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''The Conversation'' is a 1974 American
neo-noir Neo-noir is a film genre that adapts the visual style and themes of 1940s and 1950s American film noir for contemporary audiences, often with more graphic depictions of violence and sexuality. During the late 1970s and the early 1980s, the term ...
mystery thriller film written, produced, and directed by
Francis Ford Coppola Francis Ford Coppola ( ; born April 7, 1939) is an American filmmaker. He is considered one of the leading figures of the New Hollywood and one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. List of awards and nominations received by Francis Ford Coppo ...
. It stars Gene Hackman as a surveillance expert who faces a moral dilemma when his recordings reveal a potential murder. Supporting cast members include John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, and Frederic Forrest.
Harrison Ford Harrison Ford (born July 13, 1942) is an American actor. Regarded as a cinematic cultural icon, he has starred in Harrison Ford filmography, many notable films over seven decades, and is one of List of highest-grossing actors, the highest-gr ...
and
Teri Garr Terry Ann Garr (December 11, 1944 – October 29, 2024), known as Teri Garr, was an American actress. Known for her comedic roles in film and television in the 1970s and 1980s, she often played women struggling to cope with the life-changing ex ...
appear in credited roles, with
Robert Duvall Robert Selden Duvall (; born January 5, 1931) is an American actor. With a career spanning seven decades, he is regarded as one of the greatest actors of all time. He has received an Academy Awards, Academy Award, a British Academy Film Awards ...
in an uncredited role. ''The Conversation'' premiered at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d'Or, and was released theatrically on April 7, 1974, by
Paramount Pictures Paramount Pictures Corporation, commonly known as Paramount Pictures or simply Paramount, is an American film production company, production and Distribution (marketing), distribution company and the flagship namesake subsidiary of Paramount ...
to critical acclaim. It made $4.4 million during its original release, and after several re-releases, its total rose to $4.8 million on a $1.6 million budget. The film received three nominations at the
47th Academy Awards The 47th Academy Awards were presented Tuesday, April 8, 1975, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, California, honoring the best films of 1974. The ceremonies were presided over by Bob Hope, Shirley MacLaine, Sammy Davis Jr., an ...
: Best Picture,
Best Original Screenplay The Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay is the Academy Award (also known as an Oscar) for the best screenplay not based upon previously published material. It was created in 1940 as a separate writing award from the Academy Award for Best ...
, and Best Sound. Since its release, it has been regarded as one of the greatest and most influential films ever made. In 1995, it was selected for preservation in the United States
National Film Registry The National Film Registry (NFR) is the United States National Film Preservation Board's (NFPB) collection of films selected for preservation (library and archival science), preservation, each selected for its cultural, historical, and aestheti ...
by the
Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...
as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".


Plot

Harry Caul, a surveillance expert in
San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...
, specializes in audio recordings. He and his team are hired by a client known as "the Director" to eavesdrop on a couple, whom they record walking in circles in Union Square. Despite the background noise, Harry filters and merges the tapes to create a clear recording with ambiguous meaning. Harry is intensely private, obsessively guarding his personal life; though he insists that he is not responsible for how his clients use the surveillance he creates, he is haunted by guilt from a past job that resulted in three deaths. When he discovers a potentially dangerous phrase in the recording, "He'd kill us if he got the chance," Harry becomes increasingly anxious. His attempt to deliver the recording is thwarted, and he is both followed and threatened. After a party at his workshop, Harry spends the night with a woman he has just met and the tapes are stolen. He receives a call from Martin Stett, the Director's assistant, informing him that the Director could not wait any longer and they have the tapes. Harry is tasked with delivering the pictures taken and collect his money in a meeting with the Director that afternoon. There he learns that the woman in the recording is the Director's wife, involved in an affair. Harry, suspecting murder, books a hotel room next to the one the couple had mentioned for a planned rendezvous in the recording, and overhears a heated argument. Convinced there was a murder, Harry breaks into the room; he initially finds no evidence, until he flushes the toilet and finds it clogged and overflowing with blood. Attempting to confront the Director, Harry discovers the wife is alive and unharmed, as is her lover. A newspaper headline reports that an executive has supposedly died in a car accident. Harry realizes that the couple actually murdered the Director, having missed the emphasis on the word "us" in the recording, which not only expressed the couple's fear of being killed by the Director if he discovered the affair, but was also an attempt to justify killing him first as a defensive move. Stett calls Harry at his apartment, and warns him not to investigate. He plays a freshly-made recording of Harry playing his saxophone to prove they are listening. Harry frantically searches for bugs in his apartment, destroying nearly everything in it. Having failed to locate the bug, Harry sits alone amid the wreckage, playing his saxophone.


