The movie director James Foley, who has died from mind most cancers aged 71, was a self-effacing and shrewd stylist whose camerawork at all times served the actors and the psychology of the characters. This thespian focus was greatest showcased in his 1992 adaptation of David Mamet’s stage play Glengarry Glen Ross; its heavyweight forged, which included Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris and Kevin Spacey, might need overwhelmed a much less purposeful supervisor.
But in his fingers this dissection of American capitalism, set in a beleaguered real-estate workplace, turned an actors’ masterclass; the forged would flip up on their days off to look at one another work. Foley had been satisfied to direct it by a brand new model of Mamet’s script that broke down what on stage had been cerebral monologues into pithy, visceral repartee. Accordingly, the director insisted on casting “great actors, people with movie charisma, to give it watchability, especially since the locations were so restricted”.
Recruiting Pacino as Ricky Roma, the star salesman, Foley had the luxurious of a three-week rehearsal interval. He used it to keep away from a pitfall endemic to Mamet: “There was a real danger that actors could get seduced by the superficial level of gratification that comes with saying great dialogue. I was much more interested in getting actors that had an interior, emotional life,” he told the WHYY radio station in Philadelphia.
With most of the stars decreasing their salaries to come back on board, egos had been on maintain – a prerequisite for Foley. “My litmus test is I have to be able to make fun of actors, and of who they are, and their fame,” he stated.
It paid dividends: the completed Glengarry Glen Ross had a commanding depth and chew. The “always be closing” pep talk – an added scene with Baldwin within the position of head workplace’s ball-breaking envoy – later turned a staple of appearing lessons. The movie’s prising open of male belligerence and insecurity was a recurrent characteristic in Foley’s movies, which had been typically noir-inflected, character-focused crime dramas. Its milieu of tawdry salesmanship, and the everlasting crucial of the hustle, should absolutely have resonated together with his battle to stand up Hollywood’s pecking order.
Born in Bay Bridge, Brooklyn, New York, James was the son of Frances and James Sr, a lawyer, and grew up in Staten Island. After graduating in psychology from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1974, he abruptly switched tack to cinema after taking a six-week course at New York University. He then studied for a grasp’s diploma on the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts in 1979.
Foley was supplied the prospect to direct by Hal Ashby, an errant New Hollywood auteur; Ashby was impressed by one of many younger man’s movies being projected on to a wall at a scholar get together. They by no means made something collectively, however what Foley described as Hollywood’s “weird calculus” meant Ashby’s patronage was sufficient to earn him the directorial chair on his first characteristic: a by-product however energetic high-school romance, Reckless (1984).
He adopted it up with the crime drama At Close Range (1986), starring his pal Sean Penn as a Pennsylvanian latchkey teenager drawn into the orbit of his psychopathic father, performed by Christopher Walken. Not solely exhibiting Foley’s approach with actors, particularly in Walken’s flamboyant however subtly shaded efficiency, the director additionally imbued the movie with an insistent romanticism. He later summed up his low-key strategy to type as: “I like getting the movie inside of the drama as if there was no director involved.”
Foley’s connection to Penn led to him directing the screwball comedy Who’s That Girl (1987), starring the actor’s then spouse, Madonna (he was greatest man on the couple’s marriage ceremony, and directed the music movies for Madonna’s Live to Tell, Papa Don’t Preach and True Blue, beneath the title Peter Percher). Who’s That Girl was a important and industrial bomb; Foley needed to regroup within the wake of this atypical foray into lighter materials: “It was a major life experience. That first failure is so shocking,” he instructed Film Freak Central.
He returned with the fraught and intense desert noir After Dark, My Sweet (1990), tailored from the 1955 Jim Thompson novel, which was Foley’s solely feature-writing credit score. Although, like a lot of his movies, it was a industrial failure regardless of important admiration, it earned him Pacino’s consideration for Glengarry Glen Ross.
Foley continued working all through the 90s and early 2000s, together with his two movies with Mark Wahlberg – the teenager sociopath thriller Fear (1996) and the actioner The Corruptor (1999) – discovering average industrial success. But the important lashing and industrial failure of the expensive $60m cyberstalking neo-noir Perfect Stranger (2007), starring Halle Berry and Bruce Willis, led to him being consigned to “director jail” for a time.
For a lot of the 2010s, he labored solely in TV, a medium about which he expressed reservations; amongst different jobs, David Fincher – whose psychological slant he shared – employed him to direct 12 episodes of the Netflix collection House of Cards.
For his ultimate options he accepted a franchise gig: directing the 2 sequels to Fifty Shades of Grey, in 2017 and 2018. Easily probably the most commercially profitable movies of his profession, he seen them with a sure pragmatism. “The movie is not going to win Oscars,” he stated of Fifty Shades Darker. “But I don’t think it’s going to win Razzies [Golden Raspberry awards]. That’s my goal – to not win a Razzie.”
Having weathered a number of cycles of fortune inside Hollywood, this journeyman took the lengthy view: “I’m interested in studying the history of directors, and why they make a few good films and then fall off the map. You look to the credits of episodic TV and there they are – and I think that it has so much to do with how you respond to failure.”
He is survived by a brother, Kevin, and two sisters, Eileen and Jo Ann.
