The Conversation

1974, Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 113min.

Selected and introduced by director and producer Mickey Lemle.

Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is the best surveillance man in the business. When a mysterious client represented by a brusque aide (Harrison Ford) hires him to tail a young couple, Caul and his associate Stan (John Cazale) manage to record a cryptic conversation between them. Unable to escape memories of a previous case that ended in disaster, Caul spirals into paranoia as be becomes obsessed with the tape.

“The use of sonic distortion and repetition render Caul’s anxiety in the medium that dominates his attention: sound.”

—Meghan Gilligan

“There is an emotional edge to it that I can recall to this day. A difficulty was that it is both a character study and a murder mystery and it required a knife edge balance between the two, which are almost contradictory. If you have a murder mystery, the characters are normally subservient to the plot, something that Hitchcock was a master of. Ultimately The Conversation had to be both and there was struggle in the sound and the editing to find the edge and perch on it.”

—Walter Murch, sound designer for The Conversation

About Cabaret Cinema: Soundtrack

You can probably name the best movie you’ve seen, but what about the best movie you’ve heard? It might be your favorite because of its sound effects, sound engineering, score, or another element of the audio experience. Watch—and hear—a series of films that caught the ear of notable New Yorkers.

About the introducer

Producer/director Mickey Lemle has been making feature films, television series, and documentary specials about some of the great beings on the planet since 1971. His works have been shown theatrically, on television, and at film festivals around the world. Since 1992 has served as Chairman of the Board of the Tibet Fund. He has also served on the Boards of Advisors for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, the 52nd Street Project, and the Rubin Museum.