Behind the Scenes: Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, 1967) with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway

You know what I think about these histories? It makes me think of what Winston Churchill said. Churchill said, history will be very kind to me because I intend to write it. And so I think all of this talk about years after when a movie was made, who knows what we remember, what we don't remember. But I'll try to give you some semblance of what at least I believe to be the truth. It might have more to do with what I wish were the truth. I don't know. I had been the art director of Esquire magazine for about six or seven years. And I was looking around for something else to do. And David Newman was a young editor at Esquire. And we were by chance reading the same book. It was a book by John Tolan called The Dillinger Days. And in it, there was a footnote about Bonnie and Clyde. And it said, not only were they outlaws, they were outcasts. And that caught our imagination. Now, I had grown up in Texas, and I'd grown up with all these stories about Bonnie and Clyde. And I began to tell David some of the stories about them. And we decided to write a film about Bonnie and Clyde. At the time that David and I were working at Esquire, and when we were talking about films, there were an enormous number of films coming out of Europe, but especially a group of filmmakers in France. They operated under the title New Wave Directors. And the ones that influenced us the most were Francois Truffaut and the director Jean-Luc Godard. And we went to Texas, and we talked to people, and we came back to New York, and we wrote the screenplay. And we sent it to Truffaut, and Truffaut said that he had committed to doing Fahrenheit 451. And we were disappointed that it wasn't Truffaut. I went to Paris to talk to Truffaut about maybe doing a movie about Edith Piaf, and he wasn't interested in that. But we had lunch, and he told me about Bob Benton and David Newman, who had done this script about Bonnie and Clyde, and said I really should get in touch with him. And so I called Bob Benton when I went back to New York. And one Saturday morning, the phone rang, and it was Warren. And he said that he had lunch with Truffaut, and Truffaut said he should look at this screenplay. And I thought, okay, well, I said, tell me your hotel. I'll drop off the screenplay. And he said, no, I'll come by and pick it up. And my wife was in blue jeans and a shirt and her hair in curlers, and the doorbell rang 15 minutes later. And there was Warren Beatty. It was two weeks before she'd speak to me again. He read it. He wanted to do it. He wanted to buy it. You know, whenever I come across a piece of material, I never see myself in it, because that's not me. And when I first had read the script, I kind of saw Bob Dylan, who I kind of knew, in it. And, oh, I went through all kinds of ramifications, and then eventually began to face the music, playing the part. When he did buy it, we had meetings about who should direct it. And we urged Warren to go back to Truffaut. But he said something very smart. He said, you've written a French screenplay, you need an American director. That was a very, very good argument, very persuasive. I had made a picture with Arthur Penn. We had made a movie called Mickey One. But on Bonnie and Clyde, I went to Arthur first. He turned me down. And then I was turned down by 10 or 12 other directors. I offered it to George Stevens. I offered it to Willie Weiler. I offered it to a whole slew of people. And they were kind of curious about it, but didn't want to do it. One after another turned it down. They said, well, the characters are not sympathetic. He don't like them. I didn't see the point in it. It's violence. It's gratuitous. All kinds of things. And then I came back to Arthur, and I said, you know, you should come back and make another movie. And then this time he decided to do it. I worried because I was afraid it was just going to be a gangster story. But when I finally said yes, it meant I would go to work with Benton and Newman on the sort of perceiving it. And so there were things that we changed rather radically. There was a sort of ménage à trois in the original story. The C.W. Moss character was a hulking sort of football type. And I thought that was way too sophisticated for the kind of story I thought we should tell. When Dave and I first wrote it, Clyde was bisexual. And when Warren came that morning to get the script, after I calmed my wife down, he called and he said, I started reading. I have 20 pages into it. I want to do it. I said, Warren, wait till you get page 47. Because I said that's non-negotiable. And Warren called back an hour later and said, OK, I read it. I know what you're talking about. I still want to do it. I said, OK. From the very beginning, Arthur wanted to take the homosexual aspect out of it. And I took discreet pains to not have too much of an opinion on that. It was the mid-60s. And I thought, it's fine. Warren