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Francis Ford Coppola: The Conversation
By
Published: Jan 30, 2022
Category:
Drama
In 1972, the entire world watched “The Godfather.” At the Academy Awards, Francis Ford Coppola was appropriately honored — the film won three Oscars: Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay.
In 1974, Coppola released what is generally agreed to be the best sequel in film history. “Godfather II” was the first sequel to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. It also won Oscars for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Little known fact: One of the films that lost to “Godfather II” that year was directed by… Francis Ford Coppola. “The Conversation” received three Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Sound. It did win the Palme D’Or at Cannes, but it was a commercial disappointment, and unless you’re a film fanatic, you may never have heard of a film a New York Times critic called “Coppola’s best movie, a landmark film of the seventies and a stunning piece of original American fiction.” [To watch the streaming video on Amazon Prime, click here.]
It starts as a simple story. Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), a genius in the surveillance industry, is hired to eavesdrop on a conversation in a crowded square in San Francisco. He doesn’t know who hired him, he doesn’t care what he’s recording, he’s paid to deliver a tape, and that’s what he’s going to do. If you’re thinking that Harry is a preview of a contemporary cyber CEO — say, Mark Zuckerberg or whoever heads Spotify — stop right there. This movie was conceived in the ‘60s. Its inspiration comes from Blow-Up and the Watergate tapes and whatever chilly logic powered the United States in Vietnam.
Here’s the preview.
The film hangs on one line of that muddled recording in the park. Is it “He’d kill us if he could?” Or is it “He’d kill US if he could?
Harry never gets personally involved in his work. He does here. And then others get personally involved with him. And then… you knew this would happen… it gets intense. Very intense.
FUN FACTS:
1) Allen Garfield plays a surveillance expert from Detroit who bugged his first phone at the age of 12 and then went on to become famous in the trade as the man who told Chrysler that Cadillac was getting rid of its fins.
2) From Air Mail:
After suspending production to switch cinematographers (from Haskell Wexler to Bill Butler) and to relieve, in Murch’s words, “an agonized mood” on the set, Coppola ran out of time and money. Murch says, “He stopped shooting with 78 scenes yet to film out of almost 400: a fifth of the film.” As Coppola departed to ramp up The Godfather: Part II, he told Murch, “Cut it together the best way you can, and we’ll see where the remaining holes are and how serious they are. And then we’ll ask for permission from Paramount to shoot another couple of days or something.”
Necessity became the godfather of invention: Murch discovered that he could generate suspense and shock using one deceptively straightforward line. In the conversation that sets up the entire film, Mark, Ann’s presumed lover (played by Frederic Forrest), tells her, “He’d kill us if he had the chance … ” When Harry isolates the line in his sound lab, Forrest lightly stresses the word “kill.”
Murch flew his latest version of the film to New York, where Coppola was shooting The Godfather: Part II. The director liked what he saw and heard. Murch had succeeded at peeling onion-like layers of emotion and compulsion from a character who could have seemed hollow and bland. Murch also managed to suggest the audiovisual contours of a new era.
Murch compensated for the 78 missing scenes with the manipulation of that “kill us” line and the addition of one pickup shot. The production “built this little mini-set with Harry’s workbench and tape recorder in Los Angeles, on a studio soundstage where another film was shooting. We just said, ‘Can we build this in the corner of your set? And, by the way, can we borrow your camera when you’re not using it? And can we use some of your film?’ If we had kept the camera running at the end, and panned 180 degrees to the left, it would have revealed Roman Polanski and Jack Nicholson waiting to get their camera back because that other film was ‘Chinatown.’”
