowing. After one month of training, he said, "It was the worst thing I'd ever seen in my life! So, we scheduled all of the rowing for the very end of the movie."

The studio tried to scout locations in Seattle but settled on England.

We came here, and we looked at everything, and the problem is Seattle doesn't look like Seattle in 1936,” Clooney explained. “So, we had to find places that had less buildings on them.

KOMO asked Brown about the links between the narrative and the Seattle area, and the impact it had on his thinking.

"That was the part that is so cool about the story - especially in the 1930s, people on the East Coast, particularly people in rowing circles, tended to be prep school kids,” said Brown. “Rich. Very rich."

They literally didn't know where Seattle was, and if they thought about Seattle at all they thought we were living in log cabins or something out here," he added. "So as a Westerner, it felt good to get that part of the story in there.

"The Boys in the Boat" premiered in theaters nationwide on Christmas Day.