Director Laurent Bouzereau On The Making Of His Faye Dunaway Documentary: ‘I Wanted To Be Honest And Raw’

With one of the most iconic photographs ever taken of a movie star and a simple four- letter name as a poster for his new documentary, director Laurent Bouzereau dives into the life and reputation of one of Hollywood’s most iconic and vilified actresses of all time, Faye Dunaway. Fresh off her victory at the 1977 Oscars for her role in Network, Faye Dunaway poses by the swimming pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel in front of her future husband’s camera, British photographer Terry O’Neill. Effortless, elegant and her long overdue golden statuette displayed on the table, this series of photos called The Morning After, will soon add to her status of Hollywood legend.

Faye premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this year, a very fitting place considering the fact that the actress was the face of the iconic festival in 2011, and that she has been secretly coming to Cannes for years to watch as many movies as possible. “There are two big movie events, the Oscars and Cannes. And to me, it’s more like Cannes and the Oscars, right?” director Laurent Bouzereau told me during an interview.

He added: “Sharing that moment with her at the Cannes Film Festival was very surreal for me. Because it’s something that when we got started, we said ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could premiere the film in Cannes?’ So it was a dream come true on so many levels. She was the face of Cannes a few years ago, she loves the French, I think one of the reasons why she did the film is because I was born in France and I have a French name.”

It was the second time that Dunaway was going to see Bouzereau’s film, but this time with an audience. Bouzereau told me that the first time they watched it together at HBO, Dunaway spent the entire time writing things down on her little notepad, to the great despair of the director who thought she was going to have notes about the film. When the lights came on, Dunaway was crying and she hugged Bouzereau. He asked her what she was writing down the whole time. She said, “I am just writing the names of the people I need to thank.”

Growing up in France, Bouzereau first encountered Dunaway watching The Towering Inferno, which was the first movie poster he ever hung up on his bedroom walls. The whole experience is a full circle moment for Bouzereau, whose documentary is also the fruit of his friendship with Dunaway’s son, Liam. The filmmaker was then able to develop the documentary, without shying away from the most complicated aspects of her life, including her reputation.

Indeed, Dunaway has been called difficult and hard to work with for decades, but Bouzereau’s documentary does not try to sanitize anything. Right at the beginning of the film, Bouzereau used a clip of Bette Davis telling TV host Johnny Carson that she never wants to work with Dunaway ever again. Bouzereau said, “Right off the bat, I said that certain things are not gonna be pleasant to talk about, because it is tough and there is a reputation there, and I wanted to be honest and raw.”

He added: “I said ‘Let’s just film everything, let’s never cut and see what we come up with.’ At the same time, I wanted her to feel safe. I am not a reporter, I am a storyteller, so I’m trying to tell her story, and I just felt that there was a need for a little repair work, because she does have a reputation, that’s out there, on the internet if you google her name. So I didn’t want to shy away from it because I was like, it needs to be honest. So she has a reputation, but I have seen many actors behave just like her, or sometimes worse and by the way, men too.”

Bouzereau explained that Dunaway’s reputation is very much shared by people, particularly artists, who put themselves out there. He said, “Not just actors, it could be athletes, painters or musicians. They live so intensely their art, it’s very internal, so when it has to be external, it acts out. I find that to be very relatable, and again, courageous to acknowledge.”

Calling a star a diva or difficult has always been easier when the star in question was a woman. Hollywood has always had double standards for women and Faye Dunaway, even though she acknowledges her wrong-doings in the documentary, was certainly judged and slandered in a way none of her male co-stars ever was, as explained by the director James Gray in the documentary.

Bouzereau said, “People are talking more about the way that women have been perceived vs men, there has been a gigantic movement worldwide, that I think has helped that dialogue. So a film like this, I think, feeds into that dialogue and hopefully can make a difference as well.”

In the late 60s and throughout the 70s, Dunaway was truly at the height of her career and starred in some true Hollywood classics such as Bonnie and Clyde directed by Arthur Penn, but also in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown alongside Jack Nicholson. Dunaway and Polanski or “Roman the Terror” as she refers to him in the documentary, didn’t get along at all. The director crossed a line when, annoyed by a hair sticking up on Dunaway’s head during the filming of a scene, he walked up to her and pulled the hair out of her head. Obviously, this resulted in Dunaway’s leaving the set and going back to her trailer.

We later learn that Dunaway actually suffers from a bipolar disorder. Bouzereau said, “She says in the film ‘I am very much responsible for my actions, I have been known for being difficult and I don’t mean it, I try to control it, but sometimes I can’t.’”

He added: “When she was really at her height and potentially struggling with it, it wasn’t even something you could talk about. Whereas people today, who are in the same position, in the media, are able to share with the world what they are going through. And frankly, it makes them relatable.”

Bouzereau believes that if a star like Dunaway can share her struggles with her bipolar disorder, it might help people. He said, “Frankly, sometimes I can be obsessive-compulsive myself with certain things, and when she was describing certain things, because we’ve had many discussions away from the camera, we shared stories, it was so great to talk about that.”

Bouzereau directed many documentaries about the biggest legends of Hollywood from Natalie Wood to Harrison Ford, but also behind-the-scenes documentaries about the making of cult classic movies including Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story or Close Encounters of the Third Kind, to name a few. I asked him about his relationship to his subjects while filming, in order to understand how and why they choose to open up to him. Does it all come down to a good filmmaker-subject relationship and chemistry? Or does it all happen through the lens of a camera ?

“It is a complex question, but in short, when I am filming with people of that caliber, or people in general, I literally go into a zone. I forget that there’s a camera, I forget there are lights, everything. I am in that zone and I hope that it doesn’t sound pretentious, but I start channeling their emotions. So when Faye was crying and talking about the adoption of Liam, I was in tears. I was really feeling what she was feeling. It wasn’t like ‘I got the story, now I can move on.’ I was literally exhausted from it.”

He added: “I feel the same way each time I film with someone, I want them to feel like I’m almost a mirror to them. That I’m the first audience to what they are saying. And if they see me being emotional and responsive, I think it reassures them that there is something happening in the room.”

Faye is now streaming on HBO.