The Conversation

In the mid 1960’s a young Francis Ford Coppola set out to write a script inspired, at least in part, by the 1966 murder mystery film Blowup, a Michelangelo Antonioni thriller in which a single photograph reveals more and more mysteries as it is further and further enlarged. Coppola’s spin on this idea was to use a single, seemingly innocuous conversation that would reveal more and more of what is really going on the more you listened to it, taking on new meanings through repetition and clarity. The film he envisioned was The Conversationand no one wanted to take a chance on funding it. All that changed in 1972 when The Godfather hit theaters. Suddenly there was a priority to pin down the now hot director into making a sequel. The problem was two-fold. Coppola didn’t want to make a second Godfather film and there was no second book to crib story elements from necessitating a script that was entirely new. 

Seeing an opportunity, Coppola made a deal: he would make The Godfather, Part II in exchange for financing and distribution of The Conversation. A deal was struck, one that required him to film The Conversation, then jump immediately into The Godfather, Part IIwhile his editor took over the film and pulled it all together with little supervision, checking in every few weeks with updates and to receive notes from the otherwise absent director. The final result is an editorial masterpiece that strangely got ignored in that category at the Academy Awards, though the British Academy Film Awards saw fit to award it in that category. Visually and sonically, this is a brilliant bit of filmmaking, distilled down from over five hours of footage into a very respectful two hours that not only tells a story via the script, but with the sounds, imagery and camera work, too. This is a film that is firing on multiple levels and requires the viewer to pay attention because even the movement of the camera sets a mood and reveals information integral to the plot and the characters. This is not a film for the passive viewer. 

Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a surveillance expert working in San Francisco. He has been hired by a client known only as “The Director” to eavesdrop on a couple as they casually walk through Union Square and to get a recording of the entire conversation. Caul considers himself the best in the business and, despite the sheer logistics of getting a clean recording in a crowded location, manages to do just that. The recorded conversation appears to be innocuous but Caul doesn’t care, claiming that all he cares about is the job, not the people involved and not what they may or may not say in the recordings. 

Caul is an intensely private individual who obsessively guards his personal life. He relocated to San Francisco from New York City after a job he did resulted in three deaths. He may claim to not feel guilt for his role in their deaths but he still is troubled by it and visits a Catholic confessional to help ease his conscience. His quest for perfection in the recording he has made of the young couple in the park leads him to uncover something in a hitherto inaudible section of the tape, masked by loud music. “He’d kill us if he got the chance.” This not-so-innocent statement raises concerns. When Caul goes to deliver the tapes to the man who hired him he is instead met by an assistant, Martin Stett (Harrison Ford) who appears much too eager to get his hands on the tapes despite Caul insisting he will only hand them over to the one who hired him. These two things combine in his mind and start to make him increasingly paranoid. Throughout the course of the rest of the film more and more about this seemingly innocent conversation in the park gets revealed and it becomes clear that there is something nefarious going on hidden in that recording. 

From the very start we get the feeling that what we are witnessing is from the point of view of an eavesdropper, and not just what Harry Caul is picking up on all of his devices. The opening shot is an above view of San Francisco’s Union Square and the hustle and bustle of all the people there. Very quickly we are drawn into a bit of action involving a Mime who is determined to tick off anyone in his vicinity by either getting in their way as they are hurrying by or walking alongside them, imitating them in unflattering ways. The camera zooms in on him like a security camera, never cutting or drifting away until Harry walks by, blending in with the crowd so well that we’d never even notice him had the camera not suddenly shifted who it was following. Caul is an expert in surveillance and blending in and he looks just like someone who belongs there, generic and indiscrete. In this way Gene Hackman is perfect in the role. He’s not conventionally handsome and he’s done up in such a way as to make him look like just another schlub walking through the park, not drawing attention to himself. He has an unflattering haircut and glasses to further this appearance. His targets don’t even give him a second glance. 