Cast


Production

Principal photography began November 27, 1972, and finished in late February 1973. 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, who he had previously worked with on '' The Rain People'' and ''
The Godfather ''The Godfather'' is a 1972 American Epic film, epic crime film directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who co-wrote the screenplay with Mario Puzo, based on Puzo's best-selling The Godfather (novel), 1969 novel. The film stars an ensemble cast inc ...
''. Wexler's footage on ''The Conversation'' was completely reshot except for the technically complex surveillance scene in Union Square. This movie was 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
Miloš Forman Jan Tomáš "Miloš" Forman (; ; 18 February 1932 – 13 April 2018) was a Czech Americans, Czech-American film film director, director, screenwriter, actor, and professor who rose to fame in his native Czechoslovakia before emigrating to the Uni ...
.
Walter Murch Walter Scott Murch (born July 12, 1943) is an American film editor, director, writer and sound designer. His work includes '' THX 1138'', ''Apocalypse Now'', '' The Godfather I'', '' II'', and '' III'', '' American Graffiti'', '' The Conversation ...
served as the supervising editor and sound designer. Murch had more or less a free hand during the editing process because Coppola was working on ''
The Godfather Part II ''The Godfather Part II'' is a 1974 American epic film, epic crime film produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, loosely based on the 1969 novel ''The Godfather (novel), The Godfather'' by Mario Puzo, who co-wrote the screenplay with Cop ...
'' at the time. Coppola noted in the DVD commentary that Hackman had a very difficult time adapting to the Harry Caul character because he 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. Coppola has cited
Michelangelo Antonioni Michelangelo Antonioni ( ; ; 29 September 1912 – 30 July 2007) was an Italian film director, screenwriter, and editor. He is best known for his "trilogy on modernity and its discontents", ''L'Avventura'' (1960), ''La Notte'' (1961), and '' ...
'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 ta year or two before, and had the idea to fuse the concept of ''Blowup'' with the world of audio surveillance." Private investigator Hal Lipset is credited as a technical advisor on the film. He chose state-of-the-art surveillance equipment, and had Caul's surveillance follow methods which were mostly realistic. In the film, Lipset and Caul are mentioned as two of the pre-eminent surveillance experts who will be attending a convention. On the DVD commentary, Coppola says he was shocked to learn that the film used the same surveillance and wire-tapping equipment that members of the Nixon Administration used to spy on political opponents prior to the
Watergate scandal The Watergate scandal was a major political scandal in the United States involving the Presidency of Richard Nixon, administration of President Richard Nixon. The scandal began in 1972 and ultimately led to Resignation of Richard Nixon, Nix ...
. Coppola has said this reason is partially why the film gained the recognition it has received, but it was entirely coincidental. Not only was the script for ''The Conversation'' completed in the mid-1960s, before Nixon became president, but 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. Because the film was released to theaters just a few months before Richard Nixon resigned as president, Coppola felt that audiences interpreted the film to be a reaction to both the Watergate scandal and its fall-out.


Score

''The Conversation'' features a piano score composed and performed by David Shire. The score was created before the film was shot. On some cues, Shire used ''
musique concrète Musique concrète (; ): " problem for any translator of an academic work in French is that the language is relatively abstract and theoretical compared to English; one might even say that the mode of thinking itself tends to be more schematic ...
'' techniques, taking the taped sounds of the piano and distorting them in different ways to create alternative tonalities to round out the score. The score was released on CD by Intrada Records in 2001.


Inspiration

According to surveillance technology expert Martin Kaiser, his colleagues consider him to the inspiration for the character of Harry Caul. Kaiser also says that he served as a technical consultant on the film, though he was not listed in the credits. According to Kaiser, the final scene of the film—in which Caul is convinced he is being eavesdropped in his apartment, cannot find the listening device, and consoles himself by playing his saxophone—was inspired by the passive
covert listening device A covert listening device, more commonly known as a bug or a wire, is usually a combination of a miniature radio transmitter with a microphone. The use of bugs, called bugging, or wiretapping is a common technique in surveillance, espionage and ...
s created by
Léon Theremin Lev Sergeyevich Termen ( 18963 November 1993), better known as Leon Theremin, was a Russian inventor, most famous for his invention of the theremin, one of the first electronic musical instruments and the first to be mass-produced. He also worke ...
, such as the Great Seal bug. "He couldn't find out where he bugwas because it was the instrument itself." Coppola also based Caul on the protagonist of Herman Hesse's 1927 novel '' Steppenwolf'', Harry Haller, a "total cipher" who lives alone in a boarding house. Coppola also made Caul religious, including a
confession A confession is a statement – made by a person or by a group of people – acknowledging some personal fact that the person (or the group) would ostensibly prefer to keep hidden. The term presumes that the speaker is providing information that ...
scene; Coppola has said that the practice of confession is "one of the earliest forms of the invasion of privacy—earliest forms of surveillance." Caul was also inspired by Karl Schnazer; a private investigator and occasional actor who appeared in Coppola's early films '' Tonight for Sure'' and ''
Dementia 13 ''Dementia 13'' (released in the United Kingdom as ''The Haunted and the Hunted'') is a 1963 Horror film, horror Thriller (genre), thriller film written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola in his feature film directorial debut, and starring Wi ...
''. Schnazer recounted to Coppola an incident where a man he had tailed for months failed to recognize him at a party, which later inspired a sequence in the film.


Reception


Box office

The film had a $1,600,000 budget and grossed $4,420,000 in the U.S. Various rereleases over the years have brought the film's gross to $4.8 million.


