Pakula didn't eliminate the animal passion of the novel's characters; he just buried it, like a banked fire with a few coals glowing through the ashes. He utterly transformed Pierson's planned sex scenes featuring Scacchi. ''The camera looks back with Rusty's prosecutor's eye, cold and rational. Until the very last shot, which slams into a close-up of Scacchi's face, the camera just does not move — it stays on the wall like some ruthless voyeur that refuses to get involved,'' says Pakula. The result won't please everyone — Pierson's original down-and-dirty sex scene might well have been more popular. But Pakula got what he wanted — the sense of rage rigidly repressed by lawyerly instinct that he found in Turow.

He also got a gratifying box-office response: The movie grossed nearly $12 million in its first weekend. Pakula is entitled to take a moment to gloat over its early success — but he won't. Instead, he has put Presumed Innocent quite behind him. All traces of the production have been removed from his bulletin boards, except for a photo of Harrison Ford, which Pakula insisted on covering up before our interview. (Maybe it was just distracting. But considering that he once planned a career as a psychiatrist, and that his films reveal a shrink's subtle insights, maybe he has a shrink's characteristic neuroses as well.)

Pakula's forthcoming project is a change of pace, a non-book-based screenplay (reportedly a black comedy about AIDS cowritten by Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau for the Disney Studio). Pakula says that he's ready for something completely differentntrom the tense, ascetic discipline of Presumed Innocent: ''Now I want to do a film where the camera never stops moving,'' he says, chuckling.

But he plans to keep transmuting books into movies. ''I do try to be true to what's been accomplished in prose using the different techniques of film. It requires,'' he says with finality, ''a magician with different tricks.''

Originally posted Aug 10, 1990 Published in issue #26 Aug 10, 1990 Order article reprints
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