Faye Dunaway (Allegedly) Threw Pee at Roman Polanski
Working with Roman Polanski isn’t a great idea for, well, a bunch of reasons, but one of them is that he famously terrorizes his actors. Faye Dunaway has a reputation for being no walk in the Target either, with Polanski later vaguely describing her as “easily insulted” and “a gigantic pain in the ass,” but she seemed to have some incredibly valid complaints about the way he ran his set for Chinatown. Even Polanski’s own recountings make it pretty easy to be on her side. We’ve already told you about how he ripped a hair out of her head because it was ruining a shot, which he explained was “back-lit and looked awful,” so he “stepped to her and quickly not pulled, merely plucked at one inch of the hair careful not to hurt her and she went crazy.” Yes, Roman, people tend to “go crazy” when you assault them.
Apparently, that was only the tip of a large, abusive iceberg. It began, according to Dunaway, right from the start, when he pummeled her face with a powder puff at the makeup test as he raged at the makeup artist to demonstrate exactly how pale he wanted her to be. “I came away from the encounter thinking he was a bully,” she said, and it only went downhill from there. Mostly, Dunaway couldn’t parse Polanski’s directions, and he was frustrated that she couldn’t read his mind, eventually becoming so fed up with her interruptions that he refused to allow her bathroom breaks. According to director of photography John Alonzo, during one such scene when Dunaway kept pleading, “Roman, I have to pee, I have to pee,” Polanski approached the car she and Jack Nicholson were sitting in to correct Dunaway’s face and was surprised with a coffee cup to the face. “You c–t, that’s piss!” Alonzo recalled him screaming.