The iconic Francis Ford Coppola character that the director called “boring and non-exotic”
It’s fair to say that Francis Ford Coppola has delivered some of the most intense and exciting moments in the history of cinema. After all, it’s Coppola who has sat at the helm of some of the most memorable movies of the 20th century, establishing himself as a key player in the New Hollywood film movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
The five-time Academy Award winner has masterminded the monolithic cinematic achievement that is The Godfather (and its sequel), which contains moments of genuine narrative brilliance within it. Of course, we ought not to forget Coppola’s stunning Vietnam War movie, Apocalypse Now, which equally features mesmerising sequences that show the shocking brutality of the historical conflict in all its fiery and bloody glory.
Still, for all the exciting moments of cinema that Coppola has undoubtedly contributed to, he has had a handful of moments in which he worried about delivering precisely the opposite effect. One such time came when the director had set about making his 1974 neo-noir mystery film The Conversation.
The film has Gene Hackman play Harry Caul, a surveillance expect in San Francisco who specialises in wiretapping. Narratively, The Conversation, which also stars the likes of John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Harrison Ford and Robert Duvall, focuses on the dilemma Harry faces when one of his recording reveal a potential murder.
Coppola had once spoken about his 1974 effort with fellow director Brian De Palma and admitted that he had some doubts about the effectiveness of Hackman’s character, noting, “I was afraid that the character of Harry was so essentially boring and non-exotic that it would be easy to cross over into a thing where the audience was really more interested in the couple and their story than in him.”
In Union Square, Harry eavesdrops on a conversation between a couple as per the directions of his client, and it’s that conversation that reveals the line, “He’d kill us if he got the chance”. Harry does not reveal much at all about his private life, although he feels extreme guilt about a previous job gone wrong that led to three deaths.
Still, Coppola couldn’t help but feel that the story of the recorded couple was more interesting than Harry’s story himself, explaining, “I was frankly scared that if I was any more specific, then everyone would be irritated that I was not making the movie about the couple.” The Conversation ended up being something of a box office failure, even though it was critically admired, receiving three Academy Award nominations.
Reflecting on the impact of the film from a narrative perspective, Coppola admitted, “One of the big struggles with the film was that it was boring. And rather than people taking a repeated line and saying, ‘Oh, isn’t that interesting; now it means that,’ many of them would just kind of tune out and say, ‘Oh, they’re doing that again.’”
Coppola said that achieving the narrative interest in both Harry as a character and in the mystery of his particular job was a “very delicate” balance, one that he could not quite achieve. “I still don’t think the finished film quite did what I had originally hoped it would do,” he said, highlighting the fact that sometimes, even the greatest directors cannot quite fulfil their personal visions.