Critical response

The film has a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 139 reviews, with an average rating of 9/10. The site's critics consensus reads: "This tense, paranoid thriller presents Francis Ford Coppola at his finest—and makes some remarkably advanced arguments about technology's role in society that still resonate today." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 88 out of 100 based on 17 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Roger Ebert's contemporary review gave ''The Conversation'' four out of four stars and described Hackman's portrayal of Caul as "one of the most affecting and tragic characters in the movies". In 2001, Ebert added ''The Conversation'' to his "Great Movies" list, describing Hackman's performance as a "career peak" and writing that the film "comes from another time and place than today's thrillers, which are so often simple-minded". In 1995, ''The Conversation'' was selected for preservation in the United States
National Film Registry The National Film Registry (NFR) is the United States National Film Preservation Board's (NFPB) collection of films selected for preservation (library and archival science), preservation, each selected for its cultural, historical, and aestheti ...
by the
Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...
as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Gene Hackman has named the film his favorite of all those he has made. His performance in the lead role was listed as the 37th greatest in history by ''Premiere'' magazine in 2006. In 2012, the Motion Picture Editors Guild listed the film as the eleventh-best edited film of all time based on a survey of its membership. The film ranked 33rd on the BBC's 2015 list of "100 Greatest American Films", voted by film critics from around the world. In 2016, ''The Hollywood Reporter'' ranked the film 8th among 69 counted winners of the
Palme d'Or The (; ) is the highest prize awarded to the director of the Best Feature Film of the Official Competition at the Cannes Film Festival. It was introduced in 1955 by the festival's organizing committee. Previously, from 1939 to 1954, the festiv ...
to date, concluding: "Made in a flash between the first two ''Godfather'' movies, Coppola’s existential spy thriller has since become a pinnacle of the genre." The February 2020 issue of ''
New York Magazine ''New York'' is an American biweekly magazine concerned with life, culture, politics, and style generally, with a particular emphasis on New York City. Founded by Clay Felker and Milton Glaser in 1968 as a competitor to ''The New Yorker'' a ...
'' lists ''The Conversation'' as among "The Best Movies That Lost Best Picture at the Oscars."


Accolades

''The Conversation'' won the Palme d'Or, the highest honor at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival. The film was also nominated for three
Academy Awards The Academy Awards, commonly known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit in film. They are presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) in the United States in recognition of excellence in ...
for 1974, but lost to Coppola's own ''
The Godfather Part II ''The Godfather Part II'' is a 1974 American epic film, epic crime film produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, loosely based on the 1969 novel ''The Godfather (novel), The Godfather'' by Mario Puzo, who co-wrote the screenplay with Cop ...
.'' It won the National Board of Review Award for Best Film.


''Enemy of the State''

According to film critic Kim Newman, the 1998 film '' Enemy of the State'', which also stars Gene Hackman as co-protagonist, could be construed as a "continuation of ''The Conversation''". Hackman's character Edward Lyle in ''Enemy of the State'' closely resembles Caul: he dons the same translucent raincoat, and his workshop is nearly identical to Caul's. Also, the photograph used for Lyle in his NSA file is actually a photograph of Caul. ''Enemy of the State'' also includes a scene which is very similar to ''The Conversation''s opening surveillance scene in San Francisco's Union Square.


In other media

A television pilot starring
Kyle MacLachlan Kyle Merritt MacLachlan ( ; ' McLachlan, February 22, 1959) is an American actor. He is best known for his Emmy-nominated and Golden Globe-winning role as Dale Cooper in ''Twin Peaks'' (1990–1991, 2017) and its film prequel '' Twin Peaks: Fire ...
as Harry Caul was produced for NBC. It was not picked up for a full series.


See also

* List of American films of 1974 * List of films featuring surveillance *'' Blow Out'', a 1981
Brian De Palma Brian Russell De Palma (; born September 11, 1940) is an Americans, American film director and screenwriter. With a career spanning over 50 years, he is best known for work in the suspense, Crime film, crime, and psychological thriller genres. ...
film that is similar in content


References


Bibliography

* * *


External links


''The Conversation'' essay
by Peter Keough at
National Film Registry The National Film Registry (NFR) is the United States National Film Preservation Board's (NFPB) collection of films selected for preservation (library and archival science), preservation, each selected for its cultural, historical, and aestheti ...
* * * * * *
''The Conversation'' essay
by Daniel Eagan in ''America's Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide-to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry'', A&C Black, 2010 , pages 704–705 {{DEFAULTSORT:Conversation, The 1970s American films 1970s English-language films 1970s mystery thriller films 1970s psychological thriller films 1974 films American mystery thriller films American neo-noir films American psychological thriller films American Zoetrope films BAFTA winners (films) English-language mystery thriller films Fiction about mariticide Films about security and surveillance Films directed by Francis Ford Coppola Films produced by Francis Ford Coppola Films scored by David Shire Films set in 1972 Films set in San Francisco Films shot in San Francisco Films with screenplays by Francis Ford Coppola Palme d'Or winners United States National Film Registry films Paramount Pictures films