The Conversation was released on April 7, 1974, and the use of surveillance to spy and invade one’s privacy is one of the core concepts of the movie. It expanded the public’s perspective on how the advancement of technology has reduced our ability to control what stays private. It is scarier now because almost all of our information is stored online, making it easy for unwanted people to access. Although the director Francis Ford Coppola claims it was coincidental, the movie came out the same year that Nixon resigned due to the Watergate Scandal. As you might already know, the Watergate Scandal occurred after the Nixon Administrations attempted to cover up their break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters where they’d tried to plant wiretaps to monitor phone conversations. The movie held some real-world implications that reflected some of the things that were actually happening at the time, which probably made it more appealing to audiences at its release. The movie is shown through the perspective of surveillance specialist Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), and we observe how they conduct surveillance as well as the unintended consequences of some of the work they do. At the beginning of the movie, Caul sees people simply as sources of information which he must collect from to do his job and he doesn’t know much about human nature; he never opens up about himself to anybody and he’s very private about his life. His limited knowledge about emotion and human nature is ultimately where he makes an error in his judgment of the conversations and mistakes the meaning of a sentence. This movie not only questions the dangerous ways surveillance can be utilized but also the mindset that enables its use. In the scene below, Caul tells his partner that something he’s learned working in the business is that he doesn’t know anything about human nature or curiosity, which is contradictory to what he’s trying to do. His human nature and conscience dictate that he doesn’t hand over the tapes, and now he’s working towards “saving” the couple.

The concepts for the movie were relevant to events that were occurring in public life, so its message was something that most people needed to understand. In addition to Watergate, there was the story released by the New York Times that exposed the CIA for spying on over 10,000 American citizens to discover who was involved in the anti-war movements. All this information about the invasion of privacy and surveillance made the American public question how safe their personal information truly was and that’s probably why the Privacy Act of 1974 was enacted. The Privacy Act of 1974 ensured that the public had more accessibility to their individual information, and it created a code of practices that federal agencies had to follow in the collection, maintenance, use, and dissemination of said information. All of these things culminated in one year, so it’s interesting that Coppola claims the film had nothing to do with any of these events. These days, there’s so much information and access to technology that it’s difficult to maintain our privacy. Even if it was unintentional, the movie was released at an opportune time to bring awareness to privacy and scandals occurring in the news. 

The Conversation is one of Coppola’s personal projects and he’d spent the past decade developing it before its release. The idea that privacy is becoming more nonexistent as technology progresses is central to this film. In the beginning, the director’s wife and her lover are meeting in a crowded public square where they believe they’re safe from people listening, but Caul devises a complex way to listen. The idea for loss of privacy is also reinforced by the scenes where Moran, Caul’s competitor,  uses a listening device disguised as a pen to listen in to an intimate conversation between Caul and Meredith; the movie concludes with Martin Stett (Harrison Ford), the Director’s assistant, calling Caul at his apartment, and after Caul discovers that they’ve bugged his apartment he tears it apart trying to find it. The movie makes you more aware that it’s difficult to completely protect your privacy; in the movie, even a surveillance specialist couldn’t escape the scrutiny of others. Caul’s character personality is very important to the development of the plot as someone who’s afraid to open himself up to others and refuses to accept his part of responsibility in the death of the three people that died as a result of his work in New York. It is ironic that he’s paranoid about others knowing his business while he makes it his profession to discover people’s secrets. However, when he realizes that the conversation he’d taped for his most recent job may lead to the death of the individuals, he wrestles with his conscience and questions if he should hand them over. The plot twist at the end of the movie just shows how easily information can be misunderstood, and it makes Caul question everything. Each situation has its own complexities and giving away the tapes resulted in death as he’d expected, but not the one he was expecting. The clips below show the conclusion of the movie and the chaos that occurred in Harry Caul’s life because of one simple conversation.