Director Joachim Rønning and legendary producer Jerry Bruckheimer talk their Daisy Ridley underdog sports movie – Young Woman And The Sea.
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue #51
A veteran of Hollywood filmmaking, producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s name tends to be associated with such expensive blockbusters as The Rock, Armageddon or the Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise. Sprinkled in among those, though, are what he calls the ‘inspirational’ stories he’s pushed through the Tinseltown system: the likes of Dangerous Minds, Remember The Titans and Veronica Guerin.
Like those films, Young Woman And The Sea, a period drama streaming now on Disney+, is about a real person: Gertrude ‘Trudy’ Ederle, a young woman who overcame the sexism and misogyny of her era to become an Olympic swimmer. Specifically, it tells the story of her 1926 attempt to swim the English Channel – a hazardous challenge that no other woman (and few men) of the time had attempted. It’s a story that Bruckheimer spent nine long years trying to bring to the screen, first at Paramount in 2015, and later at Disney.
“We felt we just had to get this made – it was just too good,” Bruckheimer tells Film Stories. “It’s emotional, it’s triumphant – it’s all those things you go to the movies for. To be inspired. I always wanna be inspired by movies, but it’s nice to have a few of them out there like this – we like to make those.”
Based on the 2009 book of the same name by Glenn Stout, Young Woman And The Sea almost starred Lily James as Ederle; then the actor dropped out, and Paramount put the project in turnaround. Nevertheless, Bruckheimer kept trying to get the film made because, he says, Ederle’s story was almost ‘forgotten’ to history.
“Her story was forgotten,” he says. “You see the parade at the end – the biggest parade down Fifth Avenue ever – yet [today], nobody’s ever heard of Trudy. We’ve done this a lot. We did it with Remember The Titans, about those two coaches. Dangerous Minds, about that teacher. Black Hawk Down, about those 18 men that you’ll never forget now. Veronica Guerin, about the journalist that Cate Blanchett played. I think this is another one of those stories – they’re inspiring.”
Although other studios expressed interest, Young Woman And The Sea eventually found a home at Disney in 2020, with the company initially intending to put the movie straight on its then-new Disney+ service. By that December, Daisy Ridley was revealed to be Lily James’s replacement as Trudy Ederle, while Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Rønning – who previously made Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales for Bruckheimer – was brought in as director.
Despite a compact shoot of roughly 50 days and a relatively low budget, Rønning not only injects an impressive amount of period detail into his sets, but also went to the effort of shooting the bulk of his swimming sequences in real locations – albeit with the Black Sea standing in for the English Channel.
“I didn’t want to do this in a heated tank or with a blue screen,” Rønning tells us. “I warned Daisy Ridley: ‘This is gonna be a very physical role.’ And again, she was very motivated to tell this as true as we could. She was in 15, 16 degree water until her lips were blue. Never complaining, just going back in. No wetsuit, because she’s in her costume. Obviously, we had boats around her so she was safe, but it’s stressful.”
Ridley’s performance is even more impressive given that she had a fear of swimming in open water, according to Rønning; still, she spent months training with British Olympic swimmer Siobhan-Marie O’Connor, and by the time cameras rolled, had gained the skills she needed to convince as an athlete.
“At the end of the day, it’s very rewarding, because we got things we’d never get in any other way,” Rønning says of the three weeks filming at sea. “You drive home, the sun’s setting, and your hair’s caked from the salt water, and you feel, ‘Wow, we did something out there.’ We were channelling Trudy Ederle somehow.”
With the film complete, Disney had it screened for a test audience in January 2024 – which is when something unexpected happened. The feedback was hugely positive.
“It’s the highest-testing movie I’ve ever made,” Bruckheimer says. “So that helped convince ’em [Disney], maybe we have something here.”
The response was such that the film earned a limited cinema run, meaning people had a chance to see it on a big screen in [May 2024]; and although it was made for streaming, Bruckheimer’s attitude is that, even if a film’s destined for home viewing, their approach is the same.
Read more: Young Woman And The Sea review | Daisy Ridley excels in family-friendly biopic
“Beverly Hills Cop [Axel F] is going to Netflix,” he said at the time, “but we made it like it should be in a cinema.”
“I really believe in cinema,” Rønning adds. “There’s been a couple of obstacles, to put it mildly, in the last couple of years, for cinema. We have to overcome it, because this is our art form, and I have to be optimistic. We saw some of it last year with Barbie and Oppenheimer, where you see there’s room for all types of movies. People want to talk about movies. People want to experience something together.”
Young Woman And The Sea is streaming on Disney+ now.
