10 Best "Everything You Know Is A Lie" Moments In Movies

Francis Ford Coppola's masterful 1974 thriller The Conversation follows surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), who while spying on a woman as part of his latest assignment, comes to believe she's being targeted for murder by the client, her husband.

While recording the woman speaking with her extra-marital lover, the man can be heard telling her, "He'd kill us if he got the chance."

This convinces Caul that the woman's husband is plotting to kill her, and after seemingly witnessing her murder, he finally decides to confront the husband.

But as it turns out, it was the husband who died, not the wife, in an alleged "accident." And so, Caul realises that the wife and her lover were in fact plotting to kill the husband all along, and that the muddy recording actually said, "He'd kill us if he got the chance."

The emphasis on "us" changes the entire context of the conversation, from fear of being killed to determined rationalisation to carry out a killing themselves.

For Caul, a deeply obsessive individual who wrestled with his "duty" to intervene at all, it was an Earth-shattering revelation.