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".[3]
Plot
Harry Caul, a surveillance expert in San Francisco, specializes in wiretapping services. He and his team are hired by a client, who identifies himself as "the Director", to eavesdrop on a couple walking through Union Square. Despite the background noise, Caul filters and merges the tapes to create a clear recording with ambiguous meaning. Caul is intensely private, obsessively guarding his own personal life, haunted by guilt from a past job that resulted in three deaths.
Despite Caul's insistence that he is not responsible for how his clients use the surveillance, he is troubled by guilt and his Catholic faith. When he discovers a potentially dangerous phrase in the recording, "He'd kill us if he got the chance," Caul becomes increasingly paranoid. His attempt to deliver the recording is thwarted, and he believes he is being followed and tricked.
After a party at his workshop, Caul spends the night with a woman, Meredith, and the tapes are stolen. He receives a call from Martin Stett, the Director's assistant, informing him that they have the tapes, and that the Director couldn't wait any longer, so Caul must also deliver the pictures taken, and collect his money in a meeting with them, that same day. In that meeting, Caul learns that the woman in the recording is the Director's wife, involved in an affair. Caul, suspecting murder, books a hotel room next to the one mentioned in the recording, and overhears a heated argument. Convinced he has overheard a murder, Caul 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, Caul discovers the wife is alive and unharmed, as is her lover. A newspaper headline reveals an executive's supposed death in a car accident, leading Caul to realize that the couple actually murdered the Director. He missed the emphasis on "us" in the recording, not only signifying the couple's fear of being killed by the Director if he discovered the affair, but also their own plan to murder him first.
Stett calls Caul at his apartment, and warns him not to investigate, playing a recording of Caul's saxophone to prove they are listening. Caul frantically searches for bugs in his apartment, destroying nearly everything in it. In the end, Caul sits alone amid the wreckage, playing his saxophone.
Principal photography began November 27, 1972, and finished in late February 1973. 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."[5]
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. 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.
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.[6] 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.[7]
Walter Murch 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 at the time.[8] 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.[citation needed]
The Conversation features a piano score composed and performed by David Shire.[9] The score was created before the film was shot.[10] On some cues, Shire used musique concrète 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.[11]
Inspiration
The character of Harry Caul was inspired by surveillance technology expert Martin Kaiser, who also served as a technical consultant on the film.[12] 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 devices created by Léon Theremin, such as the Great Seal bug. "He couldn't find out where [the bug] was because it was the instrument itself."[13]
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, originally intending the character to have a confession scene; Coppola has said that the practice of confession is "one of the earliest forms of the invasion of privacy—earliest forms of surveillance."[14]
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.[1]
Critical response
The film has a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 134 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."[15] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 88 out of 100 based on 17 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[16]
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".[17] 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".[18]
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".[19] 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.[20] 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.[21]
The film ranked 33rd on the BBC's 2015 list of "100 Greatest American Films", voted by film critics from around the world.[22] In 2016, The Hollywood Reporter ranked the film 8th among 69 counted winners of the Palme d'Or 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."[23]
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.[34]
A television pilot starring Kyle MacLachlan as Harry Caul was produced for NBC. It was not picked up for a full series.[35]
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 ISBN0826429777, pages 704–705
