The final scenes of Joachim Rønning’s “Young Woman and the Sea” are hard to spoil — the film is, after all, based on a true story — and yet, they still surprise. As the film’s own producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, sees it, that’s because the very same history that inspired the Daisy Ridley-starring feature has largely been forgotten. Until, of course: movie adaptation time.
The biographical sports drama follows swimming trailblazer Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle (Ridley), who became the first woman to swim across the English Channel in 1926. Upon the completion of her incredible athletic feat — just one of many we see Trudy tackle in the feature — she was greeted as a hero in her native New York City, care of a ticker-tape parade believed to have been attended by two million people.
“When you see that parade, you can’t believe that you’ve never heard of this athlete,” Bruckheimer said during a recent interview alongside Rønning with IndieWire. “And that’s why we had to bring it forward. How can you have a parade that’s the biggest parade for an athlete ever in New York City? And there was no television. There was no internet. There was no texting. There was nothing. All you had was radio. And look at that phenomenal outpouring of emotion for this girl.”
Bruckheimer and Rønning are hardly strangers to wild biographical tales — the producer is eager to tick off some of his own favorites when asked about the hold true stories have on him, from “Remember the Titans” to “Glory Road,” while Rønning first earned international attention with his stunning Oscar nominee “Kon-Tiki” — and “Young Woman and the Sea” offered “can you believe this happened?” drama with that extra kick of discovery.
“She was hidden from history. She was hidden by time,” Bruckheimer said. “[We wanted] to expose her to a young audience, a broad audience, period, because that’s a great family movie. It’s great for everyone. It’s a perfect Disney movie, because it’s about something, it’s about a real-life person. We try to make pictures about people that could get forgotten in time.”
Almost a decade ago, writer Jeff Nathanson, who previously wrote “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales” for Bruckheimer (and directed by Rønning and Espen Sandberg), came to the producer with an idea. “He came to us with this book,” Bruckheimer said of Glenn Stout’s Ederle biography, also titled “Young Woman and the Sea.” “And the reason he found the book is he had two daughters, and he couldn’t find anything for them to watch. He went to a used bookstore and started rummaging around and found this book and sent it to us.”
The film was originally set up at Paramount in 2015 (at the time, Lily James was eyed to play Trudy), but as Bruckheimer explained, “We set it up to one studio and then management changed. We set it up in another studio and management changed. And about nine years later, we finally set it up at Disney. The people there were always excited about it and wanted to do it, but they wanted to do it for streaming and for a very low budget, which was very difficult, we felt, to do.”
Bruckheimer and his fellow producers liked Rønning for the gig, even if his last experience with Bruckheimer included a much bigger budget. “We gave him a big budget on that one,” Bruckheimer said of “Dead Men.” “And he spent every penny, but that’s good! That’s what he was supposed to do. We thought, because he’s an emotional guy, he’s got two daughters himself, it’s perfect. It’s always better when you make something for somebody else, rather than just yourself. And he was making this for, at the time, his own little girls.”
“I’ve done a couple of biopics in my career and I’m probably above-average interested in history, and for me, it’s like when I read or hear or see a great story and then I learn that it’s true, it gives me that extra high,” Rønning said. “That’s what sports movies are about. And if you are interested in sports or not interested in sports, it doesn’t matter. I think it’s about the story. And very often in this kind of stories, it’s the underdog story and the rise to the top.”
But how to make a film that hinges on swimming across the English Channel on a budget? “We had to figure out a way: How do we get this made for the money they gave us?” Bruckheimer said. “We found Bulgaria, and the labor and the craftsmanship is phenomenal there. It was a passion project, and it shows on the screen. Everybody really worked hard, worked overtime, built amazing sets there. The Bulgarians read the screenplay and said, ‘We have to make this movie. It’s an inspirational movie.’ It’s a movie that has to be made for young girls and women who don’t know history, don’t know the struggles that young female athletes went through in the ’20s and before. She paved the way! Trudy paved the way for all the great female athletes of today.”
Bruckheimer gets pretty worked up talking about Ederle, while Rønning is happy to glide through the more technical requirements of the film. Like, hey, what’s the deal with you and films that require being on and in the water for hours, days at a time?
