Interview: Director Joachim Rønning Discusses ‘Young Woman and the Sea’

The theatrical release of Disney’s Young Woman and the Sea almost didn’t happen, as the movie was initially planned as a Disney+ exclusive. However, positive reception from test screenings encouraged the studio to give it a limited theatrical release in the United States, to which it was met by audiences and critics alike with massive acclaim. 

Now that the movie is out worldwide on Disney+, director Joachim Rønning tells Awards Radar on Zoom that he has never made a movie in his career with “that kind of resonance from all over the world. We were amazingly lucky to get a theatrical release, but the floodgates have now opened on Disney+, and it’s been so rewarding for us.”

Young Woman and the Sea is based on the book of the same name written by Glenn Stout on the life of competitive swimmer Trudy Ederle, chronicling her journey as the first woman to swim the English Channel. The movie has been in development for some time with screenwriter Jeff Nathanson, who previously worked with Rønning on 2017’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. 

In making the movie, Rønning explained that the two “both have teenage daughters, and we were looking for a story for them that isn’t pirates or fairy tales but a real, heroic, female-driven story. I wanted to tell it for my daughters, but also the daughters of the world.”

“I was baffled that I didn’t know about Trudy when I read the book because it was such a big event when it happened 100 years ago. In many ways, it changed women’s sports forever. When I read the book, I was first of all shocked that I didn’t know about it. Then, I felt a sense of responsibility to retell this story to the world.”

Rønning is a filmmaker known for his visual treatment of the sea, not only in Pirates of the Caribbean but also in 2012’s Oscar-nominated Kon-Tiki. In Young Woman and the Sea, the director explains that he wanted to shoot the film out on the open ocean as much as possible. 

“That’s something I didn’t get to do that much on Pirates of the Caribbean because the endeavor was so massive that it was mainly done on stages. I wanted to go back to what we can call old-school filmmaking. I did this on Kon-Tiki as well. We were out on the on the real ocean for weeks and weeks. I wanted to do the same with Young Woman and the Sea. I think that the audience somehow can feel that. They can feel the stakes, the happy accidents, the logistics and the dangers of it. Making this happen was a whole other ball game than shooting on stage.”

Daisy Ridley portrays Trudy Ederle and knew from the get-go that the shoot would be a harrowing one, as Rønning warned her that he wanted to shoot the film as much as possible in the open water. What the director didn’t know, however, was that Ridley had a fear of open water that she had to overcome through rigorous physical training: 

“There was a whole process that she had to go through. She had to train for months in open water and period swimming, which is the type that they did back in the 1920s. But when you get to the day on the day, everything is chaos, yet it’s also where the training comes through. She’s in the water at 60-61 degrees with so much wind and currents in front of her, completely exposed to the elements, while I’m on a boat in a warm jacket [laughs]. 

I was looking at Daisy, who had blue lips, delivering lines in an incredibly emotional way. I’m sure it informed her a little bit, and certainly myself, about what Trudy must have gone through. Obviously, we’re not out there risking our lives. I was very nervous about the propellers being so close to Daisy all the time, but we’re not risking our lives like Trudy did back in the day. However, we are out there doing it, and I think the audience can feel it and it really informed us about this journey.”

During our video interview, seen below, we also discussed his collaboration with cinematographer Óscar Faura, who also has plenty of experience in shooting the open sea (most recently in season one of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, and soon in the upcoming live-action Moana remake), capturing the most human parts of Trudy’s journey, and what he hopes audiences worldwide grasp out of her story. We also briefly teased his next movie, Tron: Ares, which will be released in cinemas next year. 

You can check out my interview with Joachim below and stream Young Woman and the Sea on Disney+ today:

[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]