Coppola and his lifelong editor/sound designer/friend Walter Murch were audio nerds who by all s originally set out to make a movie about a guy like them, someone who reads industry magazines and attends dorky tech conferences and takes pride in his private freelance craftsmanship; but once they started figuring out a more exciting cinematic entry point for a lonely, introverted character like this, and started packaging their ideas about what his responsibilities and culpabilities are to a larger nefarious surveillance state within the history of obsessive voyeurism in movies (Noir detectives, Rear Window, espionage movies, Blow Up, etc.) they ended up with one of the great sociological/political character studies that also operates as a paranoid psychological thriller of the highest order. One that through pure visual/sonic craft (and an incredible Gene Hackman performance) perfectly captures the compartmentalized contradiction of trying to maintain a professional, technical distance within a craft that requires not just unethically puncturing but shattering illusions of privacy and intimacy.

The way Coppola alternates between elegantly composed frames (and slow zooms/pans) of lonely, dingy San Francisco locations and a rougher almost verité style camera work when the subjective hysteria begins to build in the almost experimental editing patterns is phenomenal, Murch's soundscape that incorporates diegetic distortions and dials of his work and collides it with his visual memory/ storytelling projections is insane, and the eventual downbeat tragedy of the sound man's realizations and revelations (both the literal ones about the potential murder mystery job he is working which is actually still a pretty good twist to this day, and the larger existential ones about how someone could possibly live with the perverse knowledge and guilt his craft perhaps unnaturally provides and torments him with) have only aged better as our surveillance tools have gotten more advanced and what they've done to our brains has gotten even worse.

A stone-cold isolation and anxiety classic with one of best final shots of the 70s. “I’m not following you, I’m looking for you. Big difference.” 

[35mm]

Full discussion on ep 356 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.