'Nyad' Directors Break Down Historic Cuba to Florida Swim Scene

I used to think shooting in the alpine

or shooting up on El Cap was difficult,

but water is an entirely different beast.

For some reason, we didn't really talk about that

before we started making this film.

Hi, I am Chai Vasarhelyi.

And I'm Jimmy Chin.

We are the directors of Nyad,

and today we're gonna be breaking down

one of our favorite scenes from the film.

This is Notes on a Scene.

Look over there. Look over there.

You see that? I'm not getting out of-

You see that? The horizon?

Look at the horizon. You see it?

Is it the sun?

No, that's not the sun, babe.

Those are the lights of Key West.

Most of this water work was filmed in a tank

in the Dominican Republic.

It's a film stage.

And it's a very, very large pool,

you know, which is about four feet deep

everywhere except for the very middle,

which is about 20 feet deep.

It's surrounded by blue screen except for one side,

which is an infinity pool,

which you can see out to the ocean.

So, if there were no visual effects on this,

you would see a blue screen basically like that

at the edges of the pool.

And then because we had those blue screens up,

we were able to put in, you know,

Key West as well as the night sky that's all up here.

That's it. That's it.

[water sploshes]

[Diana groans]

You're never going to put that mask on again.

Before we even started filming,

we knew we had all these night scenes.

And so, when we designed the boat,

we had a lighting designer go through.

We knew we needed light on Bonnie.

We knew we needed lights to illuminate inside the cabin.

Here's lights.

But the biggest thing was that we knew that John Bartlett,

the actual navigator,

had created an LED lane

so that Diana could swim as perfectly of a straight line

parallel to the boat as possible.

He had these LED lanes built

that we could adjust on a dimmer,

and that was huge 'cause that allowed us to have,

like, a key light underwater.

When Diana's swimming at night,

you could actually see her face.

So, we built a giant platform

that basically parallels the boat,

and on it, we had two huge dollies.

One holding a 70-foot technical crane

and another one holding a 50-foot technical crane.

We were able to kind of shoot all these different angles,

especially down low along the water.

We had this thing called a HydroHead

where you could actually get it into the water.

Peter Zuccarini, who is literally like Neptune,

he would go underwater

and swim the length of this tank without coming up for air.

And he would literally swim back and forth

underneath filming with his camera set up.

It's like Merman. Merman.

Except for he wouldn't

[Jimmy] really have We call him Merman.

[Chai] a snorkel. No, no, he'd have one,

But he wouldn't use it. Yeah, he wouldn't use it.

He just wouldn't use it. Yeah.

Off with the goggles. [Diana retches]

All right.

[Diana retches]

And that was really clear in her intention

to show a 64-year-old woman as a real person.

And so, Diana actually achieved her swim when she was 64,

and Annette was 64 when she played the part.

And Annette insisted on having absolutely no touch-ups,

no, you know, vis effects, touch-ups

to her body or to her face,

except for when we had to show the extreme kind of effect

of 40 hours in the water on your face and your body.

And Annette's wearing probably four hours of makeup

to get her face that swollen.

We had a few makeup looks,

which were like 17 hours in the water,

30 hours in the water, 50 hours in the water,

and then jellyfish, you know, that was its own thing.

You know, we had a really, really

talented prosthetics person.

His name's Corey Castellano,

and he worked with Annette, you know,

to fit the prosthetics.

And so, basically Annette had prosthetics here and here

in her cheeks and then also in her lips right here.

And then she would sometimes use a piece of gauze

inside her bottom lip, which was her idea.

This prostetic situation took, like at its heaviest,

was four hours.

And when you look at the lips and the idea of, like,

an actor being able to perform

with that heavy of a prosthetic,

like, it's really impressive.

Come up. That's it. That's it.

[water sploshes]

In terms of performance, it's extraordinary.

And like, it was probably like two o'clock in the morning,

Annette had already been Yeah.

in the water.

A lot of it also has to do with the fact

that this film is really about building

and showing this friendship between Bonnie and Diana.

It's really interesting

'cause you would assume that two Hollywood veterans

like Jodie Foster and Annette Bening

would've been longtime friends,

and they actually were just acquaintances.

They'd never acted together.

It was still the pandemic,

so they got to know each other kind of one-on-one

with the real Bonnie Stoll and the real Diana Nyad.

And they all lived in LA,

and they kind of had their own thing that they were doing.

And I think that's where they began

to develop this very close friendship.

And like, we were quite a small crew of actors.

A huge set production wise,

but not in terms of acting talent.

And because of the pandemic, it was quite isolated.

I do believe that Annette and Jodie

fostered a real friendship,

and they also felt, I think,

together a great responsibility

towards the real people they were playing.

I think one of the things about the relationship

between Annette and Jodie

that was really beautiful to experience and watch

was just the level of respect,

mutual respect they had for each other.

Jodie clearly signed onto this film,

not only because she loved the script,

but I think she really genuinely wanted

to work with Annette.

And I think that was reciprocal.

[Diana retches]

Diana, look at me. I need you to look at me.

[Diana] No. Look at me.

It's over.

No, I- Did we drift?

[Bonnie] No. I can make it up.

I used to think shooting in the alpine

or shooting up on El Cap was difficult,

but water is an entirely different beast.

For some reason, we didn't really talk about that

before we started making this film.

I mean, I think that was the privilege

of being first-time fiction filmmakers

We were clueless. in that, you know,

we're just so used to,

as nonfiction filmmakers of extreme situations,

like, just making do.

Our first day on set, we have a 450-person crew.

I think that was the hardest part.

Everybody's standing there.

We take our first shot,

we are told that there's not enough time

for us to take a boat out to the boat to give notes,

that we're gonna have to get on a microphone

and scream notes at Jodie Foster

as our very first 10 minutes on set

in front of 450 people.

We had to get over it really quickly,

but I mean, it was just one of those moments

where we looked at each other, and we were just like-

[Jimmy sighs]

Come up. That's it. That's it.

And I remember when Diana finally achieved her swim

in 2013,

and I remember following that

just as like a human interest story

and being very moved by this idea

of a woman who's 64 years old

who's able to kind of achieve her dreams

and fight to achieve her dreams.

Anna Barnes, who runs our company,

I was telling them about the script I read,

And then this happened and then this happened.

It really happened.

Then there're the jelly, then there're the sharks.

And Jimmy looked at me, he's like,

This sounds like something we would like to make.

We'd been hoping for a film, looking for a film which had,

at its center, a very strong female relationship

'cause most of our work had been about male protagonists.

And this is a story about friendship between two gay women

of a certain age

and one woman who has got this audacious dream

and is not willing to give up no matter what.

And a very complicated character.

We wanted to make a film and a story

that you haven't seen before.

That was always something that, I think, we talked about.

After Free Solo won the Oscar,

we understood that we have a certain platform,

at least in nonfiction.

It just has to move the needle a little bit.

It has to make the world just a tiny bit better.

Otherwise, I don't know, let's make a great rom-com.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, if you're gonna put in the work,

and we're gonna always put in the work,

it has to have some meaning,

and it has to have speak to us both personally,

which that's the kind of special sauce

of the Venn diagram when we both agree.