Actors: Gene Hackman, John Cazale
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
I like directors who know when to slide in the subtext, rather than beating us over the head with it. Coppola manages this feat in The Conversation - the one time in the film that a television is turned on, Richard Nixon is referred to. This is a film made in Nixon's America, where people were being recorded talking about recording other people; paranoia about surveillance had to run high. Hence The Conversation, a film about a surveillance expert who is unusually concerned about his own security.
The Conversation excels, in a similar fashion to Big Fan, by keeping all of our attention on the protagonist, who is either in every scene or listening to them. Coppola doesn't allow the film to be about larger themes, e.g. Nixonian paranoia - he expects us to read those into what's going on.
Gene Hackman is far from one of my favorite actors, but he's hardly recognizable here as an isolated security wonk - quite far from his turn as a belligerent cop in The French Connection. Hollywood often struggles the right actor for these parts (e.g. Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind), but at no point did I have the impression that Hackman is a wealthy, successful actor pretending to be a schmuck.
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