Now available to stream on Netflix, NYAD by renowned doc filmmakers Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, featuring two magnificent actresses, is a story everyone who has ever doubted themselves should watch. Foster and Bening sat down to talk about the film, during an insightful press conference in LA.
You can watch NYAD on Netflix right now. I was lucky enough to watch it on the big screen during this year’s London Film Festival and it was a true life changing experience. Every stroke that Diane Nyad, played by Annette Bening, took, I was there. Every whistle that her friend Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster) blew, I heard it loud and clear. You can only make that kind of film if you’re a documentary filmmaker and Chin and Vasarhelry are gems.
What made these stars sign on for working on a film that shows them “au naturel”?
For Bening, when she was offered the script, it was a simple “I loved the story immediately — the script was just a really tight narrative and absolutely compelling characters.” For Foster, who knew Nyad and Stoll socially, “my first connection really was knowing them personally and then of course Bonnie who's such a character and so eccentric and I adore her.” But then she added that the “most important part was Annette.” Working together left them respecting each other, as Bening remembers their first meeting, “she came over to my house. She like gave me a little once over. Just like checking me out. We knew each other, we'd met, but we didn't know know each other, and we just kind of like clicked.” Bening admits that Foster is “always the smartest person in the room which is not an easy thing to be.”
“I need a Bonnie in my life!”
Bening said something beautiful about the friendship between Bonnie and Diana, the driving force behind the story of the film. “Friends are everything — these 2 women couldn't have done it without each other on both sides, you know, and they completed each other and for me I thought that was really beautiful.” She continued “it's sort of how we how we keep going in life is our friends. Yes, we have our partners, we have our kids, we have our loved ones, but there's something about the friendship that is so powerful and it's so much a part of the story and it's not always easy to dramatize.”
A partner in crime
Foster, in the film’s press notes said “I almost always do movies all by myself and then various people come in and play bad guys. Solitary journey.” So when asked how the process changes once paired with someone like Bening as her film partner, she replied “his is new for me. I mean, I have I really for whatever reason I haven't done a lot of movies where I were 2 people doing something and what a revelation it was just so lovely, so pleasant and also just to be able to support somebody that I admire so much, the way Bonnie really admires Diana and I really admire Annette also because she's much nicer than I am. She's, you know, she was in that water and every time she'd be freezing or, you know, it'd be 8 hours later and we would be like, are you okay?”
Women reclaiming the narrative
Bening pointed out that “one of the things that we have gained in storytelling as women, is that we don't have to play stereotypes anymore. We don't have to play this idea of a woman or this idea of a mother.” That includes playing a woman who can swim 53 hours straight, and is over 60 years old.
She also said that Diana’s “book is called Find a Way and that's really what the movie is about.” And that “it's about finding the way and that's the metaphor that we all need. In whatever way it is — we're given human life and what do with it and what we do with our problems and our relationships and our kids and our parents and all our partners, all of it is like you're always trying to just find a way to get there.”
Finding inspiration in NYAD’s story
Bening revealed the reason the filmmaker of NYAD wanted to make the story. “Elizabeth Chai, one of the directors in the movie, one of the first things that she said to me when I said, you know, why do you want to do this film? She said, because it's the story of a woman who's not done. She wakes up one day and says, I'm not done. The world thinks that I'm done, but I'm not done. And to me, I didn't really, 100% understand how important that was until recently where I was like, oh yeah, I'm not done either. You do have to reinvent yourself as you get older,” because “society has told us that we are done.”
Bening’s own inspiration is her 94 year old mother. “She is an amazing person. My dad just died about a month and a half ago, he was 97. And so what I aspire to is where my mother is — she just, she goes on her computer briefly in the morning, she does her crossword puzzle briefly in the morning, she reads, she enjoys her bridge with her friends, she is in her house, she basically doesn't leave her house. She takes a rest in the afternoon. She has a cocktail in the evening. Like that to me is remarkable what she has achieved — that she is able to just be and to be in serenity and gratitude towards all of us, who help her.” And “that's what I'm talking about when I talk about what, you know, we're all trying to find a way to deal with what we have,” said Bening.
Watch NYAD on Netflix now.
Image courtesy of Netflix, used with permission.