The Making of The Conversation – An Interview with Francis Ford Coppola, 1974

 

In 1966, Francis Ford Coppola was working as a scriptwriter when he talked with fellow American director Irvin Kershner (born Isadore Kershner (April 29, 1923 – November 27, 2010)) about spy movies. The time was ripe with espionage plots. The James Bond films were hugely popular (Dr. No, 1962; From Russia with Love, 1963; Goldfinger, 1964; and Thunderball 1965), readers were devouring books steeped in espionage (John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and Len Deighton’s The IPCRESS File, 1962) and the Cold War was in full cry.

Coppola revisited his discussion with Kershner during a chat with another director, Brian De Palma for the magazine Filmmakers Newsletter in 1974. He reveals that meeting with Kershner inspired him to write The Conversation, a tense, psychological thriller that asks sharp questions about power, responsibility and technology:

We were talking about espionage, and he said that most people thought the safest way not to be bugged was to walk in a crowd. And I thought, Wow, that’s a great motif for a film – and it started there, around 1966. I actually started working on it around 1967, but it was an on-again, off-again project which I was just never able to beat until 1969 when I did the first draft.

In The Conversation surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) monitors a young couple. Caul, a lonely and detached figure, records their them and among the tapes hears one of them say, “He’d kill us if he got the chance.” Caul listens to the tape over and over as he tries to decipher the words’ meaning. The mood of watching Caul locked in a kind of tight, recurring dream is enhanced by Walter Murch’s sound design and the skill of advisor Hal Lipset, who examined the notorious gap in Richard Nixon’s White House tapes.

Coppola was also influenced by German-Swiss writer Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1929) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), in which a photographer (David Hemmings) thinks one of his picture shows evidence of a murder.

I got into THE CONVERSATION because I was reading [Hermann] Hesse and saw BLOW-UP at the same time. And I’m very open about its relevance to THE CONVERSATION because I think the two films are actually very different. What’s similar about them is obviously similar, and that’s where it ends. But it was my admiration for the moods and the way those things happened in that film which made me say, “I want to do something like that.”

Every young director goes through that.

…

I have to say [The Conversation] began differently form other things I’ve done, because instead of stating to write it out of an emotional thing—the emotional identity of the people I knew – I started it as sort of a puzzle, which I’ve never done before and which I don’t think I’ll ever do again.

In other words, it started as a premise. I said, “I think I want to do a film about eavesdropping and privacy, and I want to make it about the guy who does it rather than about the people it’s being done to.” Then somewhere along the line I got the idea of using repetition, of exposing new levels of information not through exposition but by repetition. And not like RASHOMON where you present it in different ways each time—let them be the exact lines but have new meanings in context.

In other words, as the film goes along, the audience goes with it because you are constantly giving them the same lines they’ve already heard, yet as they learn a little bit more about the situation they will interpret things differently. That was the original idea.

I got into THE CONVERSATION because I was reading [Hermann] Hesse and saw BLOW-UP at the same time. And I’m very open about its relevance to THE CONVERSATION because I think the two films are actually very different. What’s similar about them is obviously similar, and that’s where it ends. But it was my admiration for the moods and the way those things happened in that film which made me say, “I want to do something like that.”

Every young director goes through that.

…

I have to say [The Conversation] began differently form other things I’ve done, because instead of stating to write it out of an emotional thing—the emotional identity of the people I knew—I started it as sort of a puzzle, which I’ve never done before and which I don’t think I’ll ever do again.

In other words, it started as a premise. I said, “I think I want to do a film about eavesdropping and privacy, and I want to make it about the guy who does it rather than about the people it’s being done to.” Then somewhere along the line I got the idea of using repetition, of exposing new levels of information not through exposition but by repetition. And not like RASHOMON where you present it in different ways each time—let them be the exact lines but have new meanings in context.

In other words, as the film goes along, the audience goes with it because you are constantly giving them the same lines they’ve already heard, yet as they learn a little bit more about the situation they will interpret things differently. That was the original idea.

 

The Interview:

 

 

The Making of The Conversation – An Interview with Francis Ford Coppola, 1974:

 

 

Via; People’s Graphic Design Archive, Cinephilia and Beyond.