The Conversation
A film by Francis Ford Coppola
1974/ USA / 113 mins / Col
7th Sept ; 5.45pm; Perks Mini Theater
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Harry Caul
(Hackman) is pre-eminent in his field. His trade magazine is called
"Security World" and sound is his universe. Harry Caul is an expert
professional eavesdropper. From his troubled childhood, Harry has grown up into
a lonely man. He lives alone, has no entertainment except playing his saxophone
with jazz records . No woman has any influence over him.
Coppola, who
wrote and directed, considers this film his most personal project. He was
working two years after the Watergate break-in, amid the ruins of the Vietnam
effort, telling the story of a man who places too much reliance on high
technology and has nightmares about his personal responsibility.
Harry Caul is
a microcosm of America at that time: not a bad man, trying to do his job,
haunted by a guilty conscience, feeling tarnished by his work.
Harry has
been hired by the director of a large corporation to investigate and report the
movements of his wife Ann. ‘The Conversation’ comes from another time and place
than today’s thrillers, which are so often simple-minded. This movie is a
character study, about a man who has removed himself from life, thinks he can
observe it dispassionately at an electronic remove, and finds that all of his
barriers are worthless. The cinematography (opening scene by Haskell Wexler,
the rest by Bill Butler) is deliberately planned from a voyeuristic point of
view; we are always looking but imperfectly seeing.
The
Conversation allowed Francis Ford Coppola to engage in a more personal style of
storytelling, crafting a small-scale character study that's steeped in
minor-key melancholia. The Conversation perfectly encapsulates the
disaffection, alienation, and paranoia infecting America's body politic in the
era of Watergate, the wiretapping scandal that brought down the Nixon
administration, though the timing of the film's release was coincidental.
(Source:Internet)
Francis Ford Coppola
Coppola was born in 1939 in Detroit, USA, but he grew
up in a New York suburb in a creative, supportive Italian-American family.
Francis Ford Coppola graduated with a degree in drama from Hofstra University,
and did graduate work at UCLA in filmmaking. He was training as assistant with
filmmaker Roger Corman, working in such capacities as sound-man, dialogue
director, associate producer and, eventually, director of Dementia 13 (1963),
Coppola's first feature film. During the next four years, Coppola was involved
in a variety of script collaborations.
Coppola won a
Best Original Screenplay Academy Award for Patton (1970), Coppola's 2nd film
brought him critical acclaim and a Master of Fine Arts degree. In 1969, Coppola
and George Lucas established American Zoetrope, an independent film production
company based in San Francisco. The company's first project was THX 1138
(1971), produced by Coppola and directed by Lucas. Coppola also produced the
second film that Lucas directed, American Graffiti (1973), in 1973.Coppola's
film The Godfather (1972) became one of the highest-grossing movies in history
and brought him an Oscar for writing the screenplay with Mario Puzo.
Following his
work on the screenplay for The Great Gatsby (1974), Coppola's next film was The
Conversation (1974), which was honored with the Golden Palm Award at the Cannes
Film Festival.Also released that year, The Godfather: Part II (1974), rivaled
the success of The Godfather (1972), and won six Academy Awards, bringing Coppola
Oscars as a producer, director and writer. Coppola then began work on his most
ambitious film, Apocalypse Now (1979), a Vietnam War epic that was inspired by
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1993).With George Lucas, Coppola executive
produced Kagemusha (1980), directed by Akira Kurosawa, and Mishima: A Life in
Four Chapters (1985), directed by Paul Schrader.
Francis Ford
Coppola is one of America's most erratic, energetic and controversial
filmmakers.
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