LOS ANGELES – The biographical sports drama Nyad assembles a dream team of Oscar winners to tell the true story of American long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad, who in 2013 completed a 180km, 53-hour swim from Cuba to Florida – at age 64 and without a protective shark cage.
Playing her is four-time Oscar nominee Annette Bening, 65, while two-time Oscar winner Jodie Foster, 60, portrays Bonnie Stoll, the friend and coach who was essential to her success.
Casting two actresses in their 60s for the film was non-negotiable, say husband-and-wife American directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi.
The pair, who won the Best Documentary Feature Oscar for their rock-climbing saga Free Solo (2018), were at a film festival in Santa Barbara, California, in early October to discuss Nyad, which is their first work of fiction.
It premieres on Netflix on Friday.
Vasarhelyi, 44, says: “It was really important to us to cast age appropriately, and it was a wonderful opportunity to create two very rich roles for female actors of a certain age that you normally don’t get to see.”
Bening, who was Oscar-nominated for dramas such as American Beauty (1999) and The Kids Are All Right (2010), was their first choice for the lead.
“It had to be Annette – it was an instinct, a feeling (we had). She’s such a great actor,” says Vasarhelyi.
The American actress also committed to rigorous physical training for a year before filming began, and fellow American Foster – who won Oscars for the crime dramas The Accused (1988) and The Silence Of The Lambs (1991) – whipped herself into impressive shape too.
Bening “spent a year training and swimming daily to prepare herself for the physical demands of the role”, Vasarhelyi reveals.
“Jodie, likewise, was an amazing sight when she showed up on set and we saw how much she’d been working out.
“And there’s not one image or shot of either of them that’s been retouched or augmented,” the director adds.
“It was really important to both of them that they present exactly how they are. Because it was part of the role, and of presenting women of a certain age in their full splendour.”
Vasarhelyi and Chin’s acclaimed Free Solo, a vertigo-inducing look at American rock climber Alex Honnold’s rope-free ascent of a rock formation in California, was also about an extreme athletic feat.
But neither that film nor their 2021 documentary The Rescue – about the daring 2018 rescue of a Thai boys’ soccer team from a cave – prepared them for this one.
For Free Solo, Chin, a professional mountain athlete, had made the climb alongside Honnold and dangled precariously from ledges to capture the best angles.
But having to shoot Nyad in the open ocean as well as a water tank was much tougher in many ways.
“We pride ourselves on shooting in very high-stakes environments up in the mountains, but we had no idea what the challenges were shooting with water.
“And we were told the hardest conditions and environments to shoot in are with children, animals and in the water,” says Chin, 50, who has photographed many extreme expeditions and climbs.
“The main challenge was just scheduling, because the variable (of water) just adds so much time to everything, even make-up and prosthetics, because it had to be waterproof.”
He and Vasarhelyi also wanted to capture ocean swimming in a visually unique way.
For this, the couple had the help of Chilean cinematographer Claudio Miranda, who won the Best Cinematography Oscar for the adventure drama Life Of Pi (2012), and shot other hit movies such as Top Gun: Maverick (2022).
“We talked a lot about how to shoot swimming in a way that hasn’t been seen before, and how we were going to bring people into Diana’s experience,” Chin says.
New technology and smaller cameras also enabled the film-makers to “get really close to Annette while she was swimming”, he adds.
“And I think that feeling of being right with her was really important for that sort of visceral experience.”
Nyad premieres on Netflix on Friday.
