Jeff Nathanson is proud to have written an “old-fashioned” movie. These days, old-fashioned usually means character-driven work on a studio’s dime. That’s exactly what Young Woman and the Sea is, a personal sports drama with grand scope that we don’t see enough of these days.
It’s the true story of Trudy Ederle (Daisy Ridley), the first woman to swim across the English channel.
Nathanson wrote the film, in part, for his daughters. It’s an elegant biopic with just the right amount of soaring, high-spirited moments. The co-writer behind Catch Me If You Can and The Terminal recently spoke with Immersive about his robust script for the Jerry Bruckheimer production.
You write family dynamics really well, I think of Catch Me If You Can—the father-son relationship here, the mother and father, and the daughters. For you, what rings especially truthful when you’re writing about parents and their kids? What are you looking to explore?
I mean, they say, write what you know. So that’s one of those cases where it’s pretty easy because we all have family, we all have parents, and certainly for young women, and to see, I have daughters, so they’re sisters. So it was very easy to tap into the sister relationship. I also have been surrounded by strong women, my mother and others, my whole life. And so, it was very easy to create those dynamics. And same with Catch Me, there are certain pieces of it that are just… they’re in you, and you want to explore. And so when a family dynamic comes around and those stories, I get very excited. And that was sort of my way into both of those projects.
What was your impression of her from the book? Just in terms of her personality and voice, what struck you, and what did you want to honor?
I felt like, because you’re not going to hear a two-hour interview where she talks about her life, and you’re only going to read snippets in newspapers and stuff, that I wanted to stay true to who she was by what she did. I had to go to her actions and her relationships and really kind of dig deep that way. It was very difficult to sort of find her voice for me for a while because I just felt like it wasn’t a normal situation. I had to kind of go away from trying to imagine it and try to feel like, in these situations, what would she have had to do, and what would she have had to feel? And start there. And then, like you said, because the family dynamics are so clear, it all started to feel natural to me as I got into it.
On the page, how did you want to communicate just her interior life, even as she’s swimming? How did you want those strokes to feel personal, just in the script?
Yeah, it’s hard, obviously, in the script to convey that. You have to really get inside everyone’s head a little bit. I think the great thing that happened was that Daisy Ridley came on board, and Daisy just brought an incredible amount to those scenes with just a look, or even in her stroke, everything she did in the water, but also out of the water — just the small nuances. And we forget that in the movie, she really ages before our eyes. She goes from a kid to, by the end, there’s this parade in New York with 2 million people celebrating her.
So she kind of grows up, but you don’t ever have these scenes in a normal movie where you’d kind of mark the passage of time in that way. We don’t have the birthday scenes, so it’s really just Daisy. And so she brings that slow burn to it. And I’ve seen the movie, obviously, a bunch of times, but I still am fascinated by what she does just in the middle of the movie — how she kind of transitions from a child to somebody who’s willing to ultimately risk their life and all that. So I find it really incredible.
There’s nothing “cliff notes” about it. It was a very clear beginning, middle, and end. Was your impression when you read Dan’s book?
Yeah, exactly. And obviously, look, when you have a movie where you certainly know the ending, it does help. Many times in Hollywood, you’re writing films where you don’t know the ending, or the ending is rewritten after the movie’s made and you’re fixing it, or this movie had a pretty good ending. So we knew we were headed that way, and I certainly knew that’s where we were going. And obviously, when we found the black-and-white footage and saw that for the first time, it was hard not to get emotional just looking at it and realizing that people were going to see that, and truly, their minds were going to be blown — that it all was true and everything they saw happened.
So we had this kind of great thing to go toward, but we had to pass time, and it was a lot of years. And to figure out how to do it, how to do it so people could go in the water with you and feel like they weren’t drowning themselves. So the movie had to have a pace, it had to have a heartbeat, it had to keep moving, and it had to have enough drama in those scenes, individual vignettes, to kind of keep you interested as she did her swim. And luckily, there’s a bunch of stuff in the book that really worked.
Even though we know the ending, it’s the “how” you feel like that is just what’s most important?
Absolutely. And there’s a lot of movies with endings. And so it’s not an unusual thing, especially in a period piece, to kind of know that in Apollo 13, they’re going to land safely, so you’re going to know the ending of some movies. But what I think exactly what got to me was just how she did it, and what was up against her, and how many people and how many people didn’t think it was possible, and how even today, I think it’s probably the hardest thing in sport to do. It hasn’t really changed. So with all the people that climb Everest every year, there are very few people who cross the English Channel to swim. So it remains something that I’m incredibly impressed by, and I remain… you can’t see this side of my desk, but there’s a lot of PR memorabilia. It’s very inspiring for me.
How’d you want to communicate not just the difficulty of swimming but the drama, beauty and poetry of it as well?
The trick is – the magic trick of this whole thing is if I can make people care enough about her in the beginning of the movie and love her and want her to succeed, then it’ll be like their own kid is in the water, and that’s how people react. And so they won’t mind however long or whatever we’re doing there.
At some point, the fear was, well, if people aren’t engaged, then that last half of the movie doesn’t work. And so we really took our time at the beginning, and it’s definitely… it’s an hour before she actually declares, “I’m going to go swim the English Channel.”
But we had to do that because that last hour, you have to be willing to go on those swims with her, or the movie doesn’t work at all. So that was the big trick of it all, and I think from watching it with audiences, they’re so tense, and they all know — every person knows she’s going to make it — but everybody is just so tense watching that and so emotional. And I think that, again, that’s a lot of just Daisy being so engaging and kind of the script working in that way.
What’s a part of the trick of taking 14 hours and making it 30 minutes? How much trial and error is involved in that?
Yeah, I mean, it’s 14 hours, but it’s also years. There was actually an extra year or so in between the two swims. There’s a lot of stuff that you have to do when you’re taking someone’s life from a hundred years ago and condensing it to two hours. So we had to play with time. It is not easy. Every frame was a fight if it had to really stand the test of time to stay in the movie. So it’s just one of those things where you have to be really diligent about how you edit a film like this because one second here or there is a big difference in this kind of thing.
When you tell a true story, you obviously want to be truthful to the person, but you also want to be cinematic. Is there a fine line for you there?
At the end of the day, I think we all are really respectful, or I hope we are, about the truth. But I think ultimately it’s about capturing the essence of what you’re telling and not being afraid of being cinematic. I mean, I think, particularly in this case, you want to show the struggle. The struggle is real. She spent so much time, even when she wasn’t swimming, practicing her strokes and building her muscle memory, and that was incredibly inspiring.
So there’s certainly a little cinematic license taken in terms of time. I mean, we condensed a lot of years into a short period, but the point is, we captured her spirit. And I think, for me, that was really important to show her tenacity, her determination. And that was something that was true to the real person.
For me, it’s about making the audience care enough so that when they see the struggle, they feel like it’s their own. If I can make you care about her, then the struggle has meaning, and it matters. And that’s really the key for me in all of it.
Young Woman and the Sea is now available on Disney+.
