“I had become very friendly with a great model [Anne St. Marie] who had offered to do some pictures for me, as I was always doing test shots. I had been thinking of doing a film for a while, but didn’t know what it was going to be. Speaking with this model, she told me about how she had this breakdown, and I thought this was interesting material, so I decided to tape her. In that same time period, I had gotten to know Faye Dunaway after I was sent down to Florida to do some photographs with her for her first film, when she was an up-and-coming actress. So, a few years later, after Faye had done Bonnie and Clyde, we had lunch and she asked me what I was working on. I told her that I would love to do a film, which piqued her interest, so I got her to listen to the tape. Was she interested right away? Now, this tape was two and a half hours long. Faye listened to the whole thing, and she fell in love with the character. From that point on, she was part of the project. We went through several writers after that. I had a French writer [Jacques Sigurd] at first, who turned in a script that wasn’t bad, but he was a pain in the ass. When he finished the script I said there were some changes I’d like to make, and he couldn’t believe that I would have anything like that to say, especially as a first-time director. So, I got rid of that problem. After some other writers fell through, we had a script that I loved from Carole Eastman, who was a wonderful writer.” Jerry Schatzberg, on the origins of his film “Puzzle of a Downfall Child.”
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