9 Fascinating Facts About ‘Witness’

On February 8, 1985, Witness defied expectations by opening to largely rave reviews and a second-place finish at the weekend’s box office. Four weeks later, it would become the first film of 1985 to unseat Beverly Hills Cop from the number-one spot. All told, Witness would gross nearly $69 million worldwide, turn Danny Glover and Kelly McGillis into movie stars, and reinvent action hero Harrison Ford as a serious actor, landing him his first (and so far only) Oscar nomination.

Pretty impressive for a film no one wanted to make. Australian director Peter Weir’s (Picnic at Hanging Rock) American debut, about a Philadelphia homicide cop who is tasked with protecting a young Amish widow and her son after the boy witnesses a murder, was a hard sell in a Hollywood that was cranking out high-concept comedies, sci-fi spectacles, and teen movies. Witness is none of those things. Thriller elements aside, it’s largely set in Pennsylvania’s Amish country and centers on a doomed affair between an “English” and an Amish woman, yet it won over audiences with its pitch-perfect blend of suspense and romance. On the eve of its 40th anniversary, here are a few things you might not know about Witness.   

1. Witness began as an unproduced Gunsmoke script.
2. It was turned down by several major studios, partly because studio heads didn’t think Harrison Ford could act.
3. David Cronenberg and John Badham were among the directors who weren’t interested. 
4. Robert Redford wanted to play John Book.
5. Ford was skeptical about casting Kelly McGillis. 
6. McGillis moved in with an Amish family to prepare for her role, while Ford embedded himself in a Philadelphia homicide squad.
7. It was Viggo Mortensen’s film debut.
8. The script was tweaked to take advantage of Harrison Ford’s carpentry skills.
9. Members of the local Amish community refused to appear on film as extras, but they provided technical services and labor for the production.

Witness began as an unproduced Gunsmoke script.

In the 1970s, William Kelley and Earl W. Wallace were writers on the long-running CBS Western Gunsmoke. According to a 1985 interview with film scholar Michael T. Marsden that was published in the book In the Eye of the Beholder: Critical Perspectives in Popular Film and Television, it was in the final year of the show’s run that they cooked up a story inspired by Amish characters from an unproduced TV movie Kelley had written called Jedidiah.

The would-be Gunsmoke episode had one of the show’s white-hat characters—probably Buck Taylor’s deputy Newly O’Brian—defend a member of an Amish-like religious sect the writers dubbed the “Simonites” from a group of men who were harassing her. The character got shot for his trouble and was taken back to the Simonite community to convalesce, where he fell in love with the woman he’d protected.

Gunsmoke was canceled before the episode was produced, but Kelley and Wallace got plenty of mileage from it later. The pair reworked it for a first-season arc of the TV series How the West Was Won, porting over the fictional Simonites and placing Bruce Boxleitner’s Luke Macahan in the role that would eventually become Harrison Ford’s John Book.

By 1981, both men had moved on to other projects, but at Wallace’s behest, they began collaborating on a script that would update their fish-out-of-water story to what was then the present day, ultimately moving the story to Pennsylvania Amish Country and replacing their cowboy hero with a Philadelphia homicide detective.

It was turned down by several major studios, partly because studio heads didn’t think Harrison Ford could act.

Wallace and Kelley’s script—co-written with Wallace’s novelist wife Pamela, who reportedly came up with the idea to update the story in the first place—found its way to producer Edward S. Feldman in 1983. According to Feldman’s 2005 autobiography Tell Me How You Love the Picture, it was originally titled Called Home, an Amish euphemism for dying, and weighed in at a hefty 182 pages, which would have translated to roughly three hours of screen time. The script had already been in circulation for a while, but its length, coupled with the amount of time it spent explaining and depicting Amish customs, turned off studio heads. One development executive told Feldman that the crime-thriller aspects of the story were “diluted by all the Amish stuff.”

Feldman bought the script out of his own pocket and convinced the writers to whittle it down and step up the pacing, but he still hit roadblocks when he took the new version to studios. Fox told him they didn’t make “rural movies,” but an executive there told Feldman he might have better look with a major star attached. Feldman thought Harrison Ford fit the bill—Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Star Wars films were minting money for their respective studios. But even with Ford attached, Witness was a hard pass. Fox still didn’t do “rural movies.” Warner Bros. balked at Ford’s $2 million fee. MGM told Feldman that Ford couldn’t act. Finally, Paramount expressed interest—but only if Feldman could bring them a director. 

David Cronenberg and John Badham were among the directors who weren’t interested. 

Feldman claimed he thought of Australian arthouse director Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock; Gallipoli) right away, but Weir was already committed to what would eventually become another Harrison Ford vehicle: Warner’s The Mosquito Coast.

That left Feldman searching for a director. Bullitt director Peter Yates was briefly attached, but he left Witness to work on another film. Arthur Penn (Bonnie & Clyde) was game, but Paramount didn’t want him. John Badham, who directed Saturday Night Fever and scored a 1983 hit with War Games, didn’t want to do a police thriller. David Cronenberg, fresh off The Dead Zone, was invited to direct, but he didn’t like Amish culture, which he saw as a “repressive, enclosed society,” per the 1993 book Cronenberg on Cronenberg.

Feldman was getting desperate when he finally got a break: The Mosquito Coast had been delayed, and Weir was available after all.

Robert Redford wanted to play John Book.

