I recently had the good fortune to see Coppolla’s personal print of The Conversation on the big screen, with the sound (all-important in the film) recently remastered by Walter Murch. The clarity was almost startling, like a new release.

Although the snooping technologies used by Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) are by now seriously outdated, the underlying themes, like in all great films, remain starkly relevant, maybe more so in these days of orange alerts, Guantanamo, and Patriot Acts. In 1974, of course, the scandal of the day was Watergate and tapes, so in The Conversation the escalating mystery revolves around the recording of a seemingly innocuous conversation between two young lovers.

Hackman’s Caul does all he can to remain studiously objective about his work. His life is stripped to the bone—his apartment is sterile and sparsely furnished. He has a girlfriend, after a fashion, but remains so emotionally distant from her that he crawls into bed with her fully dressed. Harry’s job involves prying into the most intimate parts of people’s lives; it has made it impossible for him to have intimacy in his own. There are cracks in his façade, however: he is a lover of jazz, and devoted to his faith.

Hackman is one of the great actors of our time, and even his most mediocre performances usually have some worth, but he may never top the layered, pained Harry Caul. It’s an economic performance, with few dramatic outbursts, that matches the film’s subtlety: Hackman invests Caul’s smallest gesture with the weight of guilt and doubt and fear that well within him. His slow unraveling is painful and mesmerizing to watch.

More than anything, The Conversation is about perception. Harry’s perception of himself and what he does, the variety of ways in which a thing (or a conversation) can be understood, depending on the angle it is approached from, the audience’s perception of an act. A pen may be a microphone. A mirror may be a window. In the end, the heroes may be villains, or the villains heroes. And in the end, it may be a single word that makes the difference.