Kevin Lally on Film

James Foley died on May 6, 2025, at the age of 71. I had the good fortune to talk with the director in 1992 about one of his highest-profile films, the star-laden adaptation of David Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross. Foley’s post-Glengarry credits included the John Grisham thriller The Chamber, Fifty Shades Darker, Fifty Shades Freed, and 12 episodes of the Netflix hit series House of Cards. A new production of Glengarry Glen Ross, starring Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr, and Michael McKean, is currently one of the hottest tickets on Broadway.

He’s already guided Sean Penn, Aidan Quinn and Jason Patric through some of the key dramatic performances of their movie careers. Now, director James Foley has gathered the year’s most formidable male ensemble in Glengarry Glen Ross, the film adaptation of David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about a corrupt group of real estate salesmen. Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon head the cast, with solid support from Alec Baldwin, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey, and Jonathan Pryce.

Mamet’s screenplay recaptures the coarse energy and pungent language of his acclaimed stage work, as the bitter employees of an ailing real estate firm are forced into a competition designed to weed out all but the very top salesmen. Foley and cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchia follow their bluffs and intrigues in widescreen Panavision, giving each member of this gifted cast a chance to shine.

Casting was crucial to the 38-year-old director’s interest in the project. “I felt the only reason to do it was if there were going to be great actors who were also movie presences, which is a real particular animal to me. There are a lot of great actors, but not all of them are movie presences. I also think there are a lot of movie presences who are not great actors. Finding people who are both is a rarity. So the thing really turned on that—principally, in the beginning, on Pacino, because we’d wanted to work together for a while and I knew he had been interested in the part previously. So I went to him and said, ‘Are you still interested?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, under the right circumstances’—which mainly was who’s gonna play the other parts… So we had a reading of the script with Al and Jack Lemmon and a bunch of young actors, and this was the moment when Pacino and I felt things come alive. I realized that the actual storytelling would be served by that once-in-a-lifetime transcendent moment that you can capture with particular actors who have a particular relationship to cinema.”

Foley admits that the combination of the intense Pacino and the amiable Lemmon is a startling choice. “On the surface, I felt Pacino and Lemmon was a crazy idea, but like many crazy ideas it turned out to be a very exciting one. I think what made it work was that they both were right for their parts, and they respected each other. They knew that they were from different planets, but respected whatever planet that person was from. And the actual work was remarkably easy. I know this sounds Pollyannaish, but there was not one moment of any kind of what I call extracurricular friction, no testiness between the actors. It was amazing to see that so much of that tension and neurotic stuff is just that—neurotic. And when you have a group of people who have mutual respect for the director, for the text, and for each other, it’s amazing how many of the problems just go away. We actually shot in 39 days—it was under schedule when we finished. And that’s with never hurrying, doing 20 takes sometimes, really indulging ourselves.”

Foley has high praise for the veteran Lemmon’s willingness to explore new directions. “I turn on the TV and see Jack Lemmon movies, and all of a sudden it occurs to me who Jack Lemmon is in a way I hadn’t really thought about before—certainly not during the movie. He was as energetic, interested, and open to being directed as anybody I’ve ever worked with in my life, as if I was perhaps the first director he had ever met in his life and I was somebody to really listen to and respond to. I wasn’t even conscious of him doing that—it just seemed to be his modus operandi. Only when it was over and I realized he had made all these Billy Wilder movies, did I think, ‘Jesus, I’m glad I didn’t think about this before.’ He doesn’t bring it up.”

The director and his cast rehearsed for three weeks before filming began, an eye-opening experience for Foley. “I really wanted the opportunity to fuck around, with no pressure, to talk about the text and maybe fill in backstory or just free-associate. You know, no matter how leisurely a shooting schedule you have, there is always that big machine sitting there, breathing like a beast, waiting and wanting to go. I wanted time where there was no beast waiting. It was just myself and the actors in a room, with no time schedule whatsoever. Those three weeks changed my life and my whole relationship to actors and to film. For the first time, I began to give that part of the process 100 percent of my attention. I realized that the process can be—dare I use the word?—fun, and all that implies, rather than simply something that one has to suffer through to get to results that might be gratifying. The actual process was gratifying, and that was different for me.”

