The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola’s classic paranoid thriller-cum-character study, turns fifty this year. A 4K restoration is set to be released in select theaters starting August 9th. Let’s take a look, shall we? 

Opening with a bird’s eye-view shot of Union Square in San Francisco, the camera slowly zooms in on the titular conversation. Here we meet Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), a surveillance expert coordinating a very intricate bugging operation—involving a freelancing fed and multiple sniper-like microphones—to record the seemingly innocuous chatter of two young people at lunch hour. What they are talking about is irrelevant to Harry, all he wants is “a nice, fat recording.” And he gets one! But after a suspicious confrontation with his client’s assistant (Harrison Ford, who made such an impression on Coppola that they developed the character around him), Harry becomes fixated with the tapes and the murder plot they presumably uncover. 

Coppola originally wrote The Conversation in response to Antonioni’s Blow-Up, a film about a photographer who may have inadvertently captured a murder. Besides Antonioni, Coppola listed the plays of Tennessee Williams as an influence, which becomes clear during the film’s middle section when it surprisingly drops the mystery plot at its most ominous point as Harry attends a local surveillance convention, followed by a drunken after-party at his workshop—a warehouse-like open space resembling a theater stage. It’s digressions like these—and an earlier, very sad meet-up with his lonely, long-suffering girlfriend (the privacy-obsessed Harry storms out of her apartment after boundary-pushing questions like “what do you do for work?” and “do you live alone?”)—that enriches the film as more than a conspiratorial whodunit. Although when it does finally come time to start putting the pieces together, the dread gets cranked to eleven, particularly in a scene rivaling Kubrick’s bloody elevator in The Shining. 

I would be remiss if I didn’t properly dedicate some space to the film’s anchor: Gene Hackman. He was a movie star (for any of my younger readership: a movie star was an actor or actress that studios could count on for profitability based on their name-value alone; think Marvel, but a person!) who blended Method-intensity with chin dimple-charisma (duly repressed for this picture) and Midwest-relatability (emphasized here to show the banality of the surveillance state). There’s a famous quote within pro wrestling (where theatrics intersects with athletics) often attributed to the late, great Terry Funk: "I can't make them believe wrestling is real, but I can make them believe I'm real.” Replace the word “wrestling” with “cinema” and you’ve got Hackman’s entire acting philosophy. Whether playing an obsessive cop in a grit-classic like The French Connection, or a deadbeat dad in The Royal Tenenbaums, or a Tom Landry-esque football coach in a middling sports comedy like The Replacements, Hackman was a celluloid fantasy that you could buy into regardless of a film’s genre, aesthetic, or overall quality. The Conversation, for all of its pure cinema-induced hypnosis and paranoia, is a character study—and what good is the study if you don’t believe in the character? You believe in Harry Caul. 

While it’s now regarded as a classic of the Hollywood Renaissance, the actual production was less than ideal. For starters, Hackman, a notorious curmudgeon under the best circumstances, wasn’t thrilled about playing such a contemptible person and it showed on set. The original cinematographer, Haskell Wexler, was replaced after shooting the complicated opening scene due to differences in opinion. And Coppola, who was juggling this film’s completion and pre-production on The Godfather Part II, grew increasingly frustrated towards the end of shooting, culminating in a premature wrap-up. Fittingly, Coppola left the editing in the hands of a sound man: Walter Murch, who deserves as much praise for his work on The Conversation as his household-name director. To use Murch’s own words, Coppola would visit the editing room every few weeks to “take the film’s temperature,” but for the most part he was left to his own devices, which included figuring out just how exactly to end the damn thing (the originally conceived climax was ingeniously repurposed as a second act dream sequence). The rest is history. 

Sure, The Conversation brings up prescient questions regarding privacy, voyeurism, the industry of spying, etc.. But below the surface, it could be read as a form of auto-critique by its writer/director. In his field, Harry Caul is a perfectionist, in a sense an auteur (“I build all my own equipment.”). His downfall is the end result of his obsession with the technical aspects of his craft; an obsession so isolating that he loses everyone close to him; an obsession so consuming that he misses the forest for the trees, and people suffer for his oversight. Francis Ford Coppola is one of the great auteurs of cinema, but sometimes with auteur theory we lose sight of how much of a collaborative process filmmaking is. A true artist, he seems to argue, is someone willing to be a part of that process. And that’s why his name is attached to several of the most celebrated titles in the history of motion pictures, while Harry Caul ends up tortured and alone—the punchline of a cautionary tale. 

Regarding the new 4K restoration, it looks great. The most noticeable difference I detected when comparing it to previous versions (I used the 2011 1080p Blu-ray as my imperfect frame of reference) was the color palette, which in many scenes now has an appropriately cooler (read: blue) tone. Makes sense; this is certainly a cold film and the restoration team seems to have made it a priority to convey that coldness to a maximal degree. (It should be noted that the color grading is reportedly based off of a 35mm reference print). If you’re blessed to live in a city showing The Conversation on the big screen, see it. And Happy 50th to everyone involved. 

Following The Conversion’s rerelease, Coppola’s enduring filmmaking legacy continues this year with his latest film, Megalopolis, scheduled to reach theaters and IMAX on September 27th.