The Conversation

Surveillance expert Harry Caul, who runs his own company in San Francisco, is obsessed with his own privacy. His apartment is almost bare behind its triple-locked door and burglar alarm, he uses pay phones to make calls and claims to have no home telephone, and his office is enclosed in a chain-link cage in a corner of a much larger warehouse. He has no friends, his girlfriend Amy knows little about him, and his sole hobby is playing along to jazz records on a tenor saxophone alone in his apartment.

Caul insists that he is not responsible for the content of the conversations he records or the use to which his clients put his surveillance activities. But he is wracked by guilt over a past wiretap job that was followed by the murders of three people. His sense of guilt is amplified by his devout Catholicism.

Caul, his colleague Stan, and some freelance associates have been tasked with bugging the conversation of a couple as they walk through crowded Union Square in San Francisco. Against a cacophony of background noise, the couple discusses fears that they are being watched and mention a discreet meeting at a hotel room in a few days. The challenging task of recording this conversation is accomplished by having a number of surveillance operatives located in different positions around the square. After Caul has merged and filtered the different tapes, the final result is a sound recording in which the words themselves are clear, but the meaning is ambiguous.

When the client is not in his office, Caul refuses to leave the tape with his client's assistant, Martin Stett. The assistant warns him against getting involved, telling him that the tapes are "dangerous.” Feeling increasingly uneasy about what may happen to the couple once the client hears the tape, Caul repeatedly plays the tape, gradually refining the recording. Using a filter, he reveals a key phrase hidden under the sound of a street musician: "He'd kill us if he got the chance."

Caul avoids handing in the tape to the aide of the man who commissioned the surveillance. Afterward, he is increasingly pressured by the client's aide and realizes that he is followed, tricked, and bugged. The tape of the conversation is eventually stolen from him while his guard is down. He goes to the client ("the Director") to find he has received the tapes and learns that the woman in the recording is the client's wife, apparently having an affair with the other man in the tapes.

Caul books a hotel room next to one mentioned in the recording of the conversation. He uses equipment to overhear the client in a heated argument with his wife. When he goes to the balcony to curiously watch the events through the windows, he sees what he believes to be the wife being murdered and retreats in shock. He later breaks into the hotel room to find no sign of a murder scene save for the toilet, which overflows with bloody toilet paper.

Caul attempts to confront the client at his office in the Embarcadero Center, but the client is absent. While departing, Caul notices the wife, alive and unharmed, in a limousine. He learns that his client was killed in an "accident" and discovers the truth; the couple he heard in Union Square was talking about killing the woman's husband, and the murder Caul witnessed was actually that of his client and not the wife. The man in the recording actually said, "He'd kill us if he got the chance."

Caul gets a phone call from Stett, who plays a recording of Caul's saxophone playing from seconds earlier and tells him not to look any further into the matter, adding, "We'll be listening to you." Caul frantically searches for a listening device, tearing up his apartment, to no avail. He sits amid the wreckage playing his saxophone, the only thing in his apartment left intact.

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."[3]

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 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 the spying equipment used in the film also 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 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.[4] This 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.[5]

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.[6] 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.

The Conversation features a piano score composed and performed by David Shire. The score was created before the film was shot.[7] 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.[8]

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.[30]

The film ranked 33rd on the BBC's 2015 list of "100 Greatest American Films", voted by film critics from around the world.[31] 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."[32]

A television pilot starring Kyle MacLachlan as Harry Caul was produced for NBC. It was not picked up for a full series.[33]

• List of American films of 1974
• List of films featuring surveillance
• Blow Out, a 1981 Brian De Palma film that is similar in content

Wikiquote has quotations related to The Conversation.

• The Conversation essay by Peter Keough at National Film Registry
• 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 ISBN 0826429777, pages 704-705
• The Conversation at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Conversation at IMDb
• The Conversation at the TCM Movie Database
• The Conversation at AllMovie
• The Conversation at Metacritic
• The Conversation at Box Office Mojo