The Conversation

The Conversation
theatrical poster
Directed by	Francis Ford Coppola
Produced by	Francis Ford Coppola
Written by	Francis Ford Coppola
Starring	Gene Hackman John Cazale Allen Garfield Cindy Williams Frederic Forrest
Music by	David Shire
Cinematography	Bill Butler
Editing by	Richard Chew Walter Murch
Studio	Paramount Pictures American Zoetrope The Directors Company The Coppola Company
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release date(s)	April 7 1974 (NYC)
Running time	113 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$1,600,000

The Conversation is a 1974 American thriller about audio surveillance, written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest, and featuring Harrison Ford, Teri Garr and an uncredited appearance from Robert Duvall.

The Conversation won the Palme d'Or at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival,^[1] and in 1995, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Originally, Paramount Pictures distributed the film worldwide. Paramount retains American rights to this day but international rights are now held by Miramax Films and StudioCanal in conjunction with American Zoetrope.

Plot

Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a surveillance expert who runs his own company in San Francisco. He is highly respected by others in the profession. Caul is obsessed with his own privacy; his apartment is almost bare behind its triple-locked door, he uses pay phones to make calls and claims to have no home telephone, and his office is enclosed in wire mesh in a corner of a much larger warehouse. Caul is utterly professional at work but he finds personal contact difficult. He is uncomfortable in dense crowds and withdrawn and taciturn in more intimate situations. He is also reticent and secretive with work colleagues. He is nondescript in appearance, except for his habit of wearing a translucent plastic raincoat virtually everywhere he goes, even when it is not raining.

Despite his insistence that his professional code means that he is not responsible for worrying about the actual content of the conversations he records or the uses to which his clients put his surveillance activities, he is, in fact, wracked by guilt over a past wiretap job that left three people dead. His sense of guilt is sharpened by his devout Catholicism. His one hobby is playing along with his favorite jazz records on a tenor saxophone in the privacy of his apartment.

Caul and his friend Stan (John Cazale) have taken on the task of monitoring the conversation of a couple (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest) as they walk through crowded Union Square in San Francisco. This challenging task is accomplished but Caul feels increasingly agonized over his doubts about the actual meaning of the conversation and about what may happen to the couple once the client hears the tape. He plays the tape again and again throughout the movie, refining its accuracy (by catching one key, though ambiguous, phrase hidden under the sound of a street musician: "He'd kill us if he got the chance") and constantly reinterpreting its meaning in the light of what he knows and what he guesses.

Caul avoids handing in the tape to the aide (Harrison Ford) of the man who commissioned the surveillance (Robert Duvall). He then finds himself under increasing pressure from the aide and is himself followed, tricked, and listened in on. The tape is eventually stolen from him in a moment when his guard is down.

Caul's appalled efforts to forestall tragedy ultimately fail and it turns out the conversation might not mean what he thought it did--the tragedy he anticipated isn't the one that eventually happens. In the final scene, he has come to believe that his own apartment is bugged and goes on a frantic search for the listening device, tearing up the floorboards and destroying his apartment. He fails to find it. At the film's end he is left sitting amidst the wreckage, calmly playing his saxophone.

Cast

• Gene Hackman as Harry Caul
• John Cazale as Stan
• Allen Garfield as William P. "Bernie" Moran
• Frederic Forrest as Mark
• Cindy Williams as Ann
• Michael Higgins as Paul
• Elizabeth MacRae as Meredith
• Teri Garr as Amy Fredericks
• Harrison Ford as Martin Stett
• Mark Wheeler as Receptionist
• Robert Shields as The Mime
• Phoebe Alexander as Lurleen
• Robert Duvall as The Director (uncredited)
• Gene Hackman's brother, Richard Hackman played two roles in the film, the priest in the confessional and a security guard.^[2]
• Gian-Carlo Coppola, the nine-year-old son of director Francis Ford Coppola, played the small part of a boy in church.^[3]

Production

On the DVD commentary, Coppola says he was shocked to learn that the film utilized the very same surveillance and wire-tapping equipment that members of the Nixon Administration used to spy on political opponents prior to the Watergate scandal. Coppola has said this is the reason the film gained part of the recognition it has received, but that this is entirely coincidental. Not only was the script for The Conversation completed in the mid-1960s (before the Nixon Administration came to power) but that the spying equipment used in the film was discovered through research and the use of technical advisers and not, as many believed, by revelatory newspaper stories about the Watergate break-in. Coppola also noted that filming of The Conversation had been completed several months before the most revelatory Watergate stories broke in the press. Since the film wasn't released to theaters until several months after Richard Nixon had resigned, Coppola feels that audiences interpreted the film to be a reaction to both the Watergate scandal and its fall-out.

The original cinematographer of The Conversation was Haskell Wexler. Severe creative and personal differences with Coppola led to Wexler's firing shortly after production began and Coppola replaced him with Bill Butler. Wexler's footage on The Conversation was completely reshot, except for the technically complex surveillance scene in Union Square.^[4] This would be the first of two Oscar-nominated films where Wexler would be fired and replaced by Butler, the second being One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), where Wexler had similar problems with Milos Forman.

Walter Murch served as the supervising editor and sound designer. Murch had more or less a free hand during the editing process, since Coppola was already working on The Godfather Part II at the time.^[5]. Coppola noted in the DVD commentary that Hackman had a very difficult time adapting to the Harry Caul character because it was so much unlike himself. Coppola says that Hackman was at the time an outgoing and approachable person who preferred casual clothes, whereas Caul was meant to be a socially awkward loner who wore a rain coat and out-of-style glasses. Coppola said that Hackman's efforts to tap into the character made the actor moody and irritable on-set but otherwise Coppola got along well with his leading man. Coppola also notes on the commentary that Hackman considers this one of his favorite performances.

The Conversation features a piano score composed and performed by David Shire. The score was created before the film was shot.^[6] On some cues, Shire took the taped sounds of the piano and distorted them in different ways to create alternative tonalities to round out the score. The score was released on CD by Intrada Records in 2001.^[7]

Influence

Coppola has cited Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup (1966) as a key influence on his conceptualization of the film's themes, such as surveillance versus participation, and perception versus reality. "Francis had seen [it] a year or two before, and had the idea to fuse the concept of Blowup with the world of audio surveillance."^[8]. There are also several overt borrowings from Blowup, notably the presence of mimes in both films and the central sequences involving the enhancement of a medium to reveal details previously unnoticed (photography in Blowup, audio tapes in The Conversation).

Awards

In 1995, The Conversation was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". It won the 1974 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was nominated for three Academy Awards for 1974:

• Academy Award for Best Picture (Francis Ford Coppola)
• Academy Award for Sound (Walter Murch & Art Rochester)
• Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay (Francis Ford Coppola)

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Michael Ondaatje, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, London: Bloomsbury Publishing (2002)

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: The Conversation (film)

• The Conversation at the Internet Movie Database
• The Conversation (film) at the TCM Movie Database
• The Conversation (film) at Allmovie