never said a word about it. But Arthur came to us and said, I want you to consider changing the bisexuality. And we got sort of uneasy about that. And he said, I'm giving you two reasons. One is, you've written it as heterosexual people imagining this. And you don't really know the dynamic of what that would be. And that was true. And he said, the second reason is more important. That what you've written about these people, when an audience sees it, they're just going to think, oh, they're a bunch of freaks. Now, that's not what you wanted to do, is it? And we said, no. He said, well, then I would advise you to take it out. And within 15 minutes, just sitting alone with Arthur, we agreed to take it out. His reasons were so logical and so strong. And we switched it to this notion of impotence. Because there had to be some sexual complexity. They couldn't just be this happy couple. My favorite part of the film is the very beginning, where Bonnie's on the bed and we draw back. And then she goes to the window. And down the stairs, she comes in a great flurry. And then they start that courtship dance. And that's the part of the film I like best. When we came to cast it, Warren had very different ideas. And he went to numerous women out there and searched for somebody. I started out doing photography and interviews of filmmakers and putting together a little magazine. And one day, a press agent who had been helpful arranging an interview with Henry Fonda, he called me up and asked me to do him a favor. He had a new client, an actress, and he wanted to know if I would take pictures of her. And her name was Faye Dunaway. And as we worked together in the afternoon, she just came to life through the camera. And I had a great time with her. And we ended up spending longer than we should have. And she said she had to race back to have this meeting with an actor-producer. The next day, the telephone rings. And it's Warren Beatty, actor-producer. And he says, I hear you took pictures of Faye Dunaway yesterday. I said, yeah. And he said, what did you think? And I told him that they were good. And he said, how would you like to show them to me and to Arthur Pant? I said, well, I'd love to do that. He said, well, why don't you come on over? We're talking about it right now. So I took my slide projector, my boxes of slides. I threw an old sheet, king-size sheet in the car and drove down to the Beverly Wilshire, went up to Warren's room and went through the slides. And they looked and they talked. And sometime later, he said that Warner Brothers would buy the pictures from me. He wanted me to get something out of this. And I said, I appreciated that. But what I'd really like would be when they made the movie, if he would send me a ticket to come down to Texas and watch. And I went down to Texas. So it was a fabulous learning opportunity for me, for which I will always be grateful to Warren. This was the first big feature that I got my hands on, this script. And it was amazing. I had a manager who went up the five flights of the walk-up. I remember saying, you have to do this. You have to do this. I said, yeah, I know. It's pretty good. I mean, it was a very wonderful role, obviously, with such colors. And there was tragedy. There was poetry. There was vulnerability. There was sexuality. I mean, everybody in Hollywood wanted it. And I darn near didn't get it because I gained weight for the dirt farmer's wife in Harry Sundown. And then so I had to take the weight off. And I did take it off quite fast, as it were. But anyway, I auditioned for Arthur Penn and for Warren Beatty. So I met this young woman, Faye Dunaway. I thought she was not right for the part, but I thought that she was going to be a big deal. And I liked her very much. And I knew that she was just the kind of person that Arthur Penn would like. So I said, look, there's a girl I want you to meet because it's your kind of actress. And you're going to think she's great. I said, I don't know if I want her in the movie, but I think you should meet her. I'd seen her in After the Fall in New York. And I remembered her as being kind of a beauty. But I'd sort of had the memory that she was an actress. She could act. She went down to meet him. And then he called me in about 45 minutes and I think I want her in the picture. And so I think in an unconscious level, I knew that this was going to happen. Warren kind of had to be talked into it a little bit. And for some reason, Arthur really saw it. He saw what I could do in spite of the fact that I was a little too fleshy and I wasn't a big star yet. But Faye was the person to go with. She was and is as dedicated and as energetic and as driven as any actress that I've known. I'm from North Florida, which is very Southern. So I grew up with those kinds of people. I often say it's the role that was most like me, that was closest to me. It was closest to Dorothy Faye Dunaway, who is who I am and always have been. So that kind of Southern girl wanting to get out was and still is very close to