I love films and I love rowing, so it’ll come as no surprise that I’m pretty excited by a combination of the two. When I heard about Backwards, a new movie about rowing due to be screened in the Autumn, I had to find out more. Happily, Sarah Megan Thomas, its writer, producer and lead actor, happens to be one of the nicest, least starry people you could hope to talk to, and agreed to spend some of her Sunday afternoon talking to Girl on the River about the film.
Backwards is the story of Abi, a rower who narrowly fails to make it into the Olympic boat and ends up coaching rowing at a high school where her boss (played by the gorgeous James Van Der Beek of Dawson’s Creek fame) is also her ex-boyfriend. Out of the blue, Abi gets the chance to get back into the Olympic crew and is faced with some hard choices.
Choosing rowing as a subject of her first movie was an easy choice for Sarah. She was pretty hot rower herself back in the day. She rowed at high school and made it to Henley at just 16; she then went on to row at college and only stopped when she moved to Manhattan, where she found that rowing just wasn’t as much fun (or nearly as picturesque) as it was back in her hometown of Philadelphia.
Rowing also, she believes, lends itself to a film. “It’s such a beautiful sport but there’s so much hard work at the same time.”
Having played basketball and tennis and done cross country running, Sarah has never felt the same emotional connection in any other sport as she does to rowing.
“I think it’s something about the team element”, she says. “You have to have trust in each other, to believe everyone is giving 100%”.
Backwards is unashamedly a romance, both in the personal story of Abi and Geoff but also in her sporting journey and the beauty of the rowing.
“It’s a love song to rowers”, she told me, “and it’s a great film for any female athlete.”
So, when can we see it? Well, there’s a trailer up on Facebook already and the makers of the film are hard at work trying to get a distributor. If you want to see it in a cinema near you (and I know I do), the main thing you need to do is to like it on the Facebook page – that will help to convince the money guys that there’s a demand to see it.
I’ll do another Backwards post closer to the time about how Sarah Megan Thomas managed to turn herself back into a rower, the logistics of filming a rowing movie on a budget and the problems with noisy drive-by Van Der Beek fans.
