In the event you’re questioning whether or not long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad preferred Nyad – the place the titular persona performed by way of Annette Bening fulfills her dream of completing the Cuba-to-Florida swim at month 64 – a excellent pass judgement on can be her real-life schoolmaster, Bonnie Stoll, performed by way of Jodie Foster in the Netflix drama.

“Well, it has her name on it, so she loves it!” Stoll advised the Princess of Wales Theatre on the Toronto Film Festival on Thursday evening all the way through a post-screening Q&A. Stoll mounted in for Nyad, who was once a no-show on the world premiere at TIFF next Telluride because of her club in SAG-AFTRA, as had been Bening and Foster because of their very own Hollywood collision restrictions.

However the marathon swimming drama does slight to dissuade its audience that the true-life Nyad is one hundred pc self-centered and pushed or, as Foster’s Stoll tells her absolute best buddy within the movie, she has “a superiority complex.”

The film dramatizes Nyad who, in 2013, turned into the primary particular person to swim the 110-mile distance from Cuba to Florida with out the assistance of a shark cage. It was once her 5th try, and he or she finished a 53-hour swim throughout the bad perceptible ocean that integrated overcoming sharks and toxic jellyfish.

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi was once with out co-director Jimmy Chin in Toronto to provide her narrative debut, the place she heaped honour for Bening and Foster’s performances. “These actors have access to these emotions and craft and having that as tools for us to tell this story was incredibly helpful,” she recalled.

Stoll advised the TIFF target audience she spent a lot generation with Foster however by no means introduced recommendation about taking part in her position. “I never said a word about anything, until after I saw the movie. And from the first time I saw it, I was watching myself up there,” she recounted.

Vasarhelyi mentioned making her and Chin’s first narrative movie next successful an Academy Award for his or her 2018 documentary Separate Solo about rock climber Alex Honnold. She additionally unfolded about diving into bad waters for Nyad, with cameras rolling in a immense tank within the Dominican Republic.

“It was tough. We shot for 41 days, started shooting in a tank and I’ve never directed actors before, and I’m given a bullhorn and told to yell at Jodie Foster and Annette Bening across the water. To their credit, they were gracious,” Vasarhelyi remembered.

Nyad is produced by way of Andrew Lazar and Teddy Schwarzman and was once advanced by way of Lunatic Anticipation and Twilight Undergo Photos. The constituent will crash theaters on Oct. 20 prior to launching on Netflix on Nov. 3.