The filmmaker Bradley Cooper called “one of the best auteur directors”
Ahh, Bradley Cooper. Never has a bro-flow looked so well-sculpted. Making ordinary human men look like the underside of a big toe since 2001’s Wet Hot American Summer, Cooper has been a familiar face on our screens for over 20 years now. 2000s comedy mainstay turned Academy Award nominee, the actor’s career is the stuff of dreams. He’s starred in everything from blokeish jaunts like The Hangover trilogy to tense crime dramas like 2012’s The Place Beyond The Pines. Today, he remains one of the most beloved and revered actors in Hollywood, and here he opens up about one of his favourite filmmakers of all time.
Back in 2011, around the time Cooper starred in Limitless, the actor sat down with Rotten Tomatoes to discuss his five favourite films. As well as Martin Scorsese’s Life Lessons, Thomas Vinterberg’s Celebration, Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, and Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around The Corner, Cooper revealed his obsession with Francis Ford Copolla’s 1974 film The Conversation starring Gene Hackman.
This Palme d’Or winner tells the story of Harry Caulis, a surveillance expert hired to spy on a young couple. As he tracks them through San Fransisco, he captures cryptic and deeply personal conversations, trying his best to bat away memories of a previous case as he attempts to establish if the couple is, in fact, in grave danger.
Explaining his fixation with Coppola and his work, Cooper said: “The Conversation is just, I think, a movie made by one of the best auteur directors of the ’70s and ’80s. To me, I think the reason that I would choose that one is the sound editing”.
He added: “Even though Hackman does play a sound guy, the sound of the movie is really innovative. You have conversations that are happening in the foreground that you can barely hear, and yet that’s the main conversation, so they play around a lot with where they put the microphone. It’s really awesome.”
Coppola would later cite Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up as a key inspiration behind his emphasis on surveillance and the spectator. In Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, Coppola’s editor recalls, “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.”
The result is a remarkably prescient film which seems to predict our contemporary anxieties surrounding the use of mass surveillance at a time when tapped iPhones were still an unknown entity.
