“He’d kill US if he had the chance….” This I remember was the pivotal line in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 paranoid procedural thriller The Conversation.

Inspired by Antonioni’s earlier arthouse thriller Blowup, Coppola cast Gene Hackman as a lonely, obsessive bugging expert, whose recordings indicate a potential murder. But it’s when he plays the tape back repeatedly and clarifies the audio that the nuances of what was being said turn truth on its head.

Hackman turns in one of his greatest ever performances, and The Conversation won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, but the movie was considered a box office disappointment at the time.

This is a French petit poster, which was one of the first posters I ever sold.