The first lesson a con man learns is not to con someone who is connected. In this case, Jake Vig (Ed Burns) and his band bilk “mob accountant” Lionel Dolby of a tidy sum. When Lionel and Big Al (Louis Lombardi as a member of Jake’s crew) turn up dead, Jake learns the lesson the hard way and is summoned to the King’s (Dustin Hoffman) inner sanctum to return the King’s money. For Jake, the only way to save himself and his crew is to set up another more elaborate con. This sets up the story of James Foley’s ensemble caper Confidence, where no one is ever sure who is doing what to whom and where or when the events are happening.

Doug Jung’s tight script, which has more twists and turns than any one person could follow, was penned to take place in “New York.” And, the studio originally wanted to shoot this in Canada. “We went to Toronto for the scout,” director James Foley admits. “I’ve done two pictures there. One was Toronto for New York and the other was Vancouver for Seattle.

“I just didn’t want to do that any more,” he admits. “It’s so dispiriting. As Aristotle says, the director’s job is to capture a sense of place and time. You can’t do that, when you can use only five or six locations and where you can’t move the camera left or right. And, where you have to cover the railroad tracks,” he adds, in a determined voice. “A director has to fall in love with his locations and be able to explore and probe them to create his point of view.”

One day, Foley was driving around Los Angeles at magic hour. It came to him that the characters in this story were transient grifters who move from city to city. It would be interesting to play out their various cons in the bright Los Angeles daylight seeing Ed Burns in thousand-dollar Armani suits, prowling streets like Melrose, and seeing the neon signs of the city and palm trees at magic hour. “We simply changed every scene from New York night to Los Angeles day,” he says.

Once that decision was made and the script re-written, Foley met with his long-time cinematic collaborator Juan Ruiz-Anchia, ASC. The two had worked together on At Close Range, Glengarry Glen Ross, Two Bits and The Corruptor.“I loved the script,” says Ruiz-Anchia. “It was fast paced, well written, and with original plotting and intrigue. James Foley said he wanted it to have saturated colors and a brighter look than normal.”

While Ruiz-Anchia was in pre-production testing, he decided to shoot the film Super 35mm with ARRI cameras and a MovieCam system. “This was necessary, because the picture was going to have a special language and we had to move quickly,” he explains. “Over the 35-day shoot, we would be doing fast pans to connect scene to scene, go from black to black, and so forth. We had to be able to execute each moment quickly, using every trick available.”

Ruiz-Anchia tested various stocks and colors to develop the look that they both wanted. First, he tried Ektachrome reversal. He got the saturation he wanted, but realized that the feeling was too contrasty. The skin tones did not hold. He finally settled on Kodak’s 5279 rated at 500, 5274 rated at 200, and 5248 rated at 100.

His second idea was to do degrees of skip bleach and he worked with Deluxe to use a 25-percent silver retention. He could shoot the colors extremely bright in production, and when he did the desaturation process, the colors would still hold. He abandoned this process, preferring to control the colors while he was shooting the picture.

These colors then became his focus. He wanted to do color tinting, but not in post like in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic. His idea was to tint specific areas in scenes and control the color intensity as well as the quality of the color in certain moments. “I created a chart of colors with different types of blues and greens, light fluorescents like fern green, half blues and quarter blues, then lavender, lilac, orange, amber, yellow, red and plum,” he explains.

“I then assigned them a number. The numbers would then correspond to the colors we would use to convey what we wanted for a particular look. We could mix colors for different locations. For instance, in the Euclid Bar, I found that a predominance of green seemed to work for the moment.”

It was an interesting choice that would take the film in a very different direction for the team. “The problem with coloration, is that you have to choose how to mix it so you don’t repeat yourself,” Ruiz-Anchia comments. “That’s why we had to plan carefully what we wanted to use and what the appropriate place was for each color.”

Which could be a little difficult, considering Foley doesn’t like to plan his set ups all that much. “For me, I like to wing it on the day of shooting,” says Foley. “The locations have been chosen and I have the lay of the land. But, as far as shots go, unless they are stunts, I like to lose myself in the actors.

