The captivating and inspiring story of swimmer Diana Nyad (played by Annette Bening), who on her fifth attempt, swam the 110-mile stretch from Cuba to Florida is well-documented. Her trials and many setbacks are stated in her memoir Find A Way, on which the film Nyad is based.
Sports biopics of achieving the seemingly impossible have consistently roused the human spirit and Nyad is no different. “I think the way that Diana Nyad was going about it at the moment in her life when a lot of people feel like maybe they’ve done all they can do was fascinating to me,” says screenwriter Julia Cox.
Diana Nyad was picking up an old dream and that felt so brave and vulnerable
“The specificity of this dream and its unique goal speaks to something universal in its esoteria. We all define a meaningful life differently and we all go after our idea of such a life in our own way,” she adds.
“Diana inspired me on that level because she accomplished this goal on her own terms. This was important to her and it didn’t matter that sometimes the whole world didn’t understand. It was what she needed to feel like she reached her full potential.”
Julia Cox. Photo by Lauren Kallen
Diana Nyad was driven by her “willingness to push the boundaries of what might seem possible, or even practical.”
Diana was driven by a deeper inner goal to risk it all
She made peace with the likelihood of her death because the rewards of self-actualization outweighed the risks. “There’s something Zen about that idea too.”
Relationship Between Diana and Bonnie
Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster) is Diana’s coach and best friend who endured much of Diana’s persistence and unwavering determination to complete the 110-mile swim despite her ongoing losses. Failure was not in Nyad’s lexicon.
“Directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (Free Solo) really understand what it is for a human being to want to push the edge of what’s possible and also tell a character story. They also tell a love story within the context of a sports movie because Nyad is a platonic love story and a story of a friendship between two women.”
Diana Nyad is acutely aware of her mortality and often asks Bonnie to confirm she was still onboard with her objectively dangerous quest. Diana wasn’t out to prove she could do it to the world. She was out to prove it her to herself.
“There is a self-assuredness in Diana, a fierce kind of confidence that can can get pretty potent and intense, but it’s not hubris,” muses Cox.
Bonnie is never portrayed as a doormat in her relationship with Diana, but rather as an antidote to Diana’s energy-intensive zest for life and chasing goals. “Diana offers Bonnie a taste of an exciting life that she had a taste of in her younger years as a professional racquetball player.”
“Bonnie was realizing that if she didn’t access that through Diana she probably wouldn’t get a chance to do something like that again in her life. Diana makes things interesting and she makes the world feel big, unexpected, and fun. Bonnie is the beta to Diana’s alpha. Diana’s infectious charisma and her relationship with the world is really magnetic to be around.”
Bonnie’s attenuated love of excitement has its limits. There are times when Diana takes Bonnie for granted with her myopic perception of their friendship, eventually pushing her too far and straining their friendship. There are elements of co-dependency here. “Bonnie has to come to terms with that and has to discover her own agency and ask herself if she’s being dragged along for the ride and if she still wants to be there.”
Bonnie feeds off Diana’s bubbling energy, but ironically, she also experiences some resentment towards her. “Bonnie is a giver by nature and doesn’t need to be the main event. She’s self-contained and derives value from being a part of the team.” By the end of the second act when Diana almost dies, Bonnie puts her foot down and declares that she’s had enough.
Diana Nyad (Annette Bening) Bonnie Still (Jodie Foster) Photo by Kimberley French/ Netflix
Meeting The Real Diana Nyad
The real Diana Nyad (now an author and motivational speaker) spent considerable time with Julia Cox to help craft Nyad.
“From the moment that I met her on Zoom, her voice was so specific, alive, and dripping with character,” recalls Cox. “She is funny, hyper-verbal, she’s got something to say about everything, and she has this relationship with language that is really fun. She can speak in this very grand and articulate way,” mentions Cox.
Diana’s love of dialogue is reflected in her character in the film through her constant banter with Bonnie. There are a number of scenes in Nyad where the pair discuss the minutiae of their everyday lives against the backdrop of the swim. They might be bickering about dinner or who won the tennis that day. The conversations with Diana Nyad granted Julia Cox an insight into the patterns of their everyday life which made it to the screen. They helped Julia capture the essence of each character in her screenplay as realistically as possible to make them come to life.
Diana Nyad
“I wanted to honor the real people and their voices in the film. I wanted to create an arc for each character and make sure that that the protagonist’s flaws are visible in such a way that the character has room to grow and the audience can go on on a satisfying journey,” states Cox.
