Vasarhelyi and Chin, who won an Academy Award in 2019 for their intense, free-climbing documentary, “Free Solo” and received critical praise for “Meru” and “The Rescue,” have long been concerned about athletes’ push I am interested in telling stories. Push yourself to the mental and physical peak of your game.
“I think there’s probably an autobiographical element to it where I’m trying to understand my husband over and over again,” Vasarhelyi said of Chin, an accomplished climber, photographer and skier, in a video interview with NBC News.
In “Nyaad”, the filmmakers recognized an opportunity to tell a remarkable story of human ambition that aligns and expands on their existing work, which up to that point had consisted only of documentaries.
“I think this film sets itself apart because it’s about a woman’s experience,” said Vassarhelyi, who worked as an assistant to director Mike Nichols two decades ago when he was making “Closer.” . “Having made so many nonfiction films, it was a really fun challenge or question to think about, ‘How do you tell a true story in narrative fiction?’ Are there truths you can bring to the table that are not accessible to nonfiction?”
For their narrative feature debut, Vasarhelyi, Chin and their creative team chose four-time Academy Award nominee Annette Bening as Nyda and two-time Oscar winner Jodie Foster as her best friend-turned-coach Bonnie Stoll. decided to. After purchasing the film rights in early 2021, Netflix executives decided to move the production start date back nine months to avoid hurricane season in the Dominican Republic. The delay proved to be a blessing in disguise, giving Bening and Foster additional time to delve deeper into the psychology of their characters and undergo their own physical transformations.
Bening, 64, also “spent a year training with an ex-Olympic swimmer, but we didn’t know how it was going to go,” Chin said of the actress swimming for the first time in front of the rest of the cast and crew. Said while remembering. “She told us she was swimming every day, and then when she came and she swam across the tank we were shooting in, we were amazed – everyone, including the stunt team. His stroke was beautiful. His body had changed; She looked like an Olympic swimmer, and we were very impressed with that commitment. And from that point on, it seemed like everyone had to step up their game to the level that Annette was bringing to the set.
Given that so much of the dramatic tension in “Nyad” takes place in the water, the directors teamed up with Claudio Miranda, the Oscar-winning cinematographer known for his work on “Life of Pi” and “Top Gun: Maverick.” Is known. Make each swimming sequence intriguing and unique.
“We wanted to push the cinematography; We wanted to shoot swimming in a way that had never been shot before,” Chin explained. “We tried to shoot big and detailed to give people a sense of the scope and scale of the environment they’re in. But we also wanted to shoot something intimate that brought people into Diana’s internal conflict.”
Director Jimmy Chin, left, Jodie Foster, director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Annette Bening on the set of “Nyad.”Kimberly French/Netflix
By spending a lot of time in Los Angeles with the real-life Nyad and Stoll, who are both gay, Bening and Foster were also able to develop their own version of the pair’s idealized friendship, which is the beating heart of the story. , While his films with Chin “sometimes perform these extraordinary feats”, Vasarhelyi argued that they are “really just vehicles for exploring a certain emotional truth – and in this case, it’s friendship.”
Vasarhelyi said, “We were interested in showing this idea of chosen family and a complex friendship between two women, where you can grow with each other.” “The focus was always that Diana Nyad had to go on a journey of emotional growth, and it was only through Bonnie’s support and friendship (that) she was able to move on from some trauma and find the freedom to make it to another Was. Edge.”
But this does not mean that Nyad and Stoll have always been compatible with each other. Stoll, a former racquetball champion who said she is “stepped back in time” whenever she watches the finished film, said that Nyad’s single-minded approach to achieving her goal may have resulted in their friendship. It may not have ruined it, but it “certainly put a lot of stress” on both of them. Shortly after Nyad nearly dies from a jellyfish sting during a failed attempt, Stoll decides that he can no longer serve as her coach, which can be interpreted as a breakup of sorts. . To work through these issues, Nyad and Stoll went to meet with Steve Munatons, the former head of open water swimming, who acted as a kind of mediator between them.
“At the end of it all, I said, ‘Steve, is it humanly possible to swim?’ And she thought about it, and she said, ‘Highly unlikely, but if anyone could do it, it’s Diana.’ We went back an hour and a half — not a word was spoken between us; we’re both in our own thoughts,” Stoll told NBC News. “I got out of the car, and the next morning, I called her. Said, ‘I’m in.’ …I didn’t realize how determined she really was on some level. As she became more determined, the whole team became more determined, and not just Diana, but all of us, to get to the other side. Became the goal of.
At this point in their lives, Nyad and Stoll are more than just friends: “They’re a family in good times and bad,” Vasarhelyi said.
She added, “There’s a generation of women who have made some life decisions that maybe they didn’t have the luxury of their family’s support for, and no one really talks about it very often.” “I think Bonnie made an extraordinary decision. It was better to be there with her friend, even though her friend could die, than to maybe not be a part of why she didn’t get there. I think a “I’ve always been humbled by the strength of that commitment to each other, the respect we have for each other.”
Some in the small but enthusiastic community of marathon swimmers have questioned the validity of Nyad’s achievement, which has not been officially confirmed and was recently the subject of investigation by the two leading organizations in open water swimming. In light of this film, decades-old questions about the conduct and documentation of Nyad’s swim from Cuba to Florida, as well as allegations about Nyad’s character and tendency to exaggerate his accomplishments, have resurfaced .
Vassarhelyi and Chin, who said they did their own research into these claims and found them to have little merit, have repeatedly stressed that “NYAD” was never about claiming the record from the beginning. Used to be; Instead, they wanted to tell a story about how it’s never too late to achieve one’s dreams. The filmmakers also hoped to show the Nyad in all its “prickly” complexities, with Vassarhelyi comparing the swimmer to a mille-feuille, a multilayered French pastry that is both “complex” but “vulnerable”.
“I just think as a society, people are uncomfortable with women showing ambition, or it’s often called ‘dislike,'” Vasarhelyi said. “People are uncomfortable seeing old bodies under the age of 25. Both Annette and Jody were adamant that there were no changes made to their bodies, no changes to anything, which is incredibly admirable, and it takes a real commitment to your craft for that to happen. Is required. It seemed incredibly important for two of the best female actors of their generation to be able to create these roles where they could throw themselves into playing a complete woman.”
