Five years ago, when Phuong Mai Nguyen began work on In Waves, her first feature film, she imagined the undertaking as her own personal Mount Everest — or, perhaps more fittingly, as standing at the edge of an ocean of uncertainty. “It felt like something insurmountable,” she says. Luckily, the task at hand — bringing AJ Dungo’s beloved graphic novel to animated life — was one she wouldn’t face solo, a fitting approach given the material. “The story is such a unifying one,” she adds.

In Waves follows AJ (voiced by Will Sharpe), a young Los Angeles skater and artist who is afraid of the water but desperately likes a girl, Kristen (Stephanie Hsu), who lives for it. In one of their first moments together, Kristen teaches AJ to surf — or at least to find peace in the ebb and flow of the waves. Soon, the teenagers fall for one another. When Kristen suddenly falls ill, they must face it together.

Dungo began the book as a history of surfing, but the project evolved into memoir, with the author recalling his first love, who introduced him to the sport and passed away eight years into their relationship. When Dungo first met Nguyen, he knew the filmmaker would do the story justice. “I remember watching her short film Chez Moi and I was really captivated by her ability to tell a story with no words but still capture so much with expressions, textures, colors, tone, atmosphere, and visual metaphors,” Dungo says. “She has a real gift for capturing human emotions in subtle ways.”

AJ (voiced by Will Sharpe) and Kristen (voiced by Stephanie Hsu)

Surfing becomes the backdrop to every phase of AJ and Kristen’s romance: trepidation, ecstasy, joy, fear, even grief. “I wanted the film to convey through the characters an urgency to live and to believe in the future,” Nguyen says. “Sharing this story felt like a necessity to me.” Dungo feels that Nguyen came at the project with an earnestness, humor, and compassion that allowed her to really see the nuances of the story. “For a film about something devastating, there is so much life and humor to be found in the performances, the physical comedy, the timing. I found myself laughing as much as I was crying,” Dungo says.

To immerse herself in their world, Nguyen visited the real-life couple’s high school, Kristen’s house, and the beaches where they used to surf. “Those [particulars] that she got to experience firsthand really come alive in the film,” Dungo says. She and Dungo even surfed together, and when the author visited France, Nguyen would make him dinner. All of these experiences lend an earnestness and tenderness to the animated characters and the places they inhabit. 

In approaching the script, screenwriters Fanny Burdino and Samuel Doux developed a fictionalized version of AJ, but grounded his characterization and experiences in reality, incorporating AJ’s desire to become an artist and his need to process emotions through images. AJ’s own artistic journey — and his book about their relationship — became a story within the story, blurring the lines between fact and fiction. Burdino and Doux would ask Dungo about details of his story that went beyond the book, “things like mine and Kristen’s home lives, what our hopes and dreams were, what we fought about, who our friends were,” Dungo says. “The book is so sparse with details, they needed more backstory to flesh out these characters.”

In finding her inspiration, Nguyen, a Vietnamese-born filmmaker based in France, was struck by the distinctive light in California, a stark contrast to the places where she grew up. She used David Hockney’s paintings as a reference for her own interpretation of the Los Angeles sky and sea. In lending her own graphic style to the story, Nguyen found herself drawn to the light, colors, and texture of the ocean. She ultimately used the water as a place to chart the film’s changing moods. “At the beginning of the story, to convey this idea of first love and youth, the colors are very bright and shimmering,” she says. “Then as we approach the end of Kristen’s life, the light turns progressively white and the settings seem to lose their vividness. Eventually, we move toward more muted and murkier tones; the waves seem choppy, as if representing the turmoil AJ is experiencing.”

The first time Kristen and AJ enter the ocean together, their faces bob up and down amid the ebbing water, reflecting the pinks and oranges of the sky. It’s hopeful and bright, their bodies barely touching under the water. Much later, in the bright light of a bathroom, AJ washes Kristen’s hair, now short after chemotherapy. The water is white and soapy, sterile but still reflective of their outlook on life. Dungo always loses it when he watches this scene. “When it’s over,” Kristen tells AJ in this moment, “I want to live on through your drawings.” It’s a promise Dungo kept — and one that Nguyen has helped to uphold, too. Nguyen says that AJ and Kristen’s true story “made me realize that cinema, drawing, or art more broadly can serve to extend the memory of people we’ve lost.”

Translating the theme of grief from the graphic novel to the film became a delicate balancing act, especially since the shift in medium necessitated leaving out certain elements and inventing new ones. All the while, Nguyen and her team aimed to keep the true essence of the story intact, with the transformative power of water at its core.

“When we talk about surfing, I think it’s important to speak about where it comes from,” Nguyen says. In Waves opens with sepia-toned scenes of Hawaii many years ago, when women and men waded into the water unafraid and discovered a new way to commune with the ocean that surrounded them. Nguyen traveled to Hawaii to meet with historians, anthropologists, and researchers to better understand the rituals and culture around the sport. In the water, to this day, surfers are in constant conversation with nature, with the cycle of life and death, with all the things they can’t control. “I think to surf is to confront something bigger than yourself,” Nguyen says. “And a way to be humble in the face of nature and to accept events as they unfold.”

When the time came to show the families of the real-life couple the finished film, Nguyen was nervous; the screening was the first time that both families had been together since Kristen’s funeral. It proved to be a cathartic moment for everyone. “There were a lot of tears, but it opened the doors for us to share stories and memories,” Dungo says. “It was the greatest gift we could have received, to see Kristen alive again.” In Nguyen’s telling, their story lives on — one that, ultimately, is centered around joy and optimism. “In a world of hopelessness, it’s powerful to see people so filled with hope after experiencing this beautiful film,” Dungo says. “It’s truly priceless.”