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!”
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?” asks 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 Deadline 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.