'The Conversation' is an 'intricately constructed aural experience about the act of listening, and how sometimes our perceptions of sounds are shaped by what we want to hear,' writes film critic seanmburns. The film screens at svilletheatre:
.) Yet, no such tinkering was necessary when it comes to “The Conversation,” the chilling 1974 masterpiece Coppola has often cited as his favorite of all his films. A digital restoration with a new surround sound mix supervised by the film’s editor and sound designer Walter Murch was originally scheduled to open here in Boston back in April of 2020, but we all know what happened then.
“The Conversation” is a character study disguised as a mystery, more interested in paranoid Harry’s psychological unraveling than in any conspiracy that’s actually afoot. We know Hackman as such a feral, roughhousing screen presence it’s a shock to see him withdrawn so deeply into the character’s guilt-ridden neurosis. He’s an ineffectual introvert in bad glasses and cheap clothes, so emotionally cut off from the world he can barely communicate.
Written by Coppola in 1969 and rejected by every studio in town, “The Conversation” was eventually produced as a low-budget indulgence by Paramount Pictures, who wanted to keep their newly minted superstar happy and hopefully cajole him into making “The Godfather Part II.” Coppola had such a miserable time on the first film that he desperately didn’t want to direct the sequel, suggesting to the studio that the project would be perfect for an up-and-coming kid named Martin Scorsese.
Like the making of a lot of great films, the editing of “The Conversation” was a series of happy accidents and necessity breeding invention. A botched take of the original ending was repurposed as a dream sequence midway through the film, and Murch’s elliptical approach to the mystery’s resolution is a hundred times more haunting than any straightforward exposition could ever be.
Coppola has said he got the idea for Harry’s dilemma after hearing about film editors who fall in love with leading ladies they’ve never met, smitten by spending all day with their footage. Hearing and re-hearing this conversation over and over, both we and Harry make all sorts of assumptions about these two strangers, our minds forcing the puzzle pieces to fit where they don’t belong, with tragic results.