Inside the 50th Anniversary Restoration of Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Conversation’
Ever since he re-edited the first two “Godfather” movies into a “novel for television” in 1977, Francis Ford Coppola has obsessively returned to his past works, creating alternate versions of “Apocalypse Now,” “One From the Heart,” “The Outsiders,” “The Cotton Club,” and “The Godfather Part III.” For the 50th anniversary of his thriller “The Conversation,” Coppola has supervised a beautiful new 4K restoration that Rialto Pictures is releasing in theaters. This time, however, there was no tinkering with the original cut — this is the same “Conversation” that audiences saw in 1974, just looking and sounding the best that it ever has.
“Francis always felt this film was perfect as it is,” film archivist and restoration supervisor James Mockoski told IndieWire. “He’s very comfortable with the work he and [editor and sound designer] Walter Murch did in 1974.” To that end, restoring “The Conversation” was a simpler process than the work Mockoski undertook on “Apocalypse Now,” where he had to piece together a new cut from damaged footage and a missing negative. In the case of “The Conversation,” the negative itself was in good shape.
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“It hadn’t been used, so it was different from ‘The Godfather,’ where that film had been loved so much that the original negative had gone through a lot of wear and tear with new prints and damaged sections being replaced with dupe negative,” Mockoski said. The first step toward restoring “The Conversation” was a 4K scan of the negative carried out by Roundabout Entertainment in Burbank, a post house used by Coppola’s American Zoetrope for multiple projects. Mocoski then went through that scan frame by frame.
“I cleaned the dirt, the scratches, all the stuff that has been collecting on it for 50 years, removing all the artifacts,” Mockoski said. Once that was done, the movie was sent back to the lab for an HDR color grade using an archival print approved by cinematographer Bill Butler as a reference. The sound mix is essentially the 5.1 mix Murch created in 2000; in spite of the importance of sound in the film’s story, it was released in mono back in 1974 because so few theaters were equipped for stereo.
For Mockoski, one of the pleasures of working on “The Conversation” was observing how much the film itself relates to the filmmaking process, as Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul takes the pieces of a recording apart and puts them back together again in multiple ways as he tries to determine if he has unwittingly stumbled onto a murder plot. “The process Gene Hackman is going through is the process that was going on in the making of the film,” Mockoski said. “‘The Conversation’ is about an analog world, and it came from an analog world. Recording dialogue, recording music, recording effects…those were all separate elements and a huge operation. We don’t appreciate that now because it’s all done on our computer and it’s all done in Pro Tools.”
Mockoski also sees a direct line from “The Conversation” to Coppola’s latest film, “Megalopolis.” “‘Megalopolis’ is ‘The Conversation’ on steroids,” Mockoski said, explaining that films like these and “The Rain People” most closely reflect what Coppola most wanted to do in his career: make personal art films from original screenplays rather than adaptations. “The common thread in all of Francis’ films is that he’s a student. He wants to learn different ways of filmmaking, and ‘Megalopolis’ is certainly in that vein of trying something new and uncomfortable for him. When he made ‘The Conversation,’ he didn’t know how to make a thriller. But he studied well and crafted something that has lasted 50 years and still resonates.”
The 4K restoration of “The Conversation” opens in New York and Los Angeles on August 9.
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