‘Enemy of the State’: the unofficial sequel to Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Conversation’
Whenever we discuss Francis Ford Coppola‘s greatest works, The Conversation is always a little slow to come up. That is definitely understandable since we’re talking about the director of unforgettable masterpieces such as The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, but Coppola’s technically brilliant 1974 neo-noir deserves to be mentioned with the best.
Starring the supremely talented Gene Hackman in one of his strongest on-screen performances, The Conversation revolves around a paranoid surveillance agent whose shadowy world is irreversibly complicated by strange discoveries in his recordings. Anticipating the omnipresent concerns around personal privacy that we have in the internet age, Coppola’s gem remains a visceral cinematic experience.
This subject has been broached by several contemporary films, but few follow it as closely as Tony Scott’s 1998 thriller Enemy of the State. Featuring Hackman once again alongside Will Smith, Scott’s film contains a similar plotline where recordings detailing a conspiracy are discovered by the main characters, who are subjected to all kinds of terrifying consequences.
While it might be easy to write off Enemy of the State as an imitation, it follows a chain of inspiration that predates Coppola as well. During a conversation with Brian De Palma, the Apocalypse Now director revealed that The Conversation was heavily impacted by Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, which has thematic similarities, as well as Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf.
Coppola said: “I got into The Conversation because I was reading Hesse and saw Blow-Up at the same time. And I’m very open about its relevance to The Conversation because I think the two films are actually very different. What’s similar about them is obviously similar, and that’s where it ends. But it was my admiration for the moods and the way those things happened in that film which made me say, ‘I want to do something like that.'”
The Conversation was markedly different from Coppola’s previous efforts, especially when you consider the grand scale of The Godfather. Moving from such an expansive crime epic to a tightly wound thriller is not an easy task at all, but the New Hollywood auteur pulled it off with confidence in his own abilities to mould the cinematic medium just the way he wanted to.
“Every young director goes through that,” Coppola added. “But that’s what started it going. And I was over my head in a sense, and I knew it; I wasn’t about to make another Steppenwolf. But those were the textures that started me off, so to speak. That’s how I got into it.”
The similarity in the thematic trajectories isn’t the only connecting thread between the two works. In fact, a photo placed in the file of Hackman’s Enemy of the State character is directly taken from Coppola’s The Conversation. Adding to his tribute to the master, Scott also ensured that Hackman’s performance in his movie has a lot of parallels to his work in Coppola’s mesmerising neo-noir.
The increasing relevance of subjects related to surveillance in modern society has brought extra attention to these movies, including a proposed ABC television adaptation of Enemy of the State that would continue 20 years after the events of the film. Unfortunately, that particular project never saw the light of day.
Watch the trailer below.
