“I Want to Shoot…Now!”: How a New Documentary Captures the Totality of Faye Dunaway

It’s hard to imagine a better environment for the premiere of a documentary about the life and career of Faye Dunaway than the movie-exalting atmosphere that permeates the Cannes Film Festival. Here, the kind of filmmaking that the 83-year-old’s résumé represents (Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, Network) reigns eternal. So it was that FAYE, from director Laurent Bouzereau, had its world debut on the Croisette this month attended by a packed audience, followed by solidly glowing reviews. Dunaway was once again in all of her widescreen glory: The film opens with the classic shot of the star beside the Beverly Hills Hotel swimming pool the morning after her 1977 Oscar victory—“the most famous shot in Hollywood history,” according to the documentary—slouching in a pink satin robe, newspaper headlines at her stiletto-shorn feet, statuette on the table, her face caught in a faraway look that says, according to her, “Is that all there is?”

“She was the face of the poster not so long ago,” the festival’s director Thierry Frémaux said onstage. “She used to come here just to watch films. And it was something very impressive for audiences to see a star like her.”

While Dunaway’s onscreen story has been filled with glory, her offscreen life was very different, seemingly written in disappearing ink, as she appeared to fade from the public eye in recent years. Now, here she was standing on a cinema stage again, alongside Bouzereau and her son, Liam O’Neill, to introduce the movie about her life.

“It’s always an honor to present a film in Cannes,” she said, adding that the documentary was “a role I didn’t have to rehearse.”

Then the lights went down and the audience could indulge in watching the movie star whose roles almost always came with conflict and turbulence.

“Are we shooting?” she demands onscreen at the start of FAYE. “C’mon, I’m here! I want to shoot…Now!”

BREAK

Dunaway’s return to Cannes to walk the red carpet this year came during a feast of a festival, which featured other vintage names like Francis Ford Coppola (Megalopolis), Elizabeth Taylor (in the documentary Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes), Meryl Streep (opening night honoree), George Lucas (receiving an honorary Palme d’Or), Demi Moore (The Substance), and even Donald Trump (embodied by the actor Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice).

Dunaway’s appearance was perhaps the most surprising because few stars in the history of cinema have a more mercurial reputation.

“Oy, vey, what a pain in the ass,” says Chinatown first AD Hawk Koch in the doc, remarking upon Dunaway’s habit of using Blistex—which he says was her “security blanket”—between takes.

“Faye Dunaway in one word?” adds film historian Annette Insdorf. “Complicated.”

In a clip included in the film, Johnny Carson asks Bette Davis on The Tonight Show if there is anyone in Hollywood she recalls as particularly difficult.

“Yes,” Davis replies without missing a beat. “Faye Dunaway. And you can ask anyone else and they will tell you the same thing!”

Bouzereau balances those kinds of barbs with admiring testimony from Dunaway’s friends, including Sharon Stone and Mickey Rourke.

And amid all of it comes a revelation: Dunaway was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and suffered from manic depression and alcoholism. “I worked with a group of doctors who analyzed my behavior, who gave me prescriptions for pills they thought would be good for me,” she says in the film. “And that helped. So I am quieter. But throughout my career, people know there were tough times.”

Bouzereau previously gave the documentary treatment to Natalie Wood and Steven Spielberg (whose production company, Amblin, produced FAYE for HBO, where the doc will stream later this year). How did Bouzereau get the notoriously private Dunaway to tell all before his cameras?

“My producer/husband Markus Keith and I have enjoyed a friendship with both Faye and her son Liam,” he tells me. “We discussed the documentary over several meals and phone calls. Faye and Liam really liked my previous films—also, when Amblin’s producers (Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey) came on board, that sealed the deal, and we went to HBO with whom we had done two projects.”

“It took time—and it was based on trust. We all knew this was going to be a challenge, but that’s not unique to Faye,” he continues. “Everyone we’ve ever made a film about always has that same initial reaction.”

And so Dunaway sat for four separate interview sessions over a year, and the demons and difficulties from her past arose once again in what Variety reviewer Pete Hammond called “a surprising, forthright and honest account of someone, as it is put in the film, who ‘started out as a normal person wanting to be famous, and ended up as a famous person wanting to be normal.’”

Dunaway sits on a couch onscreen beside her son, who shows her a series of old photographs from a scrapbook that elicit a flood of memories.

“Faye is perhaps someone that I have created,” she says in the documentary, explaining the difference between the life she was born into, as Dorothy Faye Dunaway, a cheerleader and beauty pageant contestant from the small town of Bascom, Florida who moved to New York in hopes of a career on the stage, and the global movie star she became. “It’s a persona that is related very much to my work, that’s specific to my career. That’s the actress, I suppose.”

Then it was on to the roles: from The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968 to Supergirl in 1984, with so many classics in between, all befitting the widescreen where these movies were shown.

“And here’s Miss Bonnie Parker, and I’m Clyde Barrow,” says Warren Beatty in 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, in which Dunaway blazes across Texas with a beret on her head and a rifle in her hand, a role she nailed as the classic femme fatale and that led to her first best actress Oscar nomination.

Evelyn Mulwray was just as iconic in 1974’s Chinatown, in which Dunaway played the sultry daughter of a wealthy Los Angeles landowner who impregnated her—leaving her with a child who, as she famously shrieks at her detective costar Jack Nicholson, “She’s my sister AND my daughter!” The documentary tells another torrid story, this one behind the scenes, of when an errant hair on Dunaway’s head wouldn’t stay down, and director Roman Polanski rushed over and plucked it—sending a fuming Dunaway to her trailer. Upon her return, she was wearing a hat (with a veil) that only added to her character’s mystery. “Roman, the terror—but he thought I was a terror too!” she says, looking at a photo from the set and deeming him a great director despite their difficulties.

“After the hair incident, Jack called me Dread,” she says in the documentary, ‘the Dreaded Dunaway.’”

She loved the nickname. Another Oscar nomination followed.

She finally won the best actress Oscar in 1977, playing the scheming programming director Diana Christensen in Network. Each of these roles was introduced to audiences who were not sitting “at home while scrolling through” phones, “while checking emails and half paying attention,” as director Sean Baker described today’s distracted viewers in his acceptance speech for this year’s Palme d’Or award–winning movie Anora, but in the communion of movie theaters across America, and later, the world—exactly the way the audience watched the premiere of FAYE in Cannes. As Baker added: “I see the future of cinema as where it started: in a movie theater.”

In 1981, Dunaway played, of all things, a mother: She became the actress Joan Crawford at her child-abusing worst in Mommie Dearest, complete with those infamous lines, “Don’t fuck with me, fellas!” and “No wire hangers, EVER!” Dunaway long maintained the role was a mistake and rarely spoke about it (until now), even admonishing a biographer—in a widely quoted and very long 6:14 a.m. voicemail—that she had no interest in “dilly-dallying and tarrying over Mommie Dearest; I don’t even want to discuss it.”

Still, the movie endures as a camp classic, an emblem of an era fading fast. “Has any movie queen ever gone this far before?” Pauline Kael asked in her 1981 Mommie Dearest review. “Faye Dunaway captures every facet (imagined and real) of Joan Crawford. Dunaway is sexy, grotesque, moving, funny, maudlin—sometimes all in the same scene…. She gives a gigantic performance. It’s like grand opera without the music…You can’t help laughing at the movie. But you can’t laugh at her.”