me. There were at least three people that they picked up along the way. And we melded those three characters into one, just for narrative sake. And we originally wrote him as a dumb stud. And then it was when Arthur got the idea of casting Michael Pollard, we just made those changes for him. And he was brilliant. You know, that character came to me right before I came out that door, because I didn't know what to do with that thing, you know? And at the end of that, Blonde on Blonde album by Bob Dylan had come out. I said, Oh, yes, that's like kind of a neat accent. Michael Pollard turned out to be quite funny. And I knew him to be from around New York, a good actor, but I'd never met him. But Warren knew him. I knew Michael from the beginning of my professional career as an actor. And Michael is really an extremely talented actor, inventive, and with a great sense of humor, diabolical sense of humor. I was living up in Laurel Canyon with this girl, Annie, and he was staying at the Beverly Wilshire. So he said, So come on over. So I went over and Arthur Penn was there. And a couple weeks later, when my agent called, he said, Warren wants you to be in his movie. And I said, Oh, okay. So then he sent me the script. And it was like really neat script. Really great. So, you know, so I said, you know, that's great. Gene Hackman's first movie was a movie that I had done called Lilith with Robert Rossum. And, you know, this thing happens sometimes when you're acting when, oh, oh, I remember that's what acting is. It's enjoyable because Hackman talks and he listens. And, and I thought this, this guy makes me better in the scene. So I gotta not lose this guy. So when it came around to Bonnie and Clyde, I really wanted Hackman as my brother. Really, it was Warren who said, Look, let me show you this scene from Lilith. And we looked at it and it was wonderful. I was working in New York on stage. And I think Warren probably mentioned my name to Arthur Penn, who I didn't know. And then Arthur came to see me in a play that I was doing and, and came backstage and was, was quite nice. From the very beginning, in the first scene where they meet in a motel room, they don't really have anything to do. And I remember Gene saying to me was we came to that scene, what are we doing? And I refrained from answering. I thought, I'm going to leave him bewildered. I love the idea that he didn't have, or at least he didn't project a preconceived idea about a way a scene was supposed to go, which is a great knack of some directors to make an actor feel like everything is his idea. You know, it's terrible in a way. But the more of that kind of thing you have in a, in a film, the more an actor feels the confidence to, to try things. And, and Arthur was always willing to try. Now, any other actor would say, come on, give me an answer. But Gene didn't. It was that quality of Gene of going out to the edge, unknown, that I, I loved. It was great fun for me. I loved doing that scene because it was a real actor's scene, both on, both our parts, Warren and myself. And that was very important to establish the fact that even though I was the older brother, I had this wonderful admiration for him. And, you know, just was willing to do almost anything for him. Estelle Parsons was someone that Arthur had worked with and was very, very high on. And I, he was certainly right about that. And, and she was just hilarious. I was at the Berkshire Drama Festival. Martha was a part of it. And he said, would you read this script? And I started reading it. And I thought, oh, this is one of those secondary roles. And I don't want to do this kind of secondary role. And then the more I read, I saw it was an amazing secondary role. So I said, good, okay. And then I came back to New York and I did an awful lot of research in the library at 42nd Street. So I had a lot to contribute to the character in the movie, actually, because I knew more about them than anybody in the movie wanted me to know or anybody else to know, because, you know, it wasn't really realistic about them. It took off from them. What we would do is we would shoot the day and then that night, get together in the motel and rehearse the next day's shooting. Well, as you encountered new material, there was question from everybody, you know, how are we going to do this? What, what am I doing here? And Warren and I, not unusually, had somewhat different fixes on the scene. I said, I wanted to have one little provision. I said, I, I would like to have an argument with you every day. We don't have anything to argue about. Let's, let's find something to argue about. And then, you know, we'll wind up at the end of the argument. We'll do what the director says. You're the director and we'll, we'll do that. But I have the right to, to beat you up in a kind way. And he thought that that was a good idea. Bob Towne once said, whoever gets tired of arguing first loses, you know, or discussing, fighting for their point or their point of view or something. Fight's not a