‘NYAD’ Screenwriter Julia Cox On the Life-Changing Experience of Bringing Diana Nyad’s Story To the Big Screen

Directed by Jimmy Chin and Chai Vasarhelyi, Nyad tells the inspirational story of swimmer Diana Nyad who, at age 60, swam from Cuba to Florida after several life-threatening attempts. Four-time Oscar nominee Annette Bening plays Nyad, and 2-time Oscar winner Jodie Foster plays her life-long friend and coach Bonnie Stoll. Screenwriter Julia Cox shaped this hugely impactful story after having this story subconsciously in her head for many years, and surprisingly, she was granted the opportunity to be the person to bring it to screen. Her deep involvement in the project as a screenwriter as well as a producer gave her a chance to do a lot more with the project. Both roles allowed her be even more involved in the process as well as to be able to add her input in different ways. Here, in an interview with Awards Daily, Cox describes the life-changing experience, one that she wishes every screenwriter could experience.

Awards Daily: I read that this story had been in your head for over a decade. What made you finally decide to write it?

Julia Cox: I think that’s not exactly true if I’m totally honest. I think that what you read is that, like everyone else, I heard about Diana making it to Florida in 2013, and I thought it was incredible what she did. I read the portrait of her in the New Yorker, which was this beautiful piece about marathon swimming, Diana as a person. I thought that would make a great movie someday but I didn’t intend to work on it or know anything about who’s making it or anything like that. I was just a fan from afar. Then in 2020 producers I’ve known from over the years, Andrew Lazar and Teddy Schwarzman, had been developing this story for a while based on Diana’s memoir called Find a Way, and they sent the materials to me and that’s when I started to get involved. It’s only been a few years but it’s been in my consciousness the way I think that it has for a lot of people as a remarkable and kind of eccentric story that sticks in your craw. One that hopefully people will enjoy seeing some of the details about how it happened in a fictionalized version of the character who did it.

Awards Daily: This is your first feature film script, correct?

Julia Cox: It’s my first produced feature. I’ve spent the last 11 years writing studio movies. I’ve probably written 13, maybe more, assignments for big studios and indie financiers, and this is the first one that has gotten made. Which is kind of wild, but it is statistically the number that you hear; that it takes a decade and a lot of work. The funny thing about the life of a screenwriter is that you can have a really satisfying artistic career and a fulfilling one and not have anything made. It’s really really satisfying to see this one get to the finish line. I’ve gotten close before but when it became clear that this one was going to go all the way it just felt like wow, this was worth waiting for, with the team that we got together on this.

Awards Daily: One of the things you have to get across really quickly and in a short amount of time is Bonnie and Diana’s friendship that they have had for decades. How did you approach doing that?

Julia Cox: In the script I would say there was more time spent on the pre-existing life of Diana and Bonnie as friends before the sports movie of it all kicks into gear and Diana takes up this dream again. To the director’s (Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi) credit, they were really smart about shooting a lot, letting my hefty script be shot in the way that we planned it. Then in the editing room they whittled things down, much like I had to whittle things down from in real life to shape it into a screenplay that is not 10 hours long. So there was a little bit more on the page, but I think what they kept was really smart because it gets across really quickly the dynamic between these two women.

They are peas in a pod and yet total opposites, they complement each other yet they challenge each other at the same time, they know each other in their bones, they see each other every day. They do everything together, they are a chosen family. That was the important part frankly, from the moment I read Diana’s memoir, that I considered signing on for this project. It was the relationship between these two and the potential to structure this film almost as a platonic love story between two friends. That stuck out to me. So it was always really important to set up that relationship as one that we could get behind, and then going forward we could understand the character of Diana through the character of Bonnie. and root for Diana herself and Bonnie as an individual who has to go on a journey to find more agency in her life. But also that we root for the friendship–that was really important to me.

Awards Daily: You mentioned that the movie is based on Diana’s memoir. Were there any other sources that were used, and how involved were Diana and Bonnie in making the story?