“We will rehearse in the morning on location and I tend to leave the actors on their own. That is when I find out whether the camera will fit the actors’ choices. It is then that I start to intervene, if necessary. You can lead an actor to ‘water,’ but you can’t always make them ‘drink,’ so to speak. We work things out between us,” he adds.

“When we lock things down, I will invite the crew in to watch what we are doing. Marks are laid down. Stand-ins go through the paces. Juan and I then collaborate on what we are going to do. He will listen to what I want and often fill in the spaces. In this case, he went crazy with color, but for a specific purpose in mind. It was his idea to use highly saturated colors to blow apart the film noir look.”

Foley’s and Ruiz-Anchia’s collaboration begins with the ending, as a frame that holds the story together. The opening sequence is a high angle shot looking down on the “dead” body of Ed Burns’ character. The story is then worked through via black-to-black moments ala Sunset Boulevard, with flashbacks to key elements. Throughout the story, Burns’ character tells the tale to enforcer Morris Chestnut.

This sequence was shot in an alleyway in downtown Los Angeles––without the color saturation set up––to enhance the story.

One of Ruiz-Anchia’s favorite sequences was King’s headquarters, which was shot at Club Deep on Hollywood and Vine. It is both an exterior and an interior, in that King’s office is inside the inside of the club. “The character of King was originally written as a big guy (about 250 pounds) with a round belly and the owner of a gritty old boxing gym,” says Foley. “But, when Dustin Hoffman read the script he said he was interested in the story, but not that kind of character, so we brainstormed. What came up was the owner of a nightclub that could be the hub of his other nefarious business doings.

“Club Deep allowed us to create a thrown room for ‘The King.’ Inside the club was a glass enclosed area where people could dance and where others could sit on couches outside and voyeuristically watch the dancing,” Foley continues. “The inside area became his throne and the electronic hub of information, where he fixed dog races or produced porno movies. Inside, the constantly shifting images on big plasma screens revealed the character’s Attention Deficit Disorder perfectly.”

“It was an interesting and very challenging location,” says Ruiz-Anchia. “The interior room of the club had walls of mirror panels, which could reflect everything. The challenge became mixing the colors, using these mirror reflections, keeping the light consistent and still being able to shoot with two cameras.”

“Juan wanted to make the mirror panels inside the office different colors,” recalls gaffer David Morton. “We traced the windows and added theatrical colored gels (red, yellow, green) over the mirrors and then lit through them with MaxiBrutes. This created an effect of colored panels. To create the effect, we often over powered the mirrors.

“To enhance this, we often under played the other walls, either playing the reflections or changing the dynamic of the moment.

“Inside the office, we used single tube Kinos at the base of the mirrors and Gobos above. We also put tracing paper on the floor and made light boxes, with six 2000 watt Blondes as the source.”

To complete the picture of the club outside the inner sanctum, Ruiz-Anchia had PAR cans with theatrical colors and Leikos with window patterns for pools of light as prison-like bar effects to cover the club itself.

Ruiz-Anchia’s other favorite location is the Euclid Club that was created at Little Joe’s in Chinatown. This is where Burns’ crew plans their con. “This becomes the heart of the story,” says Ruiz-Anchia. “We repeatedly go back here, so we had to develop a color pattern that stayed basically the same, but was accurate for the style of the story and the moment.”

“Juan had one of the walls painted green,” says Morton. “He then lit it with PAR cans through diffusion and a hard green gel. He also had Dedo lights put in a few areas for hard pools of light and used Kinos and Image 80s for the rest.”

For Foley, a small interior sequence is his favorite. “It is when the guys find Big Al with a bullet in his head,” Foley explains. “To me, it conveys a certain emotional tone. The audience really gets to see the fiber that connects these guys and what the hierarchy of the group is and gives the story an emotional grounding.”

The location was a second-story one-bedroom apartment in Hollywood. Ruiz-Anchia had it lit as a day interior with light coming through the windows off Condors with 12K PARs. However, instead of using the whole window, he had them blacked down to the bottom quarter with tracing paper. By lighting through the bottom, he could achieve concentrated lighting on the lower portion of the room, letting it fall off up toward the faces. He also had a little light coming from the hallway. His color choice for this sequence was green again.

