Is the opening scene from The Conversation a signature shot from a Coppola film as Walter Murch commented?

I have compared the opening scene with six other openings from Francis Coppola’s films, four from around the same time and his two latest films, Tetro and Youth without Youth. In regards to the more recent films I did not see any similarity stylistically to The Conversation although quite a lot of similarity between each other, suggesting that there could have been other periods of similarity in this films. The other four films I watched the opening scenes from were The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Finian’s Rainbow and The Rain People. Finian’s Rainbow had nothing in common to speak of with the conversation, followed by the Godfather Part II. The Rain People did have a mid-long shot at the opening but aside from that the angles and editing then became a lot more different. The only similarity was with The Godfather Part II, the actual film that Murch used as reference originally. The similarity is that there is a slow zoom out instead of a zoom in which works in a very similar way; as we move away from the man’s face we see more of the scene and this is contextualised as he tells his story we get an idea of the sort of man he is addressing. This indirect way of introducing a major character is like the use of the mime in The Conversation. This and the zoom make it the most closely related opening. However, I do not think that there is any strong correlation worth researching any further here. It will be interesting to see if there is anything interesting in Coppola’s own comparison of the film as a mixture of Steppenwolf, Psycho and his own script.

 

References

Coppola, F. (2001). The Godfather DVD Collection [DVD]. US: Paramount Home Entertainment