good word, but fight was the word that I had as an actor watching them. But I mean, obviously they were involved in some heavy, professional, collaborative decision making. We'd all be sitting in that car, you know, me, Faye, Estelle and Jean. And Warren would be talking to Arthur, like for hours, how the scene should be done. He'd be out in that field, you know, and every scene, you know, they'd do that and we'd be sitting in the car. They were very good partners in a way. I think he, Warren trusted him and I think he really did understand what the dramatic material needed to work for an audience. Certainly there were differences. Certainly. But they didn't result in being obstacles to the work going on. And we moved right along on that field. Warren had the ability both making you feel that he needed you desperately. And at the same time, the ability to hammer you into doing it. This was just at a period when the lunatics were taking over the asylum. You know, you have an actor out here producing a movie, which was not done that often. It was a very, very interesting period of American moviemaking. It was a picture where you could feel the energy and you could almost feel this sort of tension from the energy, because on the one hand, there was this independent spirit that was happening. And yet at the other hand, it was a Warner Brothers movie. When you think about all of that, you realize the push and pull that was taking place. We were in Texas this whole time too, so there was nothing distracting us. So I think we all developed the characters as we went along and we used the company to help us to do that. You know, we had to get up really early in the morning, especially with that tattoo, you know, that was on me. So, you know, that Bob Jarvis would come in in the morning and put that every morning. And I was, you know, sleeping and he'd be putting this tattoo on really early, every morning for two months. And, you know, we worked late, but I was very young, so he could do it. You know, I could do it now. When you're doing a movie, you're not doing much else and you oughtn't to be doing much else, really. Unfortunately, it takes that kind of focus and attention to detail. It was a very lively experience. You know, it was the first movie that I had produced. And I would say, to some extent, talent is energy. And Bonnie and Clyde is an energetic movie and the energy holds up. Of course, Bonnie and Clyde wanted to be fashionable and, in fact, were fashionable on a certain level. They were not fashionably dressed, although they took stabs at it, but these were people who really wanted to be heroes to their societal strata. And they made themselves into folk heroes. One thing about Bonnie and Clyde that's very important is that it was about style. And style is content. We were so lucky. We got Dean Tavaleras to be the art director and Theodore Van Ruckel to be the costume designer. And she knew what the look should be. The minute I read the first page, I knew. I saw everything. I knew it was going to be fabulous. I never designed anything before. And I made all kinds of mistakes. I didn't know about continuity. I didn't know how to break down a script. I just stumbled through. I just stumbled through. And I had a great, great wardrobe woman named Norma Brown. And I did my drawings. And they follow my drawings to the slightest drapery. And, of course, Fay is absolute perfection in every way. Theodora conceived that look with Warren, I'm sure, and with Arthur. And I loved what she did. And the minute I saw it, I knew, well, this is right. This is sexy. This is interesting. This moves. This is superior, you know. So it was a sophisticated concept. The beret was the final culmination of the silhouette. In it, she combined all the visual elements of elegance and chic. Without the beret, it would have been charming, but not the same. And one of the amazing things about this film was that the kids who saw it picked up the look. So when Warren and I were going abroad to promote the film, there we would be seeing people on the street in London dressed like Bonnie and Clyde. And that was a testament to Theodora's capacity to get a fashionable line into these clothes that were meant to reflect the period without being period costumes. Well, there's no question that film impacted fashion. I'm sorry, the one thing it didn't do was bring back men's hats. I just think men look so much better. And, you know, you see 1930 newsreels, a baseball game, everyone's sitting there with a tie and a jacket and a hat, and they look like gentlemen. We shot almost all of the film in Texas. And we had those Roosevelt posters and those things. But Dean picked a lot of these places for us. I had my list of locations, but the main things were looking for these townships. And I was very happy to see that Texas had not progressed very much out of the Depression. You had these beautiful roads with wooden sidewalks and businesses that were mostly shut, but beautifully preserved. I'm sure today they must