Julia Cox: The memoir was the touchstone of the whole thing but even the memoir was so big. She discusses her entire life but it does focus on this period of time in her 60s when she was attempting to swim from Cuba to Florida again. I realized pretty quickly I was going to have to leave amazing details on the cutting room floor if I wanted to wrap my hands around this thing. But I always let myself go wild in the research process where I am turning over every rock, I’m spending as much time as I can reading and consuming everything. There were so many beautiful things that Diana had written about her life. She is a great public speaker and has an amazing TED Talk. She has incredible interviews with everyone from Oprah to Sanjay Gupta. So I watched all that. I read everything about the swim through the eyes of a lot of journalists who were there along the way and when she finally made it.

But there really was no substitute for talking to Diana and Bonnie, who I got to speak to really early on. I should say the character of Diana in the film is different from the real Diana. Like with anything, translating from life to narrative you have to make some adjustments. The character in the movie is a distilled down version of the real Diana. She is a little bit saltier and a little more potent; she’s been cooked for a while. But I was able to anachronize some of Diana’s internal struggles that she writes about really beautifully in her book that she experienced earlier in her life: feeling like a lone wolf, swimming with an attitude, maybe feeling a little less connected to the people around her as a result of a lot of stuff that she’d been through in her life. I kind of transpose that into the timeline of the film that I wanted to focus on. So we had conversations about that. We had a lot of conversations about what the movie could be, and the details of her training for the swim.

But the best stuff was just listening to Diana and Bonnie talk. They were so funny, they stepped on each other, they teased each other, they bantered constantly. They understand each other so deeply and understand what the other one needs. I thought that was really beautiful. I probably have fifty pages of dialogue on some computer somewhere. That’s just me taking notes on what they said because they are very verbal. You would hear these little nuggets, little kernels of dialogue, I would think, my gosh, I have to use that. Or they would get off track and they would start having a conversation about something banal in their lives that was just so alive because of the way they speak to each other and the way they know each other. I was just absolutely inspired by them as people. In my writing process I tend to write a lot and then whittle down, so I got inspired by those early conversations and wrote a lot of Bonnie and Diana dialogue that I whittled down to something more manageable. One of the most fun parts of the process for me was starting to hear their voices in my head, and the voices of the characters who again became different from the real people, but who were very much inspired by the essence of them.

Awards Daily: You touched on some of the hardships that Diana had that was sometimes in the film shown through her hallucinations or dreams. And then sometimes it’s just them talking about it, where we find out about her father and her coach. How was it decided when to throw some of those elements into the story? And how important was it to get that across?

Julia Cox: The trauma that Diana went through as a young person is a pretty indelible part of her story. She writes about it so beautifully in her memoir and it’s woven throughout in a way that’s similar to the way it’s woven throughout the film actually. I would say that’s one area where the flashbacks were a little bit different to the script. There were a few more of them and there was also a focus on her relationship with her parents that was whittled down a bit. So that was partially decision making from early on to touch on that, but hopefully with the nuance that comes across in that scene between Annette and Jodi when they are outside Bonnie’s house and they are talking about it. This is the way that Diana has expressed herself on this, and I just found it so honest and authentic and moving.

The idea that you can know you’re a force, you can know you’re justified, and also still feel frustrated and haunted and sometimes cheated by terrible things that people have done to you and your life. I think that’s complex and that is true. I think a lot of women can relate to that feeling; that those two things can be true at the same time was interesting to me. It was laid out in the script and calibrated quite a bit in development, and sometimes those elements would grow and then they would shrink again. But then again we also knew the directors would be really brave and playful and willing to try things in the edit. And it was ultimately in their hands how exactly to parse each scene, how to move it around, and of course how to shoot it but also where to place it in the edit. So it got distilled during that process.

Awards Daily: That scene outside the house you mentioned was very interesting to see her talk about after we had seen so many just flashbacks of what had happened. I really enjoyed that.

Julia Cox: Thank you. I hope it subverts your expectations about what you thought the movie would say about that.

Awards Daily: It did, and I like that we just kind of moved on after that point. Like that was enough after that.

Julia Cox: Right. Narratively it is more about her being able to talk to her friend and to lean on and be vulnerable with her friend about her imperfections. And understand her own nature through that experience then about the trauma with a capital T, which of course is there.

