The film tells the story of the University of Washington’s rowing team journey to the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

By Patrick Cremona

Published: Monday, 08 January 2024 at 17:51 PM

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George Clooney has returned behind the camera for his latest directorial feature, with The Boys in the Boat launching in UK cinemas this week.

As with his 2008 picture Leatherheads, the film is a sporting underdog story – but whereas that previous film told a largely fictional tale, the new one is based on the real heroics of the University of Washington rowing team, who won Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics at the height of The Great Depression.

The film’s script by Mark L Smith is adapted from the 2013 non-fiction novel of the same name by Daniel James Brown – which was subtitled Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics – with Joel Edgerton and Callum Turner in the starring roles as coach Al Ulbrickson and team member Joe Rantz.

But just how closely does the film stick to true events? Read on for everything you need to know.

The Boys in the Boat true story

The film is largely faithful to events as they happened, but as producer Grant Heslov explained during an exclusive interview with RadioTimes.com, the filmmaking team naturally had to make a few changes such that the full story could be told in two hours.

“In the book, there’s a lot more detail, there’s a lot more races,” he said. “And we obviously couldn’t do all those races. So the challenging part really was trying to figure out like… we decided that three races would be the right amount in a two-hour film, and just figuring out what that was going to be like, and how we could sort of fit that into the storyline.”

But he argued that despite not including every detail of the team’s journey to the Olympics, the “heart of the story” very much matched up with the real events.

“The heart of the story is that these boys had to row to live really,” he said. “These are poor kids. And during the Depression, in order to go to school and to eat and to have a place to live other than a car they had to row.

“And so you know, they were rowing… they started rowing for one reason, but then they ended up rowing for different reasons. And I think that’s really what the heart of the film is about.”

As well as compressing the time span – the real events unfolded over three years rather than one, as is shown in the film – there are a few other minor alterations to the story including the addition of a fictional scene in which the coach of the rival Berkeley team helps to fund the University of Washington team’s journey to Berlin.

Meanwhile, although it is correct that the Olympic final in 1936 was extremely close, it is not true that a photo was used to determine the winning boat – instead, the winners were announced after deliberation between the judges.

Largely, however, the film is drawn from the true events described in Daniel James Brown’s novel and paints a broadly accurate picture of an incredible underdog success.