During a pre-production meeting in February 1984 with then-Paramount president Michael Eisner, Feldman and Weir learned that Robert Redford was interested in Witness’s starring role. Weir was mightily tempted; Redford was an Oscar-nominated actor who had proved his dramatic bona fides in films such as All the President’s Men, The Sting, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But Feldman, backed up by Eisner and other Paramount executives, convinced Weir to meet with Ford. Feldman was worried it wouldn’t go well, but he shouldn’t have been. In his words, the two men “fell in love.” They got along so well that when Weir’s Mosquito Coast finally got back on track, he cast Ford in the lead.

Ford was skeptical about casting Kelly McGillis. 

Kelly McGillis, who would go on to star in Top Gun and The Accused, had done only one theatrical feature before she was cast as young Amish widow Rachel Lapp in Witness. In fact, according to Feldman, she had been working in a New York City coffee shop just five months before the movie began shooting.

While Feldman and Weir were impressed with McGillis right away, Ford took some convincing. He didn’t think she was a good choice for the role and only came around when Weir gently chastised him for not trusting the director’s instincts. The famously cranky Ford relented, reportedly telling Feldman, “Well then, I guess she’s in the picture.”

The pair apparently got along well enough on set, but the two actors didn’t exactly become fast friends as Ford and Weir had. McGillis later praised Ford for his professionalism while noting that “he’s a very private person” and “doesn’t open up easily to people,” as recounted in Robert Sellers’s 1993 book Harrison Ford: A Biography.

McGillis moved in with an Amish family to prepare for her role, while Ford embedded himself in a Philadelphia homicide squad.

To help her play the character of Rachel Lapp, McGillis—a Julliard-educated California native—went to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and spent several days living with an Amish woman and her seven children. McGillis pitched in with the household chores, learning to milk cows, plant potatoes, and seed alfalfa.

There’s some debate about how her residency ended; there were allegations that she’d failed to tell the family she was an actress preparing for a role and got kicked out, but McGillis insisted that was not the case. A Paramount spokesperson told reporters the actress left the home to avoid causing trouble for her host family after her photograph appeared in a local newspaper. She decamped to an apartment nearby and continued to study Amish customs and dialect. 

Ford took a similarly immersive approach to his role as John Book. He spent two weeks with a Philadelphia homicide squad, going so far as to participate in a pair of raids targeting suspected killers. He was even shown the corpses of murder victims, both in crime scene photos and, apparently, in person. “The first corpse was shocking,” Ford once said, “and the fifth was just as shocking.” 

It was Viggo Mortensen’s film debut.

When Witness was in production in the spring and summer of 1984, Viggo Mortensen was a 25-year-old unknown actor who had yet to make his big-screen debut—he lost out to Christopher Lambert for the starring role in that year’s The Legend of Tarzan and his role had been cut entirely from Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Mortensen’s luck changed with Witness. Though he was originally hired to deliver a single word of dialogue during the film’s opening funeral scene, Weir liked him enough to expand his role and ask him to stick around for six weeks.

“That movie gave me the absolute wrong idea of what filmmaking is like,” Mortensen said in a 2016 interview with Vulture. “The director was polite and there was no yelling, and everything ran smoothly and professionally. ... It was like, ‘Wow, what a great business!’ Then it took me another 20 years to have another experience like that.” 

The script was tweaked to take advantage of Harrison Ford’s carpentry skills.

Around 1970, Ford—who taught himself woodworking by investing in a few power tools and rebuilding his house—left his job as a studio contract actor to pursue carpentry full-time. He soon became a sort of carpenter to the stars, working for the likes of Joan Didion and Rocky actress Talia Shire. By the time he was cast in George Lucas’s American Graffiti, his carpentry skills were in such high demand in Hollywood that returning to acting meant taking a pay cut—his weekly pay for what would be his breakout role amounted to about half of what he was making as a carpenter at the time. 

When Weir was reworking the script for Witness, he set his sights on a brief scene where Ford’s character John Book assists in a barn-raising, only to fall from the roof and be saved by an Amish man who happens to be his rival for the affections of McGillis’s Rachel Lapp. Weir scrapped that beat and replaced it with the elaborate barn-raising that is now one of the movie’s highlights. Weir took advantage of his star’s skills and workmanship. For his part, Ford insisted that Witness’s onscreen carpentry be technically accurate—though he had to settle for spruce boards rather than the more expensive oak that Amish builders would have preferred. The scene ended up being one the biggest carpentry jobs Ford had undertaken so far, but Weir reported that he had loved doing it. As for his beloved barn, it didn’t survive long after production; the landowner reportedly tore it down and sold the lumber. Weir would also draw on Ford’s construction skills in The Mosquito Coast.

Members of the local Amish community refused to appear on film as extras, but they provided technical services and labor for the production.

Amish people are not a monolith; like adherents of any other religion, some hold views that are more conservative or more progressive than others. In general, though, they prefer not to pose for photographs, citing the Second Commandment’s admonishment against “graven images.” This made recruiting members of Lancaster’s Amish community to appear as extras in Witness a nonstarter. Some local Amish men worked behind the scenes as laborers and technicians, but there were no actual Amish people visible in the film. “I promised them if they worked on the movie, they would never be shown on camera, even as extras,” Feldman wrote. For scenes that required large casts of Amish characters, including the barn-raising scene, the filmmakers turned to members of the local Mennonite community, whose beliefs do not preclude posing or acting for the camera, and outfitted the men with prosthetic beards to make them look Amish.

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