Trailer
Plot summary
Harry Caul runs a small surveillance business in San Francisco and is regarded as the best in his field, building his own equipment. A devout Catholic who plays saxophone along with his jazz records, he keeps his private life sealed: client calls come from pay phones, and no one enters his apartment. His colleague Stan works with him and is kept at a distance. The new job is difficult, a young couple, Ann and Mark, talking as they walk in noisy Union Square, and the client, known only as the Director, wants the audio and the photographs given to him alone. A recording from an earlier job led to three deaths, and the guilt of it has stayed with him.
Cast
- Phoebe Alexanderas Lurleen
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Conversation (1974)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Coppola 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; it was entirely coincidental, as the script had been completed in the mid-1960s, before Nixon became president.
- Original cinematographer Haskell Wexler was fired shortly after filming began because of severe creative and personal clashes with director Francis Ford Coppola, forcing nearly all of his footage to be reshot by replacement Bill Butler, except for the technically complex Union Square surveillance scene.
- Coppola modeled Harry Caul in part on private investigator Karl Schnazer, who had appeared as an actor in Coppola's earlier films Tonight for Sure and Dementia 13; Schnazer once told Coppola about a man he had tailed for months who failed to recognize him at a party, an anecdote that made its way directly into the film.
- Hackman's character Edward Lyle in Enemy of the State closely resembles Harry Caul: he dons the same translucent raincoat, his workshop is nearly identical to Caul's, and the photograph used for Lyle in his NSA file is actually a photograph of Caul.
- This was the first of two Oscar-nominated films on which 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.
- David Shire's score was created before the film was shot, and on some cues he used musique concrète techniques, taking the taped sounds of the piano and distorting them in different ways to create alternative tonalities.
SPOILER
Surveillance technology expert Martin Kaiser says his colleagues consider him the inspiration for Harry Caul, and that the film's final scene, in which Caul cannot find the listening device in his apartment, was inspired by the passive covert listening devices created by Léon Theremin, such as the Great Seal bug.- The Conversation was nominated for three Academy Awards for 1974, but lost every one of them to Coppola's own The Godfather Part II.
