'Boys in the Boat' Author Candidly Recalls His First Conversation With Clooney

Daniel James Brown and George Clooney

It took more than a decade, but a film adaptation of Daniel James Brown’s bestselling nonfiction novel Boys in the Boat, directed by George Clooney, premieres on Christmas day. The film retells the story of how Joe Rantz (Callum Turner) and eight other working-class students rowing for the University of Washington beat Nazi Germany at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, led by their legendary coach, Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton). Ahead, Brown, who also wrote The Indifferent Stars Above and Facing the Mountain, spoke with Parade about the upcoming adaptation of his bestselling book.

Have you seen the movie? What did you think? 

It was a very cool experience. [Director] George Clooney and his wife Amal invited me and my wife to L.A. for a screening of it. We went down to the Warner Brothers movie lot for a friends and family event, so some of the actors’ families were there.

Clooney made a beeline for us. He came over, sat down with us and talked about how much he enjoyed making it and some of the decisions he’d made along the way. We had a nice long chat before it ran. My wife and I both liked it a lot.

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Why do you think the book resonated so strongly with readers? 

George Clooney and I talked about this a lot. We’re in a time when people are looking for stories that are unifying and uplifting. It’s a pretty dark time in a lot of ways; we’re so divided and fractured.

People look back at the period of history when people were pulling together to try and get through the Depression. It’s about facing hard times and collaborating. It’s uplifting. And because it refers to the Nazis, it confronts evil in a way that is not overwhelming, and very inspiring. All of that contributed to the success of the book and I’m hopeful that it’ll contribute to the success of the movie.

How did you first hear about the University of Washington rowing team?

This story literally walked in my house. A neighbor, Judy, came to me after a homeowner’s association meeting. She mentioned she’d been reading one of my earlier books to her father and that he was enjoying it. She asked if I would meet him. So, I think it was the next day, I went and met this elderly gentleman, Joe Rantz. He was under hospice care at home and was in the last couple months of his life.

I sat down with him, and he started talking about growing up during the Great Depression and this very heartfelt family situation. Then, he began talking about how he came to the University of Washington and started to row in 1933, and how this crew had come together to row against the German boat in the 1936 Olympics.

The whole story came tumbling out of Joe. I was all in right away and that was the beginning of the next four years of research and writing.

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What was the research and reporting process like? 

Really interesting. First, I didn’t know anything about rowing at all or much about life in Seattle during the Depression, so I had a lot to learn. To learn about rowing, I went to the current University of Washington boat house, and the coaches there put me in a boat and took me out. They were very helpful teaching me about rowing.

Judy, Joe’s daughter, introduced me to family members of the other boys who had rowed in the boat. That took a long time because we had to track them down in various places, mostly in Washington State, and set up interviews. Judy and I did a lot of interviews with sons, daughters, grandsons and granddaughters of these guys. A big part of the research was getting those stories, getting to know the rowers through their descendants.

There was a lot of hunched-over reading of microfilm copies of newspapers from the 1930s about the crew, but also generally reading about life in Seattle at that time, just getting a feel for it. I spent many, many hours at the university library of the University of Washington.

There was also a certain amount of book research learning about Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s.

With the narrative non-fiction form you write, how do you balance writing a story while conveying facts?

That's the trick and the art of it—to write it as if it were a novel while also making it factual. That’s why The Boys in the Boat took four years to research. It requires a tremendous amount of detail in your research, so you can find the right details that will bring the story to life in the same way a good novel does.

From my vantage point, I think Laura Hillenbrand and David Grann do a great job of it, and I know they spent a lot of time doing research. It’s the granular details, what I call “micro-research”—like finding out what time the moon came up over Poughkeepsie, New York, on some day in 1936—that convince the reader that he or she is there.

Any books you want to recommend?

I read a lot of the kinds of thing I write, narrative nonfiction. I just recently read Killers of the Flower Moon, which I think is great. And, by the same author, David Grann, I just read The Wager, which is a wonderful book. Those are the two books I read most recently that I’m really excited about.