Another favorite moment of Foley’s is toward the end of the picture, when Rachel Weisz is in a car as it drives away. As the car leaves, the lawn in front of an apartment building appears and there is a row of white lights. As the wind blows her hair, “she is extremely sexy as the lights appear,” says Foley.

Weisz’s character is a strong catalyst for the story and a key element in the visual development and styles for both Foley and Ruiz-Anchia. “The love scene between Rachel’s character and Eddie Burns’ character was interesting to light,” says Ruiz-Anchia. “We wanted to create a warm golden look and keep it interesting through night and early morning moments, setting it off from other sequences.”

“To do this, Juan had operator Bruce Green dolly through a screen partition that was in this Santa Monica loft apartment,” gaffer David Morton recalls. “To back light the images in silhouette, we papered the windows and placed HMIs with cyan gel on a Condor outside.”

For both Ruiz-Anchia and Foley, the availability of practical locations such as the clubs in Los Angeles as well as streets of the city went a long way to enhance story elements in Confidence. They were able to take advantage of the various textures of the city. In downtown Los Angeles, for example, the bustle of the business district and the old classic buildings served as a background character for a night sequence were Burns’ group walk, talk and show their relationship.

Staged on 7th and Figueroa, it features a long Steadicam shot done by Green, showing the gang as they walk down 7th then cross the street to turn on Figueroa. Part of the group peels off and Burns and Weisz continue in a two-shot. “To light this, we used the lobbies in different buildings across the street,” says Morton. “Juan had us put MaxiBrutes in the buildings and shoot them across the street for streaks of light. Here, we had various gels of green, yellow and red.

“At the cross-section, there is a playful interchange between the two characters, the beginning of the love interest. Here, we had Condors with HMIs in Chicken Coops over the intersection. Juan chose blue as the predominant theme, putting no color on the HMIs.”

Melrose Avenue also became a character that moved the story forward. It is here where Foley and Ruiz-Anchia show how during a pleasant lunch at an outdoor café anywhere in the world, a “straight” person could be sitting next to the biggest dealmakers or the lowest grifters. It is here, where Burns’ team has lunch and plan their con.

To show how their world mixes with ours, Foley and Ruiz-Anchia filmed the sequence with extremely long lenses, letting the cars and characters of the city cross them in the foreground. Each moment was precisely timed to these crosses, to give the sequence an emotional punch. The result, a never-never-land giving the feeling that the characters are in a really urban fast-paced environment.

To light the location, they used the hot sunlight on the cars crossing the location, but put the characters under a large silk. They hard lit the edges with HMI PARs, putting some of that lighting inside the restaurant. By doing this, they were able to get bright kicks off glass bottles and other things placed carefully in the background. These soft focus kicks contributed to the never-land feeling.

For Foley and Ruiz-Anchia, another interesting sequence to shoot takes place at Houston’s Barbecue in Hollywood. “The owners liked what we did so much, the lights and gels we used are still on the windows of the restaurant,” laughs Morton.

“Juan wanted this to have a green/yellow look,” he recalls. “So he had me put theatrical gels on the windows instead of NDs. By lighting through the windows with 12K PARs, we could hit the actors with a bath of green, which can signify greed. It was another one of those moments where the use of color really supports the story.”

“Doing different things like really saturating various elements with distinct colors was really different for James Foley and myself,” says Ruiz-Anchia. “It made the making of Confidence a fantastic and extremely interesting project.

“I have never seen James Foley as involved with a story and with actors the way he was on this picture,” he adds. “He really directed the actors in a very special way. His passion and enthusiasm sparked them to going beyond anything that was expected.

“That enthusiasm was infectious. The whole crew really went out of their way to make this story work visually, on a very tight shooting schedule. I applaud their work and thank everyone in grip, lighting and camera crew for their efforts. I couldn’t have made this work without operator Bruce Green, focus puller Bob Hene, key grip Loren Corl, and gaffer David Morton.”

“To me, Juan is one of the undiscovered gems of the cinematography world,” adds Foley. “I have mixed feelings about this. I know he should be working with a lot of different directors, but he is one of the least self-promoting people in the world. I like this, because he can be available for me when I have a project to shoot. But, on the other hand, I want everyone to know just how great the quality of his work is.” •

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