The Conversation is a mystery thriller about audio surveillance, written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest, and featuring Harrison Ford, Teri Garr and an uncredited appearance from Robert Duvall.

The Conversation won the Golden Palm at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, and in , it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Plot

Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a paranoid surveillance expert running his own company in San Francisco, and is highly respected by others in the profession. Caul is obsessed with his own privacy; his apartment is almost bare behind its triple-locked door, he uses pay phones to make calls and claims to have no home telephone, and his office is enclosed in wire mesh in a corner of a much larger warehouse. Caul is utterly professional at work, but he finds personal contact difficult. He is uncomfortable in dense crowds and withdrawn and taciturn in more intimate situations; he is also reticent and secretive with work colleagues. He is nondescript in appearance, except for his habit of wearing a translucent plastic raincoat virtually everywhere he goes, even when it is not raining.