Order in Alan Pakula’s Court : Movies: Film director cracks a tough murder case in adapting best-selling ‘Presumed Innocent’ novel for the big screen. And Harrison Ford is his chief character witness.

NEW YORK —  Film making is a sequence of choices, and adapting Scott Turow’s best-selling novel “Presumed Innocent” to the screen involved a formidable assortment of them.

Courtroom dramas have been popular ever since the movies learned to talk, and the best of them (to cite only three: “Witness for the Prosecution,” “The Paradine Case,” more recently “The Verdict”) generate wonderful helpings of suspense and surprise.

Concealing the surprise is the artful task always, seldom more testing than here, where a prosecuting attorney is accused of murdering the gorgeous colleague with whom he had been having a fling. Remarks director Alan Pakula, “You’d say the book was made to be a picture. But it’s not that simple. When I read it, I saw right away that it was a tough one.”

The first difficulty was that “Presumed Innocent” is written in the first person.

“That means,” Pakula says, “that the character is identified and revealed by the writing. Turow (himself a lawyer) also uses certain narrative tricks which are achieved by the first person. The challenge is to make the film work in its terms. Not the least difficult adaptation I’ve been involved with,” he adds wryly.

On a hangar-sized sound stage at the Kaufman-Astoria Studios in Queens, built originally by Paramount in 1921, Pakula is back in the dark, suspenseful genre of his “Klute,” “Parallax View” and “All the President’s Men.” He is directing from a script by Frank Pierson, who is himself again in the criminal proceedings territory of “Dog Day Afternoon.”

What appeals to Pakula thematically about the project is that “it’s a book about the most rational part of man--the laws he’s created that let civilization proceed--versus man’s most primitive passions. It’s man at his most and least controlled, and a central character who’s involved in both ways. The conflict is endlessly fascinating to me.”

Harrison Ford plays the lawyer. Bonnie Bedelia is Ford’s wife, Raul Julia his defending attorney, Brian Dennehy the prosecuting attorney, Paul Winfield the judge and Greta Scacchi the luckless love. Gordon Willis, who will next be off for four-plus months in Italy and elsewhere shooting “Godfather III” for Francis Coppola, is again Pakula’s cinematographer.

On the 39th day of shooting, roughly halfway through the schedule, the company has settled into Astoria after location work at several places, a Newark courtroom and a public-housing project among them.

Part of the stage has been curtained off to heavy darkness. Ford and New York actor John Spencer, playing an investigator, sit in a car. Two curious rubber-tired dollies with headlights mounted on them are pushed slowly back and forth behind the car, while at one side a crewman waves a filter in front of a spotlight as it goes on and off.

The effect is of oncoming cars raking their headlights across the men’s faces while other cars weave in and out of traffic behind them. “It’s called a poor man’s process shot,” Pakula says between takes. “Don’t forget to drive, John,” he tells Spencer before the next take. An unseen worker rocks the car ever so slightly.

Ford and Spencer are presumably en route to a confrontation, already shot, at the housing project. There is a fair amount of exposition to get through, and the raking lights and the alternations of darkness and glare invest the talk with visual excitement.

The trickeries of the trade are invariably intriguing to watch, and as often as a visitor may have been on movie stages, the ingenuity and the thoroughness with which sets are built and decorated never seems less than awesome.

The veteran production designer George Jenkins, whose first movie was “The Best Years of Our Lives” in 1946, has constructed a courtroom that was inspired partly by one he and Pakula visited in Cleveland during an extended tour of Midwest courthouses last spring. (Pakula had thought at first of shooting in a courthouse, but the production would have taken longer than any courtroom could be made available.)

The sculpted marble columns and the heavy furniture seem to have been in place forever. The huge mural, darkened by time, behind the judge’s bench is, in fact, a photocopy of the mural in the actual Cleveland courtroom. The great eagle is carved from Styrofoam and the columns ring hollow, like empty cartons, but the verisimilitude is quite extraordinary.

