Harry Caul is a professional. Discreet, solitary, and all but invisible in his grey trench coat amid the crowds of San Francisco. He is a surveillance expert – skilled in hearing and capturing intimate confessions, stray slips of the tongue, and conspiracies of a national level. When Caul is tasked with recording a conversation between a man and a woman who may be killed soon after, he begins to question his ability to remain unseen and steal the words of strangers. The people whose conversation his client, simply known as the Director, has commissioned, might still be saved.

A requiem for paranoia, the erosion of privacy, and the Cold War – a tightly scripted, visually choreographed thriller made before the Watergate scandal, yet resonant with 21st-century anxieties about data trafficking and the ubiquity of tiny cameras and recording devices. Fascinated by espionage and intelligence services in the mid-1960s, Coppola began writing the script for The Conversation. Awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the film was made between the first and second parts of The Godfather – Coppola’s magnum opus – and its emotional nakedness and scale are altogether different. Gene Hackman’s neurotic Caul is a jazz-loving outsider, no longer able to reconcile the personal and the professional – the world reflects back that such a choice may even be meaningless.

A restored copy will be screened at RIGA IFF.