The Conversation gets deeper with 4K release for 50th anniversary

Last Updated on August 12, 2024

Fifty years on, the conversation over The Conversation is far from over. To mark Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 paranoiac thriller — released the same year as The Godfather Part II, which is still hard to fathom — the film is getting a full 4K restoration, with Coppola himself having supervised the process.

As James Mockowski — who also worked extensively on Apocalypse Now Redux — told IndieWire, Coppola has always been satisfied with how The Conversation turned out so wouldn’t go back to the drawing board for an entirely new version. And since The Conversation never seems to get the love that most of Coppola’s other works from the decade — the film still feels like an “if you know, you know” masterpiece — they had no issues with the original negative, giving them an ideal starting point for the restoration. As Mockowski put it, “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…I cleaned the dirt, the scratches, all the stuff that has been collecting on it for 50 years, removing all the artifacts.”

From there, a print approved by late cinematographer Bill Butler was brought in for reference as to the color grading. A more recent sound mix created by the legendary Walter Murch was also utilized.

Even more recent than any of that, Mockowski even drew a line from The Conversation to Coppola’s latest, Megalopolis. “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.”

With that, the 4K restoration of The Conversation has a limited theatrical run this month, while StudioCanal released a pretty awesome looking box set last month. Hopefully there is a Region 1 release coming soon enough because the labor that evidently went into this transfer sounds like it will have just the payoff fans deserve.

Are you a fan of Coppola’s The Conversation? Do you think it has found its audience or is there more to discover? Give us your thoughts below.