The Conversation

American director, screenwriter, and producer born in 1939, he is one of the key figures of the New Hollywood of the 1970s. He studied drama at Hofstra University and film at UCLA. He debuted in low-budget horror with ‘Dementia 13’ (1963) and directed personal works such as ‘You’re a Big Boy Now’ (1966) and ‘The Rain People’ (1969), for which he won the Golden Shell at the San Sebastian Film Festival. His breakthrough came with the screenplay for ‘Patton’ (which earned him the first of his five Academy Awards in 1971) and, above all, with ‘The Godfather’ trilogy (1972, 1974, and 1990), based on the novel by Mario Puzo, which garnered him four more Academy Awards. He also has two Palme d'Or awards from Cannes for ‘The Conversation’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’ (1979). He founded American Zoetrope and produced films such as ‘American Graffiti’. He is a Princess of Asturias Award laureate for the Arts, and in 2015 Seminci dedicated a retrospective and a monograph to him. After directing films such as ‘Cotton Club’ (1984) and ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ (1992), he returned to independent cinema in the new millennium with ‘Youth Without Youth’ (2007), ‘Tetro’ (2009), ‘Twixt’ (2011), and ‘Megalopolis’ (2024).