In that outline alone, the influence of early-70s Hollywood’s new amorality and sordidness is hard to miss. One of a small handful of films made through Paramount’s short-lived blank check factory The Directors Company, which allowed hotshots Coppola, William Friedkin and Peter Bogdanovich unprecedented control over small-scale projects, The Conversation is among the artistic heights of.
The Conversation study guide contains a biography of Francis Ford Coppola, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.
The film begins in San Francisco's Union Square. A couple, Mark and Ann, walk in circles around the square having a somewhat vague conversation, confessing their love for one another, and making a plan for the coming Sunday at a hotel. Harry Caul, a talented, reclusive surveillance expert, follows the couple and surveils their conversation, with the help of his assistant Stan and Paul, a cop.
The Conversation is an immaculate thriller, a study in paranoia and loneliness, long in gestation, partly inspired by Antonioni's Blow-Up, and released as the Watergate scandal was unfolding.
The first thing is to start early. She should plan on revising the essay many times. And that takes time. Her essay won’t be a masterpiece the first time. And if she pressures herself to write perfectly the first time, she might end up with bad writer’s block. Akinyi: I think that may have happened to me when I tried to write my essay.
The Conversation (1974), written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, is not one of those minor works. Though it has an indebtedness to Michelangelo Antonioni ’s brilliant Blow-Up (1966), The Conversation does not merely ape that film’s existential dilemma of an accidental photograph possibly cluing its lead character into murder.
Harry, the subject of Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” (1974), is not only bad at his job, but also deeply unhappy about it. Once his snooping may have led to the deaths of a woman and child. Now he fears that his new tapes will lead to another murder.
COPPOLA: No, I don’t give myself a lot of breaks in The Conversation because there’s not a lot in the movie that I feel viscerally about, except maybe technology, bugging the room, stuff like that.