‘We should all be talking about Annette Bening and Jodie Foster’s extraordinary performances’: Nyad director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi

In September 2013 a news story caught the eye of the future Oscar winner Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi: Diana Nyad, who was 64 at the time, began her fifth and final attempt to swim from Cuba to the United States.

“It was a few weeks before my daughter was born,” the film-maker says. “I remember being super-pregnant and seeing this story and thinking, that’s amazing.”

Nyad, a thrilling account of that swim, is the first narrative feature from Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, her husband and codirector, who won an Academy Award for their 2018 documentary Free Solo.

The film, which stars Annette Bening, Jodie Foster and Rhys Ifans in three heavily Oscar-tipped roles, feels a perfect fit for the outdoorsy documentarians behind Meru, The Rescue and Wild Life.

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“The producers had seen Free Solo and kind of put two and two together,” Vasarhelyi says. “That coincided with Jimmy and me being committed to finding an answer to a question: what does not accepting limitations and working towards impossible dreams look like in women? Because we had explored this in other ways and in other films with men. And when we read the script for Nyad we had this moment: this is the one. She’s not afraid to be herself. She’s not afraid to be ambitious. Jimmy is also a professional athlete and absolute perfectionist, so he had a kind of access to how she feels.”

As the film opens, Diana Nyad (a career-best turn from Bening) is a retired endurance swimmer who has decided, at the age of 60, to get back in the water to attempt the record-breaking swim she failed to complete three decades before. Aided by her long-suffering best friend and coach, Bonnie Stoll (Foster), and various allies (including Ifans’s navigator), the staunch and single-minded swimmer attempts a record-breaking 53-hour marathon through the shark-infested Straits of Florida.

“The problem with this kind of swim is that you don’t know when you’ll get that smooth water, especially over three days,” says the real Bonnie Stoll. “And she was in the angle of repose the whole time, so she’s not digesting her food. There was a lot of throwing up. It was hard for her to keep anything down. But she needed calories because she was burning them all up. So there were times, as you see in the movie, when she said no, no, no. But she knew we had to keep feeding her. And we knew that if we didn’t do a successful swim we could get a feeding job at Ocean World.”

[ Tara Brady reviews Nyad: Punch-the-air marathon swimmer biopic from Free Solo’s Oscar-winners ]

Nyad’s steely determination, as sharply captured by Julia Cox’s script, has rubbed several critics the wrong way. Various reviews have taken issue with Nyad’s on-screen “likeability” or “force-10 frosty disdain”. Clayton Davis, Variety’s awards correspondent, has even suggested that the character will hurt Bening’s chances of an Oscar.

“It was very important to us that we portrayed Diana in her full, glorious humanity,” Vasarhelyi says. “I used to say warts and all. But now I say it’s like a mille-feuille – it’s like 1,000 layers. We never get to see women like that. So that was exciting. Julia and I worked really closely. We also spent a lot of time with Annette and Jodie looking at the script, which was really special. Jodie has a lived experience of some of the same circles as Diana. They are women of a certain age with chosen families in LA. And it was really special that Annette wasn’t scared of playing Diana in her full splendour. She wasn’t scared of not being necessarily likable.”

A snippet of archive footage used in the movie shows a self-possessed young Nyad, buoyed by record-breaking swims in the Bay of Naples and around Manhattan Island, on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. “She’s like the sexiest person on Earth,” Vasarhelyi says. “I couldn’t see it enough. She walks into the room like she owns the room. I was fascinated by the audacity of being able to do that at 28. And who knew that when you make narrative fiction you have these amazing resources and the best archivists? When you make a documentary, material trickles in. The woman who did King Richard did this movie. Every day amazing footage would arrive in a Dropbox.”

Some long-distance swimmers have also taken issue with Nyad and the biopic; in a recent Los Angeles Times article, one claimed that Nyad “sucks up all of the oxygen in the room with her boastfulness and exaggeration” and that even though “this really cool, really hard sport we love is getting the feature movie that it deserves ... there are a lot of us who feel, like, really? You’re going to make it about her?”

Another critic asked if Nyad’s use of a suit to protect her from fatal jellyfish stings during the Cuban attempt contravened rules governing “unassisted” swims.

“There are a lot of people who think that the Earth is flat,” Stoll scoffs. “I was there every single stroke – as were 40 other people. She did it exactly like she said. But, you know, there are haters everywhere.”

“I think people are made uncomfortable by her,” Vasarhelyi says. “They’re not used to seeing a woman in her full complexity, especially one who’s unapologetic about it. Humility is not really part of the character. And it’s sad. I think they’re also not willing and not used to seeing women of a certain age. I keep remembering something my dad would say at the beginning of my career, when I was making documentaries in Africa: ‘succès de scandale’ – that any press is good press. I always channel that idea.

“But it has been rough, because we should all be talking about Annette’s extraordinary performance and Jodie’s extraordinary performance, and the idea that any studio would take a risk on this. I mean, it is crazy that Netflix made this movie. You have two women who are in their 60s, who are gay. And you’ve got two first-time narrative-feature directors. And it all takes place in water.”

Shooting a feature film in the sea proved the film-makers’ greatest challenge yet.

“That’s where coming from nonfiction helped us,” Vasarhelyi says. “Because we’ve filmed in the Alps. We’ve filmed in deep caves. We’ve filmed in the Himalayas without ropes. And we had no idea how difficult this was going to be. Thankfully, Jimmy has commercial experience, so he was comfortable with 400 people on set. And they were wonderful people around us. It was one of those films where people only said yes to the job because they loved something about it. Claudio Miranda was our director of photographer, and he’s well known for Life of Pi and Top Gun: Maverick. Alexandre Desplat did the music.” She smiles. “But there was that moment on the first day when we realised we had to direct Jodie Foster with a megaphone, because she was on a boat 100 feet away from us.”

Nyad is on Netflix from Friday, November 3rd