In 2003 interview, Foley’s film ‘Confidence’ brings him back to his alma mater

By M. Faust

In memory of filmmaker and UB graduate James Foley, who died this week at the age of 71, here is an interview I did with him in 2003.

(Image above: From Foley’s Instagram page, 2014)

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“We felt like pioneers,” says filmmaker James Foley of his days at the University of Buffalo. The director of such dark-hued modern classics as Glengarry Glen Ross, At Close Range and After Dark My Sweet was one of the first students to live on the Amherst Campus, back in 1974, when UB was still based at Main and Bailey. 

“I lived in the first residence building on the new campus,” he recalls in a phone interview. “It was us and the law school, that was all that was there. So to come back and see it all built up was a shock.” 

Foley returned to UB last fall as part of a program that brought alumni who were working in the film world to hold seminars with students. The opportunity couldn’t have come at a better time, as Foley was working on what turned out to be one of his best films, Confidence, a twisty story about a group of con artists led by Edward Burns who are forced into an alliance with a LA gangster (Dustin Hoffman in an outrageous scene-stealing performance). 

A native of Brooklyn, Foley had been to two other colleges before winding up at UB for his senior year. “I didn’t know what the hell I wanted to do,” he remembers. “I had decided that I wanted to be a shrink, so I transferred to UB in order to do pre-med stuff. And that was the year I discovered cinema. At UB I got exposed to a lot of real experimental filmmakers, Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas, whacked out people scratching frames and things like that, that intrigued me. 

“Simultaneously, what was coming out of Hollywood in the early 1970s was exciting: Dog Day Afternoon, The Godfather, The French Connection, Chinatown. I thought it was that I was becoming more aware of Hollywood, I didn’t realize until later that Hollywood was going though a kind of Golden Age. ” 

After graduating from UB Foley took a summer class in filmmaking at New York University, where the bug really bit him. He enrolled at the University of Southern California, and within a year of graduation was at work directing his first feature, Reckless, with Aiden Quinn and Darryl Hannah. 

It was his second film, At Close Range, with Sean Penn and Christopher Walken, that got him serious attention, including that of actor Al Pacino, who later appeared in several of Foley’s films. He’s worked steadily ever since, with ten features now to his credit (as well as episodes of “Twin Peaks,” Robert Altman’s series “Gun,” and the award-winning Madonna video for “Papa Don’t Preach.”) [Ed. note: In later years, Foley also directed the Fifty Shades films while continuing to work for such television shows as “Billions,” “House of Cards” and “Hannibal”.]

Foley used the making of Confidence as a model for the students he spoke with last fall. Last month he came back to show a preview of the completed film.  Before the screening, he held a workshop with some fledgling local actors and filmmakers in which they studied a scene from the script of Confidence, shot it, and then compared it to what Foley did in his film. 

Foley calls that and a similar exercise with a group of women actors “two of the most gratifying experiences of my life. I got so much out of it in terms of re-energizing myself as a filmmaker. I like to study the careers of other directors, and it seems that 90 percent of those whose work I enjoyed in the 1970s have disappeared or drifted into mediocrity. I’m always aware of Hollywood pressure to conform to stay in the job, and that’s the enemy of creativity. So to be able to re-awaken my own idealistic film student self is really great. “

Inevitably, he also got a lesson in how today’s college students have changed. “When I was a student we were very idealistic—you went to a university for pure learning: the idea of focusing on anything that would enhance a job prospect was totally off the radar. Students now are much more practically focused on how do I get to Hollywood, how do I get a job?

“I try to encourage them that if they’re just trying to create a calling card to get a job, they’ll just be aping the same thing that Hollywood already is, and their own originality is going to get buried. The best thing they can offer Hollywood is something that Hollywood doesn’t have already, something unique.”

Foley also stresses that talent isn’t all that it takes to succeed in Hollywood. “You have to be able to sell yourself,” he admits. “In film school there were other guys and women in my gradating class who were as good filmmakers as I was, but they’re not directing movies because they weren’t verbal salesmen. You have to be able to go into a studio with nothing to show them but your ability to speak and spin a tale that you want them to invest millions of dollars in.” 

Although Foley’s body of work largely deals with criminal or quasi-criminal characters, he says it’s not a conscious preference. In his mind, “I’m most interested in drama and moral relativism, moral struggle. In the case of Confidence, I was attracted to these issues of loyalty and betrayal and trust, in a story that had a unique tone to me, that was kind of breezy and fun. What I like to do best is get a closeup of an actor who’s saying one thing but feeling something opposite, something contradictory. That’s unique to cinema, because you can’t do that on stage.” 

Foley’s formal education did not include an actual course in directing, a job he thinks of in more seat-of-the-pants terms. He came to understand his own working method when he was working on Glengarry Glen Ross, with its ensemble cast that included Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris, Jonathyn Pryce, Kevin Spacey, and Alec Baldwin. 

“It’s not about me having a system or technique or school of acting where I am dealing with the actors based on my language. It’s getting to know the actors where you pick up their own vibe, because my job is to provide whatever the actor needs to get to that place where I want to get to. In Glengarry, in between shots when I’d be speaking to an actor, I realized that I was speaking different languages—if Al Pacino ever heard what I was saying to Jack Lemmon, he’d be horrified. It would be like switching from French to German to Japanese, without really thinking about it until the thing was over. Some actors, I just give then a facial expression and they’re, yeah I got you, and they go do it. Whereas some actors need you to talk in whole sentences, and some you don’t say anything at all, you just cut and do it again.” 

Glengarry Glen Ross was recently releasead to DVD in a special 10th anniversary edition, for which Foley did a director’s commentary. It’s the third commentary he’s done, and in his opinion “They all stink.

“I have very mixed and evolving feelings about DVD. It’s the name of the game that they sell a lot more DVDs when they have extras. So they want to do all this extra stuff for the DVD of Confidence, and it’s spinning my head because in the past I’ve distanced myself from all that: I make the movie, it’s cut the way I want, so there’s no ‘director’s cut’ to be released later. But I’m sticking my toe in the water. 

“I’m passionately against showing anything that is dirty laundry or reveals how anything is done. I loved Lord of the Rings, but I read that for the DVD they’re going to be doing stuff about how Gollum was created, how they filmed a real guy climbing around the rocks and computer generated it. And I’m thinking, yuck, you’re ruining it for me! I understand the market, but I think it’s a mistake. I don’t want to show deleted scenes, because they’re deleted for a reason. 

“So I want to come up with some kind of alternative that could provide added value. The only thing I can think of is to get all the actors and myself together and just have a crazy free form conversation. I always love when you get them to talk afterward and you find that different actors think that different things are going on in a scene, so it would be fun to have them find out what each other was thinking. That could be kind of entertaining.”