Influences

Coppola, it seems, was influenced by many works and people that he’d been a fan of. Hitchcock, as with many filmmakers, was one of them – but only in how he constructed his films. Coppola was more interested in the acting than the actual design, but he recognised that he would have to study Hitchcock if he was to design a thriller in the way he wanted. He states that he doesn’t care for most Hitchcock films because of the poor performances.

Steppenwolf, a book written by Hermann Hesse, was inspiration for Harry Caul. In the book the main character, also named Harry, is a reclusive and very private individual.

Pages taken from Francis Ford Coppola by Robert K. Johnson, published in 1977 by Twayne Publishers

Another large influence on Coppola was the film Blow-Up, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Blow-Up is about a photographer who, while taking pictures of a couple in a park, unknowingly captures a murder on film – a murder he thinks he has foiled until he blows up one of the pictures and sees the shadow of a man with a gun near the couple. He is pursued by a woman who wishes to retrieve the film from him and, eventually, has the film and photographs stolen from him – the corpse, which was left in the park, also disappears. [1] The story in this film is almost exactly the same as The Conversation, though with the obvious difference that Blow-Up uses film and The Converstion uses sound. Together these films seem to comment on the malleability of the media they focus on, that what you capture on film or audio tape can almost never be taken at face value, that there can always be something deeper and unnoticed – even innocuous in some cases.

[1]: http://www.filmsite.org/blow.html   –   Filmsite.org is written by Tim Dirks, Film Historian – http://www.linkedin.com/in/tdirks – both accessed on 15th/11/2010

There is also evidence elsewhere in The Conversation of Blow-Up‘s influence – the mime. In Antonioni’s film mime figures appear at the start and at the end of the film, as does the mime appear at the beginning of The Conversation.

Pages taken from Francis Ford Coppola by Robert K. Johnson, published in 1977 by Twayne Publishers

As the page below states, the script for The Conversation was written in the late sixties when Irvin Kershner brought to Coppola an article from Life magazine about a surveillance technician called Hal Lipset – like Harry Caul, Lipset worked out of San Francisco. Seeing this article, and having seen Blow-Up previously, gave Coppola the idea for The Conversation.

Pages taken from The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje, published in 2002 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (page 152)