His assignment is to obtain a recording of every last word spoken by a couple as they wander around the park. To do so he employs several techniques. He has a man tailing them as well as others stationed high up inside buildings bordering the park with high end equipment aimed at them at all times. The result is a series of tapes that Caul frets over in his personal office, cleaning up the recording and sussing out every last word they said. Caul’s personal life is a closed one. He lives by himself in an apartment as sparse as a hotel room and behind multiple locks and a security alarm. His working space is a warehouse that half of it is crammed full of equipment and the other half is absolutely empty. His associates are almost entirely kept in the dark about his methods and results, leading to tension between them. He has an occasional romantic dalliance with a woman named Amy (Teri Garr) that ends abruptly when she asks him too many questions. He is a man all about listening in on others but has no patience for anyone doing the same for him. When one of his fellow eavesdropper friends tricks him with a wireless bug disguised as a pen, Caul goes ballistic, breaking the expensive new device and chasing the friend out of his place. It doesn’t matter that this was all done as a joke that he is quickly let in on; he sees this as a violation of confidence. Late into the film he is given proof that his apartment is bugged somehow and he will dismantle the entire place in a vain attempt to find it. 

Because the entire film follows Harry Caul there is no way for us to know anything that Caul himself doesn’t know. We see nothing from anyone else’s perspective. This creates a conundrum as we aren’t entirely certain at times if something on screen is real or just in his mind. His increasing paranoid as well as his lingering guilt over the three murders in his past could be manipulating him into seeing things that aren’t real. This is especially a possibility during the final moments as he is dismantling the apartment looking for a bug that appears to not exist. Even Francis Ford Coppola admits to not having the answer one way or the other, leaving it all ambiguous. The conversation overheard in the park goes from being meaningless small talk to hiding a sinister edge to it. Finally, during the final act as we hear those words “He’d kill us if he got the chance,” over and over again the inflection is changed just enough to give us a different reading on that statement. This change is subtle and wasn’t originally planned. It came about in test screenings when the audiences were having trouble following the twist at the end. By shifting the enunciation slightly it made things more clear what was actually being implied. It also casts some doubt over whether what Caul is hearing in his mind accurately represents how it was said at the time.

We are meant to feel like eavesdroppers ourselves as we watch this film. The camera work is designed to give us that impression. Often it will remain static while characters drift in and out of range as if we are looking through security footage. Camera focus is used, too, to build on this feeling, refusing to shift focus in a way to draw our eyes to something like it would in a traditional film. The only real exception to this is in the confessional when the shifting focus is done intentionally to reveal the shadowed vissage of the priest on the other side listening to Caul’s confession. In one memorable scene Caul walks out of the range of the camera and is only heard off screen for a minute before the camera finally drifts off to catch up with him, feeling very much like a spy camera being manually adjusted when the subject has moved out of sight. All of this puts us in the shoes of a professional eavesdropper trying to glean any information through imperfect means. 

Francis Ford Coppola gets a lot of praise for his work on The Godfather and its sequel. While this is very much deserved, those movies are very straightforward in their styles and narrative. The Conversation is actually a better made film than those two are, even though they are better films overall. The style, the editing, even the score consisting of a lonely piano invoking the loneliness and emptiness of Caul, all tell a story of this character and the world he lives in. This is a man who lets no one in, not even his lovers. When he does spend the night with someone he ends up getting betrayed by them further emphasizing why he doesn’t do this. He longs for some form of camaraderie but it’s just not in his nature. Instead he will put on a jazz record, bust out his saxophone, and play along, mimicking the type of person he wishes he was. The ending may not satisfy all viewers but it is the only ending for such a film as this. Anything else would not be true to character nor would it properly represent the world that Francis Ford Coppola has built here.

Academy Award nominations: 

Best Picture: Francis Ford Coppola

Best Original Screenplay: Francis Ford Coppola

Best Sound: Walter Murch and Art Rochester

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Release Date: April 7, 1974

Running Time: 113 Minutes

Rated PG

Starring: Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest and Harrison Ford

Directed By: Francis Ford Coppola