be all gone. Progress would have beaten them up. But at that time, 1968, I found everything I really wanted very quickly. It was very important for us that the people who were from Texas, when they saw it, it would have felt real for them. It would have felt true. God, it was like an hour, two-hour drive to the middle of nowhere Texas, which can be real nowhere. I can say that as a Texan. Just like flat land as far as you can see and not much there. But back then, that really is what it was like. You could drive out to these little towns and they were sort of very similar. Most of them had a town square with the courthouse in the center and all that kind of old frontier way that they used to build things. In the beginning, Arthur wanted very much to do it in black and white because it was a Depression story. But at that point, Warner said, no more black and white. And in a way, it was a good decision because I don't think it would have lasted the way it has had it been in black and white. Well, I had on that film a really old-time Hollywood cameraman. Bernie Guffey was a very good cameraman, but he hated the way he was shooting that movie. And he would bitch and grouse to me or anybody else who was around because Arthur was using source lighting. I don't think he was a happy camper because Bernie was getting older by then and had been used to working a certain way. And Arthur, who's an actor's director, when things were going well, he wanted to keep the juices going and keep shooting. Obviously, in the studio system, everything was very controlled, starting out on sound stages, but even on location, they controlled it. Well, this was the beginning of giving up control. When you talk about Burnett Guffey and that tension, I remember being there when they shot the scene in the cornfield where Bonnie runs out into the cornfield and Clyde goes out there and they talk. And there were these enormous dark clouds that kept passing by. And Bernie wanted to wait for continuity's sake so the weather would be one way or the other. And Arthur said, let's shoot it. And not only was it beautiful, but it also so felt like what was happening to those characters, this dark shadow coming over their lives. Bernie was out of the school that said, you got to put enough light on the faces because a lot of the revenue that came in from the movies was from drive-in theaters. And so you'd always hear, well, they'll never see it in drive-ins because the projection was kind of weak. And so Bernie was always worried about that. And there were times when Arthur just didn't want a lot of light and that drove poor Bernie Guffey crazy. And he quit for a week. Fortunately, he came back and won the Academy Award, which was well deserved. I don't think either Arthur or I thought we were doing anything terribly different. It was the juxtaposition of comedic stuff with violent stuff that was different. But a number of people said, it doesn't make sense. Are you trying to be funny or is this terribly tragic? Arthur was a much respected director. His was a sensibility that was very different from most American directors, but he had a great comic sense. He had a real understanding of what had not been done for the use of violence and a desire to push the envelope in that area. I mean, yes, there are some violent aspects, but they were, I thought, character logical. They were embedded in the characters that these people were playing. I relied so much on Arthur's input in terms of the scenes that I felt that I didn't really have to find out exactly who the Barrow gang was. Because like in the real Barney and Clyde, the sister was a good looking one. My character, Blanche Barrow, she was alive when we shot the movie. So I had wanted to meet her and Warren was not too keen on my meeting her. So then we started shooting and then Warren came one day and said, okay, if you want to meet her, we'll go and see her tonight. And I said, I don't want to meet her anymore. I started playing her and there she was and I completely lost interest. We were shooting once outside of Dallas. I was standing off the set watching them set up and a voice from behind me said, Buck would never wear a hat like that. And I turned around and it was an older man. He was, I don't know, 50, 60 years old. And I said, really? I said, well, that's interesting. How did you know that? He says, well, Buck was my cousin. That was for me enough of research. I was a bit taken aback to tell you the truth. Arthur said, you know, that we were really dealing with the mythic aspects of these characters, you know, and who they were translated to their myth, to the romance, to who they were to everyone, to the people who grabbed onto them. You know, they were heroes at that point. And myth, really connecting with myth more than absolute reality. It was Gene Wilder's first movie and he was hilarious. And Evans, Evans, who are two really terrific actors. And I had seen him on Broadway with Kirk Douglas in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And