In the judge’s chambers there are photographs from his career and his family life, all created for the movie, naturally, and not likely to be more than glimpsed by Willis’ camera, but adding to the aura of credibility within which Winfield and the other actors can perform.

The diplomas in all the law offices are similarly the real thing, up to a point, and the artifacts, including scrolls and trophies, are as if borrowed from the lives of the principals.

During a wait while lights are being reset, Harrison Ford says, “Some of my friends warned me that it would be a limited part, thin and boring. Their argument was that things happen around Rusty (the besieged lawyer). But they were wrong. The character is so deep that I’m never sure what I’ll find down there.”

Ford, famous for the six enormously successful “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” films, has shown other dimensions as an actor in “Witness,” “Working Girl,” “The Mosquito Coast” and Roman Polanski’s “Frantic.” Pakula shares the view that the big adventure hits have obscured the real range of Ford’s talent.

The cast rehearsed for three weeks before shooting started, getting to know each other and the characters. Ford finds Pakula’s respect and trust for his actors welcome and warming; Pakula finds Ford’s quiet thoughtfulness not less welcome and warming. The atmosphere around the production is thus amiable but purposeful, generally a Pakula hallmark.

The film is not being shot in sequence; halfway through production, the ending had already been shot some days previously. With actors (there are 80 speaking parts) arriving for their scenes and then leaving, Pakula says, “It’s absolutely essential for me and the actors to know their placement, emotional and chronological. You don’t have time to go through the whole structure each time.

“That’s why,” he adds, “it’s nice to work with actors who know how to rehearse.”

There are on-camera rehearsals as well, ideas exchanged between Pakula and an actor in such confessional quiet that even those nearby can’t overhear. “I’ll say, ‘Let me see where you’re going to go with it, and then we’ll play with it.’ You don’t do that with a limited actor, but Harrison has wonderful ideas.

“He can do a scene light and dark and then give you one with the best of both. It’s up to me finally, but it’s the difference between participatory democracy and anarchy.

“As a director, you can orchestrate performances but you can’t give ‘em. You can make a good actor look bad but you can’t make a bad actor look good. The trick is knowing when to say something, and when not to. Often you just say, ‘Let’s do another one,’ and they’ll see themselves what’s needed. Harrison senses what you’re thinking before you say it, because he’s spent so much time discussing the film and the character.”

In the day’s scenes, Ford is speaking in a voice that is scarcely above a low murmur, almost indecipherable more than a few feet away. It is, one supposes, the voice of a man numbed and exhausted by the swift and devastating change in his life. It seems a daring underplaying. “He takes risks,” says Pakula. “But if we don’t take risks, there’s something wrong, then what are you?”

Pakula thinks Ford would make a good director but that Ford wants no part of it. Taking up directing would involve Ford more deeply in Hollywood and, like George Lucas and Francis Coppola, Ford wants as little to do with geographical and corporate Hollywood as possible.

He and his wife, writer Melissa Mathison (“E.T.”), have lived in Wyoming for six years. “For a long time I just said, ‘Somewhere in Wyoming,’ leaving it vague,” Ford says. “Now, every story about the foreign ministers’ summit in Jackson Hole seems to have a sidebar saying Harrison Ford lives nearby. I guess we’re not a secret anymore.”

Besides examining courthouses in several cities, Pakula spent time with prosecuting attorneys.

“You could become a trial junkie very easily,” Pakula says. “It’s great theater. I came away with a very good impression of the prosecutors. They’re dedicated and they could make a lot more money in private practice, but they stay on.

“You can read a lot about the cities in their courthouses. You see Newark and Detroit fighting for survival. The courthouses are decaying and overcrowded. There are cartons of papers stacked in the corridors. Yet they’re symbols of the rule of law, and they hang on to a certain kind of grandeur, even if you get the feeling the cities are tearing apart at the seams.

“Our film, I hope, has a hard edge about morality. Our hero’s a man devoted to the principles of law, yet in himself he finds this uncontrolled behavior, this overwhelming passion.

“It makes for suspenseful stuff. And suspense, experimenting with style and technique, is a wonderful way to exercise your craft.”