‘Nyad’ Is a Love Story

“I don’t think I need to say all of this,” Jodie Foster reportedly said while rehearsing a scene on the set of Nyad. The film stars Foster as Bonnie Stoll, best friend and coach to Annette Bening’s Diana Nyad. Stoll provided crucial support to Nyad on her mission to swim from Cuba to Florida at the age of 64. “Jodie was very good about policing my wordiness,” the film’s screenwriter, Julia Cox, tells Vanity Fair now. When Cox expressed worries about making the proposed cuts, she says Foster replied, “I won’t say it, but I will think it.”

The scene ultimately didn’t make the final cut of the film, directed by Academy Award–winning documentarians Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. But another of Foster’s suggestions did: a climactic moment when Bonnie dives into the water alongside Diana during her fifth and final attempt at the record-breaking swim. It took the marathon swimmer nearly four decades to fulfill her long-held dream. Cox knows how that feels: She’s spent almost a decade herself thinking about Nyad’s story. “I heard about Diana Nyad’s story when she finally made it to the Florida shore—spoiler alert,” she says. “There was a beautiful profile of her in The New Yorker. And I remember thinking, This would be a great movie.”

Ahead, Cox dives into her feature film debut—from spending time with the real-life Diana and Bonnie to addressing controversy surrounding Nyad’s swim.

Vanity Fair: What was it about Diana’s story that most fascinated you?

Julia Cox: It is this incredible adventure full of thrills and details that were so strange you couldn’t make them up, from the jellyfish to the particulars of how she completes this swim to what the mind goes through on these long swims. But what really spoke to me as a writer was the potential to do a really interesting character portrait of a woman who is ferociously self-confident, who is complicated, who is charismatic and larger than life and almost has a life force that’s outsized for this world. Who pulls us out of bed and onto an adventure and pushes us forward in life.

And then also this relationship between Diana and her best friend and coach Bonnie. They’re so interesting because they’re opposites, and yet peas in a pod. They share this drive as athletes. Being able to tell a story about a lived-in, grownup friendship among two women that has its ins and outs, has its points of conflict, but is also built on this unconditional love and this deep knowing of the other person in your bones—that felt as exciting as any of the thrilling elements of the story.

The film toes this line between being a classic sports biopic and feeling really fresh, given who our hero is and the singularity of what she accomplished. Were there any sports biopics that you looked to for inspiration, or tropes that you wanted to avoid in writing your own?

I watched everything from Chariots of Fire to The Wrestler, from conventional to highly unconventional. And the way that I was able to crack it in my mind was to focus on the relationship, almost the way you would structure a love story.