Pushing the Boundaries: The Conversation (1974) 4K Restoration
Director: Francis Ford Coppola Run Time: 113 min. Rating: PG Release Year: 1974
Starring: Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Gene Hackman, John Cazale
Country: United States
Language: English
The 1970s: Pushing the Boundaries
A Film Center retrospective on the most groundbreaking films to come out of the 1970s.
See more Pushing the BoundariesAbout the film:
Exclusively in cinemas, all presentations of The Conversation (1974) include a new introduction from Francis Ford Coppola in honor of the 50th anniversary and new restoration.
Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival.
Selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 1995.
Lonely wiretapping expert and devout Catholic Harry Caul is hired to record a seemingly innocuous conversation in San Francisco’s Union Square between two lovers. Upon re-hearing the tapes, however, Caul believes he may be putting the couple in danger if he turns the material over to his client. Tormented by memories of a previous case that ended badly, Caul becomes obsessed with the resulting tape, trying to determine if the couple is in danger.
“Celebrated in its time yet ahead of it, powerfully entertaining as well as prescient…as disturbing and unnerving as ever, if not more so.”
— Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
Restored in 4K in 2024 by American Zoetrope, in collaboration with Studiocanal at Roundabout Entertainment and American Zoetrope laboratories, from the original negative accessed for the first time. An approved 35mm reference print was used for the color grading. 5.1 soundtrack created in 2000 by Walter Murch. Restoration approved by Francis Ford Coppola.
About the filmmaker:
Francis Ford Coppola is an influential film director, producer, and screenwriter. Along with other New Hollywood filmmakers, his unconventional ideas challenged contemporary filmmaking and helped shape American cinema. In 1969, Coppola and George Lucas founded American Zoetrope, an innovative, independent film production company based in San Francisco that has produced feature films for directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, Wim Wenders, Godfrey Reggio, and Coppola’s daughter Sofia.
Among his own projects, Coppola co-wrote the script for Franklin J. Schaffner’s Patton (1970). He then revolutionized the gangster genre with The Godfather (1972), and The Godfather Part II (1974) became the first sequel to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. He won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for The Conversation (1974) followed by his vivid Vietnam war epic Apocalypse Now (1979), making him one of only nine filmmakers to have won the award twice. His other features include The Rain People (1969), The Outsiders (1983), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), and The Rainmaker (1997). Among other accolades, Coppola has won five Academy Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, and a British Academy Film Award (BAFTA). His upcoming feature Megalopolis is competing for the Palme d’Or at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
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