4. The Conversation won the Palme d’Or at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival. It was nominated for three Academy Awards
Shot on a modest $1.6 million budget, “The Conversation” wound up earning nearly three times that figure at the box office, making it a profitable success, but the film was also a critical darling. In a year that saw it running against Coppola’s own “The Godfather Part II” at the Academy Awards, “The Conversation” still managed three nominations including Best Picture. It also won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, making Coppola one of only six filmmakers to take that honor twice, and the only person to win twice in the same decade (he’d win again for “Apocalypse Now” in 1979, albeit shared with “The Tin Drum” that time around).
5. “The Conversation” was inspired by Michaelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up”
Given how much Coppola, Lucas, Scorsese and the rest of that loose ’70s gang loved foreign films, it’s no surprise that the filmmaker found inspiration from Michaelangelo’s Antonioni’s “Blow-Up.” In a sense, it’s an aural twist on that film, substituting photography for surveillance recording, but trading in a similar tone of paranoia and anxiety. “Francis had seen [it] a year or two before, and had the idea to fuse the concept of Blowup with the world of audio surveillance,” editor Walter Murch told Michael Ondaajte in “The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film.” And a few years later, Brian DePalma would also take an audio-based approach, is his decidedly more B-movie homage “Blow Out.”
“The Conversation” is available on DVD, BluRay and through various digital outlets.
In number 5 you've got it backwards. The Conversation substitutes surveillance recording for photography (that was in Blow Up), not the other way around.
Great article. I just bought this on Blu-ray a week ago, brought it home to Florida to watch with my wife, and we never got to it before I was on the road again. Seen this a couple of dozen times, but I'm really anxious to see the blu-ray print. I've read it kills.
I always found it interesting that David Shire wrote and recorded the films score before any footage had been shot, and that whilst shooting Coppola would play the accompanying scene score for the actors to give them a better understanding of the tone he was looking for. I think it definitely worked.
Thanks for this. I always thought The Conversation and Blow Up would be a perfect double feature. Now I know why.
Probably my favorite of Coppola's films. It feels like a small gem, a masterpiece shadowed by the epic force of The Godfather.
That and Hackman's brilliant performance. That last sequence of him playing the sax is heartbreaking.
Brilliant flick and brilliant article.
Thanks for these types of articles, this one especially, Kevin. Lovin' em. You're a good guy.