Diana has evolved by the end of the movie. She’s made peace with many things in her life, she’s wiser, more self-aware, and calmer. Meeting the real Diana allowed Julia to explore her internal struggles and character quirks more fully. Diana has written about these struggles in her memoir and Julia brought them into the timeline of Nyad. This fed into Diana’s journey of self-discovery at a relatively later age.
Nyad is a story of coming to know your own nature and accepting it
Writing The Film
Julia Cox tackled the first draft of Nyad with a mountain of research to draw on. She wanted to be very faithful to Diana Nyad’s life and her inspirational story, yet also infuse the story with some personal touches.
Cox wanted to illustrate Nyad’s sometimes challenging personality by allowing the audience to get to know her
As with many films, the narrative was massaged to improve the story flow, time management, and dramatization. Cox engaged in reorganizing the timing of certain events and collapsing them to give Nyad a sense of being both a documentary and film.
All this was done to enhance the story structure rather than to deviate from Diana’s perspective. This is apparent in her five attempts to complete her swim successfully. Julia didn’t simply want to repeat the same swimming scene five times in the script. “I tried to focus on one major obstacle for each attempt in real life. Sometimes it was a storm, another time it was the jellyfish encounter. It just felt better for the screenplay to be able to kill a different monster with each attempt and have each of those attempts escalate in their level of challenge and what it demanded of of the character.”
Cox also condensed the scenes of Nyad’s crew for practical and dramatic reasons to maintain focus on the swim. “I didn’t want to distract our focus from our core group of people.”
Jodie Foster added a scene to break the monotony of Nyad’s swimming when Bonnie jumps into the water with her. That did not occur in real life. “It was an exciting and fun way to externalize what’s going on in the relationship. It’s an active humility on Diana’s part and it’s something that Bonnie can receive and feel seen. And with the two of them united, Diana gets this boost that takes her to the finish line,” elaborates Cox.
This scene is also a way to add physical intimacy between the two. “They’re 15 – 20 feet apart a lot of the time. I thought about how we make them feel connected when they’re shouting at each other across a raging storm. How do we make that still feel like the words and the conflict between these two people matter despite their physical distance?”
Julia Cox confesses that she overwrites many of her scripts. Nyad also followed this pattern. “I would one of the overarching themes of my writing process is to allow myself to write more than I need in order to find the points of interest and the hot coals that attract my attention,” declares Cox. “I’m inspired by real events that trigger new ideas. I’m generating pages because I don’t really feel connected to the story until I can hear the characters almost talking on their own in my head.”
Julia did substantial research before commencing her writing. She watched every interview with Diana and Bonnie she could find multiple times and re-read Find A Way. She made notes along the way as she identified new aspects to their characters and their story.
Each line of dialogue is based on this research, but also infused with Julia’s creative inclinations. “I’m inventing as I’m researching. I like letting myself go down the rabbit hole of what’s true and it expands. Then I chisel away at this giant block of marble to find the movie inside. You just have to trust the the processes. It requires serious faith that you will find your way to the other side.”
Cox also admits that she’s not a heavy outliner. “I have this process where I’m toggling back and forth between generating pages and then pulling back to look at the big picture. Sometimes that is through a more formal outline to see how the building blocks that I’ve generated click together.”
There is also an inherent shaping of the natural structure that comes into play as Julia writes and edits. The first act changed the most during the rewriting process. Earlier drafts of the screenplay included more scenes of Diana’s previous life – her relationships, her sense of ennui and her restlessness.
Ultimately Nyad was cut like a sports movie to speed up the pace of storytelling.
A typical writing day for Julia lasts about four hours – sometimes longer is she’s “in the zone.”
Final Writing Musings
We asked Julia Cox what motivates her writing.
“I’m always writing about ambition. That might seem like an obvious theme of this film. It’s the sense of what I owe to myself versus what do I owe to other people, particularly through the eyes of women.”
“There’s also the tension between a person who wants to be their truest self and also maybe a world that that gives different feedback.”
“One of my chief concerns as an artist are these women on the fringes fighting to figure out what a meaningful life looks like. You see it in little moments like when Diana’s on the phone with John Bartlett [Rhys Ifans] trying to trying to apologize, and really meaning it, but also still wanting to complete the swim.”
“You also see it in big moments like when Diana’s arguing with Bonnie during the storm. Beneath that, is this desire to be seen. Bonnie eventually sees Diana the way she sees herself. She’s never gonna quit. You can be multiple things – hard and soft, difficult and wonderful and loving, fragile and brave.” So long as you’re true to yourself.