After working with Foley on a few minor adjustments to his screenplay, Mamet—himself an accomplished film director—maintained a distance from the Glengarry production. Says Foley, “I think he feels that those things he wrote as plays have already had their life and success as plays. He really has no interest in directing them.” Still, Foley insists, “he was as responsive and cooperative as one could ask, and absolutely non-interfering. While we were shooting, I invited him to come by and he never did. But whenever I called, he was always curious about what was going on, full of questions.”

Asked whether the themes of Glengarry Glen Ross, which first emerged as a play in 1983, seem even more relevant in today’s recessed economy, Foley reflects, “The superficial conditions of the American working man certainly haven’t changed, but on another level I think that they never will. Although the play on one level is dealing with times being tight, I think there’s a more primal sense of struggle that is transcendent of the particular moment or country or economic condition, that has more to do with the competitive struggle to survive, particularly among men in a group. It goes back to cave times. So the particular American recession is less important to me, although it’s certainly cooperating, unfortunately.”

Foley says his crash course in the argot and methods of high-pressure salesman has made him “hypersensitive” to their counterparts in real life. “I tried to buy a car, and I literally could not stay in the room and talk to the guy. Every time he opened his mouth I just felt like, ‘He’s saying words, but they have no meaning to me. He wants me to buy this car and he will say anything. It’s like quicksand.’ On many different levels—Hollywood is obviously an exaggeration of stuff like this—everyone has a goal that is separate from their own greater self-expression as a human being. As soon as money is involved, by definition the whole thing is meaningless on a certain level, because it’s a conflict of interest. The black comedy or human tragedy of the play is beyond my articulation, frankly…but I know it has something to do with the idea of the corruption of people’s ability to interact, given that they have to compete with each other to survive. And there’s something terribly sad about that.”

All of this native New Yorker’s films to date have dealt with corrupted human relationships. Reckless, his 1984 debut feature, introduced Aidan Quinn as a brooding teen stifled by his Ohio steel-town environment. At Close Range (1986) starred Sean Penn and Christopher Walken in the gripping, fact-based tale of a criminal who recruits his abandoned sons into a life of larceny and murder. The Madonna comedy Who’s That Girl (1987) offered a change of pace, but also centered on a most untrustworthy ex convict. Foley’s most recent film was the acclaimed Jim Thompson adaptation After Dark, My Sweet (1990), with Jason Patric as a hapless ex-boxer who lets the seductive Rachel Ward entangle him in a failed kidnapping scheme.

Why is Foley attracted to such dark material? “The funny part is, I don’t ever think of it as dark,” he says. “I often get scripts that are dark for dark’s sake, and they repulse me. I get angry and say, ‘Why would anybody think I’d want to do this?’ My only criterion is that something seems real to me. So many American scripts are full of lies, with people behaving in ways that are just not true. They are forced to behave in those ways by the screenwriter in order to achieve an effect, and that disgusts me. Why make believe? Why cheat? Why not just go for the effect, make a cartoon? By the way, as a moviegoer I love comedies, I love all sorts of movies. My favorite movie of all time is The Best Years of Our Lives. Is that dark? I don’t know—it’s about some sad things, but it’s also about love and the beauty of that. It’s honest. But honest doesn’t have to mean painful—honest just has to mean honest.”

Though Foley’s two latest projects have been made outside the major studios, he’s seen little difference in his working conditions. “I don’t honestly think about it as one or the other… I’ve had really good experiences, from Avenue to Warner Bros. I’ve never had a horrific experience, no one’s ever tried to take a film away from me, or recut it, or force an actor on me or anything like that… I think a lot of it has to do with understanding the nature of the project before you start, and knowing that you are making the same movie that the powers-that-be are. If you’re clear about that up front, there usually aren’t any problems. Making Who’s That Girl at Warner Bros. was delightful, because everyone was trying to make the same movie. When it was over, nobody wanted to have made the movie, but during the process it was very pleasant. I think there are an awful lot of times when people do not really talk enough. It’s like people who get married really fast in Vegas, and a week later they wake up and say, ‘What?!’ That happens in movies all the time—people fall into bed together and then all of a sudden they don’t know what the hell they’re doing.”

Pictured at top: Al Pacino and James Foley during production of Glengarry Glen Ross. The film is available for streaming on Peacock and Prime Video.