“I do have a love of the ocean,” Rønning said with a wry smile. “I think it’s a wonderful, magical place, one that we need to take better care of. It’s a way to get out there and be one with the elements, and obviously, that also means exposed to the elements. … The ocean is scary and beautiful, and it’s unpredictable. I think when you watch a movie, you want it to be unpredictable. And that’s what it is.”
And, yes, they were exposed to those elements, though no one more than Ridley.
“Daisy really put in an enormous amount of effort, she trained for months and months with an Olympic champion to make it realistic for her being in the water, because she wasn’t an avid swimmer, she wasn’t crazy about the water, but she became this amazing swimmer,” Bruckheimer said. “They put her in that cold water, you do take after take and you have to remember your lines. Don’t forget, not only are you freezing, but you have to act. The weather shifts. The wind shifts. The boat shifts. It’s dangerous. And somehow Joachim pulled it off, he got it done.”
Rønning chimed in with a big smile: “I’m on the boat in the warm jacket, though, I just want to say.” He added, “I always feel that, at the end of the day and through the chaos, mishaps, and whatever nature is throwing at us, we’re also getting things that we could never get in any other way, which in this case is such a big part of telling this story. By being out there and doing it, like we say, real for real, and being on the ocean with Daisy in the water, her lips blue, somehow it informed us a little bit of how it must have felt for Trudy doing that.”
Disney originally intended to release the film directly on its streaming platform Disney+, but an instantly legendary test screening changed that. As Bruckheimer touted during an April presentation at CinemaCon, that screening resulted in the highest-testing movie of his career.
“You never know, as smart as we think we are, they’re always smarter,” Bruckheimer said of test screening audiences. “They’ll pick up things that we never thought of. We didn’t screen it for Hollywood. It was real working-class people in Southern California, it was a mixed-race audience. It’s the kind of picture that you can see over and over again. It gives you a good feeling when you walk out. You learn something. That’s really important. Not only are we educating you, we’re entertaining you, and that’s the best kind of cinema that we can give to audiences.”
After the screening, Disney bellied up for a limited theatrical release of the film, which arrived in theaters in May. While the box office numbers were hardly of the blockbuster variety — it made less than $2 million — both Bruckheimer and Rønning believe the film is the kind we need more of.
“That’s what it is, it’s cinema,” Rønning said. “I think that extremely high test score that we got back then was a big part of convincing the studio, and obviously with Jerry constantly torturing them, into giving us a theatrical release. I am a big believer in that. We make stories for the big screen. We like to paint on a big canvas. Watching a movie is a physical experience, it’s a social experience. … It’s interesting when it comes to trying to predict what an audience wants or [doesn’t] want. That’s what studios and producers and us filmmakers, we’ve been trying to do that for 100 years. And that’s also the beautiful thing about art and movies, is that it’s not an exact science.”
There is, of course, one way to predict what audiences want. For Bruckheimer, it’s simple: good movies. And lots of them!
“Everybody said it was the death of cinema, remember, right after the pandemic? Then ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ comes out. Exploded. And they still said, ‘It’s over,’” Bruckheimer said. “And you just saw this past weekend where you had two big movies, ‘Wicked’ and ‘Gladiator II.’ You saw ‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘Barbie,’ the previous summer, the big movies. [Audiences] are hungry for good entertainment. They want to really feel they spent their 20 bucks to go to the theaters and get their money’s worth. We always say that we’re in the transportation business, we transport you from one place to another. That is what cinema is all about.”
The death of cinema? Not on Bruckheimer’s watch, not while he and Rønning are still at it.
“I’ve been around long enough, [I remember when] television got more channels, got 600 channels, and ‘That’s the end of the movie business.’ When VHS came out, ‘That’s the end of the movie business. You don’t have to go to the theater anymore,’” Bruckheimer said. “Everybody wants to get out of their house and go see something that’s different. Every one of us has a kitchen in our house, but you still like to go out to eat and go to places where you get a good meal. If we can give you a good meal, they’ll come over and over again. They’re hungry for it.”
“Young Woman and the Sea” is now streaming on Disney+.
