The Conversation

EN

“Coppola’s The Conversation was an enigma during my teen years. I viewed the VHS copy of the film and couldn’t understand the key sentence that Frederic Forrest whispered to Cindy Williams. Gene Hackman spends the entire film trying to crack the phrase. I spent more than 10 years, with countless re-watchings, until the film blossomed in me like a beautiful infection. Despite the VHS’s humble sound quality, this film triggered my infatuation with sound design in cinema.”

Apichatpong Weerasethakul1

Marjorie Rosen: How did you first become interested in the idea for The Conversation? I would think that it would take a certain amount of knowledge about surveillance equipment.

Francis Ford Coppola: I’ve always been interested in technology of all kinds. About eight years ago I was having a conversation with Irvin Kershner, the director; we were talking about surveillance. He mentioned that the safest place for two people who wanted to have a conversation in private would be outside in a crowd. Then he added that he had heard of microphones that had gunsights on them that were so powerful and selective that they could, if aimed at the mouths of these people in the crowd, pick up their conversation. I thought what an odd both device and notif for a film. This image of two people walking through a crowd with their conversation being interrupted every time someone steps in front of the gunsight. From just a little curiosity like that, I began to very informally put together a couple of thoughts about it, and came to the conclusion that the film would be about the eavesdropper rather than the people.

Francis Ford Coppola in conversation with Marjorie Rosen2

Michael Ondaatje: Watching The Conversation, I feel Coppola has given us, in an odd way, a celebration of artists, of professionals. There’s such a pleasure in the craft – in the scene following the conference on electronic surveillance technology, where Harry’s four fellow professionals stand around chatting about their craft, and in the way they talk about Harry as one of the “notables.” It’s a portrait of a clan of artists.

Walter Murch: Yes, that was very much on Francis’s mind. I remember him saying at the time how fascinating it is, particularly in film, to watch a craft being exercised. A woodcarver. Or a stonemason. To simply sit and watch. How often does he sharpen the blade? Oh, that’s interesting – he sharpens it every tenth stroke. There’s a very tactile, visual quality to it all. And it’s of considerable human interest at the same time.

It’s the way that in a samurai movie we become much more interested in the warrior’s detailed training in solitude than in the final battle.

Yes. And for Francis, Harry Caul’s craft is, of course, very much like filmmaking: Here’s the raw material, and how do you get the best out of that material? It’s an insight into the way such a mind works. Also, there’s a lot of Francis in Harry Caul, although when you meet Francis you don’t think of him as Harry. Francis comes across as the expansive, voluble paterfamilias. He’ll welcome you to his table. He loves to have lots of people around and he loves discussion, to be the host, to cook dinner for you – all those social things that run absolutely opposite to the lonely Harry Caul in his motel-like apartment, playing a saxophone alone. But in fact there’s another side to Francis that’s very much like Harry Caul.

[...]

Also, every filmmaker is a kind of voyeur. It just happens that Harry’s voyeurism is very narrow – only the sound spectrum. But as soon as you become a filmmaker you are naturally always looking for subject matter and looking at new ways of seeing things and snooping on aspects of people’s lives: not only subject matter but approaches to subject matter. I think it was easy for Francis to understand Harry Caul and his craft, out of his own experience.

Walter Murch in conversation with Michael Ondaatje3

• 1Apichatpong Weerasethakul, cited on the website of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) London.
• 2Marjorie Rosen, “Francis Ford Coppola. Interviewed by Marjorie Rosen,” Film Comment (July-August 1974): 43.
• 3Michael Ondaatje, The Conversations. Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2002).