Awards Daily: You are also a producer on this film. What was that experience like?

Julia Cox: It was really great. I got to be on set the entire time. The directors were so generous with me. I sat behind Jimmy and Chai and watched every take of every scene. It was incredible and hopefully valuable to them. It was a big complicated set and we had three incredible stars. Rhys (Ifans) was just a delight and a wonderful, really important third point on the triangle with our leads. If I can paint the picture of what it was like. We shot in a tank in the Dominican Republic, all the water work, except a little bit of open water stuff, shot in this infinity pool that was the size of about five Olympic size pools put together over an ocean on a cliff. So they get the effect of Annette swimming in open water when you’re shooting her. So this huge pool that was only four feet deep, there’s a boat in the pool and Jodie’s on the boat with the rest of the crew. There are guys in wetsuits circling the boat through the tank. Annette is swimming with the wave machines turned on, it is loud, she has to hit her underwater mark, emerge, play a scene with Jodie in the boat, and there’s a camera on a crane on land and an underwater DP who is in the tank with Annette. So if the directors want to give a note they have to either do it over a megaphone or they have to get guys in wetsuits to ferry this little platform over to the edge of the tank, board it and then be moved closer to the actors. If a line had to change or if an actor had a question about a line (“We need Julia”) the ferry would have to come back. I would have to get on it and the people would have to pull me.

So this was complicated, and time is of the essence. We shot for 42 days, which for the size of the script and the amount of complicated water work that had to be done, was pretty ambitious. So I tried to be there to help if they had questions. We did rehearsals up front but we were also able to rehearse a little bit along the way. So I was there reading the script with the actors and the directors, making changes when a location had to shift. Or when you had to translate some of the very specific actions into doable work for these actors. It is one thing for me to write a flowery description of what a jellyfish attack looks like. It is another thing on the day with six people and water and a boat trying to figure out how everyone is moving and where the camera is. So I did a lot of rewrites that were production-focused in that way too.

It was just a dream to work with the actors, the directors, and frankly I think it’s an opportunity that writers should get more often. By virtue of the fact that you have written the script you already combed over the material so many times in your mind, you’ve reworked every scene, you’ve curated every note, you thought about which notes to implement, which notes to hang on to. You remember what everyone thinks about the different elements of the script. So you have this institutional knowledge that I think is helpful in protecting the core important elements, especially as things change. Which is inevitable, things change on set. But the writer has that knowledge and their bones of what makes the story work if they have really lived with it and love the story as much as I did on this one. It was a real honor and a lot of fun.

Awards Daily: So, you are now in the middle of Oscar season. What has that been like for you?

Julia Cox: It has been really, really great. I was on strike for five months with the rest of the Writers Guild. I am so proud of my union and grateful for them and happy about the deal that we got, and hopefully SAG is right behind us. So it was a strange feeling to have been so lucky as I was just talking about being so connected to the whole process, and then to be sitting at home when the film premiered at Telluride and went to TIFF. The directors were so sweet having their assistants FaceTime me so I could watch the Q&A. But it was difficult because there’s also this catharsis that you crave when you create something and when you are one of many people creating something. I was responsible for a piece but I am not the sole author of this by any stretch. It is the director’s baby and it belongs to them and the actors more than anyone else. At the same time you want to feel like you can come to terms with it existing in the world separate from you. I think seeing it with audiences, and seeing them react to it, gives you that feeling. That this is a new stage in the life cycle of this thing. It is out there and now it belongs to everyone, and it’s for everyone to hopefully enjoy or have opinions about, or feel moved by, or feel challenged by. That is the realm it exists in now. I love talking about the movie, obviously I could talk your ear off. It’s really fun to talk about the process and the work and even better to see it with audiences and pass the baton to them. It is really nice.

Awards Daily: Final thoughts?

Julia Cox: I would say I hope people see this movie with their mom or their best friend or anyone in our lives who spurs us to do a little bit more than we think we can, and the people who challenge us to be the version of ourselves that has the most potential. I think that is who this is for.