I remember Evans, Evans really knows how to act and play with a guy like Wilder. So they were hilarious in that scene. When Towne and I examined it, we realized that she has had a premonition of death. And that's what the family reunion scene played against. And there's a scene two thirds of the way through where Bonnie realizes that, where she says, my favorite line of the film, you know, in the beginning I thought we were really going somewhere, but this is it. We're just going. And she knew then that after she had seen her mother and her mother had talked in a very clear way to her, that they were, you know, pretty doomed in their journey. It had to be a scene that was both happening and belonged to the future. And so I said to Bernie, I'd like this to look like an old CPF photograph. And we looked through the camera. It was just too brilliant. He said, give me a minute. And he went to one of the guys on his crew, sent him into town and came back with some window screen, real, just plain window screen. And he put that in the camera between the lens and it just broke down the sharpness enough for it to have that quality of a dream. The old Warner Brothers way of doing it was, you know, the gangsters were the gangsters and they were the bad guys and the heroes were the heroes. The picture was made at a time when the authority figures, meaning the figures in power, were often viewed as evil. And the picture spoke to that. And probably that's one of the reasons why the film worked is we were pretty deep into Vietnam at the time. And the fact that every day we saw body bags coming back. And I think that kind of rang true for the film too, in a lot of ways. The first conversation with Arthur about the way he saw that death scene, he said to me, think in terms of a bull being killed in a bull ring. And so when I'm kind of stretched out like that on them, that comes from his suggestion. The other memory that I have of that scene is that we shot it out of sequence. And I had asked Arthur, prior to doing the daylight part of it, if I could do it in the underwear thing outside. And of course, you know, he said, fine. When we came back to do the night thing, like two months later or whatever it was, it was so cold. And at one point, I thought I had seen snowflakes in front of Michael Pollard's face in one of his closeups. It was really bitter cold. There's a line in the script that said, unlike most movies, when bullets hit people, it should be violent. It should be painful. And from that, Arthur took and created, I think, a masterpiece of a kind of ballet of death. I thought, if this film ends with them just being shot, then no matter what we do in the film, it's still just a gangster story. Something radically different has to occur at the end of this film. The actual place where they were shot, ambushed, was in Shreveport, Louisiana. But at the end of the film, we didn't shoot that in Texas. We shot it outside of Los Angeles. I said, why don't we get some birds and put them in a chicken wire? And just before the gunfire starts, release the birds and have them come out, and then the firing starts. So I remember Warren said, well, that's a very Russian idea. And he went to Arthur, and Arthur said, okay. So I said to Warren, look, we'll get you all set up with all these squibs. And also, you know, a piece of your head will blow off. And I could see that Warren wasn't feeling very happy about the whole thing, because it took all morning to load him up with all these squib hits. So I said, look, you hold this pair. And when I point, you squeeze that pair and everything goes. When I squeezed the pair, the makeup man had to stand over way out of the camera and pull my scalp off. And we were all so nervous. He forgot to pull the scalp off. So the first take was no good, and we had wasted a whole car. But we had enough for one more take. It was an amazing sequence. I think we shot it twice. We wanted to get me falling out of the car. And I had the idea to sort of tie my leg in, as if it had been caught in the brake or something, which it could have been. So I tied her leg to the emergency brake on this old car, and it was perfect. She was great during this. She really was. You know, they made up the face in several places to look as if a bullet had just gone in with, I guess, a black center, a red rim, and then flesh around it. And then they covered each of those things with a kind of wax covering so it looked like skin. And then it was attached to an invisible wire. And then those were jerked off, you know, consecutively. And then in the dress as well, there were about 15 or 20 or more little charges that went off. So you had to take all the hits. It was really quite amazing. There were three or four cameras used in that last sequence, and they were all running at different speeds, but essentially photographing the same thing so that there would be a constant match, because I knew that that would be impossible otherwise to get the kind of lyricism that I wanted in the violence.