“I want to shoot…now!”: How a new documentary captures Faye Dunaway in its entirety
It’s hard to imagine a better environment for the premiere of a documentary about the life and work of Faye Dunaway than the film’s excited atmosphere permeated the Cannes Film Festival. Here, the type of filmmaking this 83-year-old’s resume represents (Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, Network) reigns forever. So that’s it FAYE, from the director Laurent Bouzereau, made its world premiere on the Croisette this month to a packed audience followed by positive reviews. Dunaway is once again triumphant on the big screen: The film opens with a classic shot of the star poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel the morning after her 1977 Oscar win—“the most famous shot.” in Hollywood history,” according to the documentary. —draped in a pink satin robe, newspaper headlines beneath her high-heeled feet, the figurine on the table, her face looking into the distance that said, as she put it, “Just Is that all?”
“Not long ago, she was the face of the poster,” the festival director Thierry Fremaux said on stage. “She often comes here just to watch movies. And it’s very impressive for the audience to see a star like her.”
While Dunaway’s on-screen story is filled with glory, her off-screen life is very different, seemingly written in fading ink, as she has seemingly faded from the public eye in recent years . Now she was standing on the theater stage again, with Bouzereau and her son, Liam O’Neill, to introduce a film about her life.
“It’s an honor to present a film in Cannes,” she said, adding that the documentary was “a role for which I didn’t have to rehearse.”
Then the lights go down and the audience is free to watch the movie star whose roles are almost always accompanied by conflict and turbulence.
“Are we shooting?” she asked appearing on screen at the start FAYE. “Come on, I’m here! I want to shoot…Now!”
Dunaway’s return to the Cannes red carpet this year took place at a film festival party that featured other classic names like Francis Ford Coppola (Megalopolis), Elizabeth Taylor (in the documentary Elizabeth Taylor: The lost tapes), Meryl Streep (opening night honor), George Lucas (received honorary degree Palme), Demi Moore (Matter), and even Donald Trump (performed by actor Sebastian Stan IN Probationer).
Dunaway’s appearance was perhaps the most surprising because few stars in film history have had such a mercurial reputation.
“Oy, vey, what a headache,” said Chinatown first ad Hawk Koch in the doc, commented on Dunaway’s habit of using Blistex — which he said was her “security blanket” — between takes.
“Faye Dunaway in one word?” asked the film historian Annette Insdorf. “Complex tap.”
In a clip included in the film, Johnny Carson asks Bette Davis about Tonight’s program if there’s anyone in Hollywood she remembers as being particularly difficult.
“Yes,” Davis replied without missing a beat. “Faye Dunaway. And you can ask anyone else and they will tell you the same thing!”
Bouzereau balances those jabs with admiring testimony from Dunaway’s friends, incl Sharon stone And Mickey Rourke.
And amid all that comes a revelation: Dunaway was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and suffered from manic depression and alcoholism. “I worked with a group of doctors to analyze my behavior,” she says in the film, “who prescribed me medications that they thought would be good for me. “And that helped. So I became more silent. But throughout my career, everyone knows there have been difficult times.”
Bouzereau previously handled documentaries for Natalie Wood and Steven Spielberg (his production company, Amblin, produced FAYE for HBO, where the doc will air later this year). How could Bouzereau get the famously reticent Dunaway to tell everything to his camera?
“My producer/husband Markus Keith and I have friendships with both Faye and her son Liam,” he told me. “We discussed the documentary over many meals and on the phone. Faye and Liam really liked my previous films—as did the producers of Amblin (Darryl Frank And Justin Falvey) came on board, that sealed the deal and we went to HBO, where we did two projects.”
“It takes time—and it’s based on trust. We all knew this was going to be a challenge, but it wasn’t just for Faye,” he continued. “Everyone we’ve worked with has had the same initial reaction.”
And so Dunaway sat in on four separate interviews over the course of a year, and the difficulties and nightmares of her past resurfaced once again. Diversity assessor Pete Hammond called “the surprising, candid, and honest story of someone, as portrayed in the film, who ‘starts out as an ordinary person who wants to be famous and ends up as a celebrity who wants to be Normal.'”
Dunaway sat on the couch on the screen next to her son, who showed her a series of old photos from a scrapbook that evoked countless memories.
“Faye is probably who I created,” she says in the documentary, explaining the difference between the life she was born in, and playing Dorothy Faye Dunaway, a cheerleader and pageant contestant. beauty from the small town of Bascom, Florida, who moved to New York in hopes of a career on stage and becoming a global movie star. “It’s a personality that has a lot to do with my work, that characterizes my career. I guess it’s the actress.”
Then comes the roles: words Thomas Crown case in 1968 came Superwoman in 1984, with plenty of classics in between, all suitable for the big screen where these films were shown.
