How Apple TV+ Crafted an Unpredictable Presumed Innocent

After seven long weeks and dozens upon dozens of fan theories piling up online, the first season of Apple TV+’s Presumed Innocent has finally come to a close, and its climactic twist left many viewers reeling. Despite being an adaptation of Scott Turow’s beloved 1987 novel of the same name (and Alan J. Pakula’s similarly beloved 1990 film), David E. Kelley’s new series wasn’t afraid to take risks with the source material—not only was the original story updated to fall more in line with 2024 sensibilities (particularly regarding its treatment of gender), the plot itself received a massive upheaval, featuring new characters, a new killer, and now a second season, which will continue far beyond the original novel’s conclusion. Paste spoke with directors Anne Sewitsky (known for the Norwegian comedy Happy, Happy and responsible for the first, second, and final episodes of the season) and Greg Yaitanes (a TV veteran whose work spans from House, M.D. to House of the Dragon, and directed the middle stretch of episodes for Presumed Innocent) about the series, its big reveal, balancing intimacy and suspense, and the show’s future.

Note: These interviews have been edited for length and clarity, and contain spoilers for Presumed Innocent‘s season finale. 

Paste Magazine: First of all, congratulations on the finale airing! Was it a relief to no longer have to keep it a secret? Any favorite fan theories from before the reveal?

Anne Sewitsky: Yeah, it’s definitely a relief. I think we’ve managed to keep it a secret for very, very long. There were a lot of fun theories out there. My father was obsessed with Bill Camp, and from the very first episode, he was like, “it’s him.” So we went down that route; I kind of nourished his obsession. At one point, I did find myself thinking, “Okay, then, did we not put out enough clues that this would be a satisfying ending?” But then, I’m really relieved that the response to the ending has been really, really great.

Greg Yaitanes: It was a blast watching everyone’s reactions; a lot of people I hadn’t heard from in a long time would write me like, “I know we haven’t talked in a while, how are you doing, here’s who I think who did it.” So it was fun to see everybody guessing. I directed those middle five episodes, so I had to carry a lot of the weight of directing all that suspicion everywhere—where your eye is going and what you’re listening to and who’s saying what. I just wanted people’s normal day-to-day weirdness to be suddenly filtered through the lens of like, “Are they a murderer?” There was a lot of careful shot construction to make sure people were looking where I wanted them to look. Only one person, though—which actually, weirdly, was my agent—had the killer in their sights early on, although then he moved off of it. But that’s the closest I ever saw anybody get.

Paste: Throughout the series, there was almost this will-they-won’t-they tension with the book’s famous twist: will they make Barbara the killer, or won’t they? How did you balance the source material—the book, the movie—with the original story you were telling?

Sewitsky: Well, I think the material from the book and also the scripts, it was really strong. I guess it was always about both playing the opposites. And the actors were really collaborative, in a very playful way, so that we were kind of improvising and making up stuff; we were adding all kinds of extra moments and extra small beats and scenes in case we had to come turn it another way. It was almost like collecting all this material and then molding it afterwards. And tracking the emotional arcs of all the characters more than plot was really important for me—I wanted to kind of see, “Okay, if we have a guilty Rusty or a not-guilty Rusty, either way, this family’s going through something horrific.” I think Jake Gyllenhaal nails that; he always chooses very complex and interesting characters, and I think what he really did brilliantly in this is that he showed a lot of vulnerability. He’s really kind of fighting for his life and, doing that, all of those sides come out. So that also, hopefully, made the audience more confused. It’s not a one-sided character. It’s all those sides that you also probably can experience, whether you’re guilty or not.

Yaitanes: The thing that I liked about people that had either read the book or seen the movie—or both—was that built-in sense of doubt: “Are they doing the book? Are they doing the movie? Are they doing something different?” I wanted people thinking “Well, they’re not going to do the movie,” because what we all talked about—and what David did—was wanting to drive up to the original ending of the book and the movie with that garage scene being laid out the way it was laid out, which I loved; up ’til the last second, you’re like “Oh my God!”

Paste: I know; the shot of the hatchet on the wall? That threw me off for a second.

Yaitanes: Yes! I specifically wanted the original hatchet from the movie [hung on the garage wall] just as an Easter egg for those that caught it, which you clearly did. And that I really loved. We wanted it there, so that when he comes in to sit down with her, you’re like, “Oh my God. They’re doing the movie.” And then for those that hadn’t seen it, you don’t know where to look. You’re wondering what’s going on.

Paste: Yeah, you’re just like, “Who needs this many tools on their garage wall, what the hell?”

Yaitanes: Yeah, exactly. It was just to give a nod to the original, for those who might see it. But in general, what I was hoping that people would feel was that there might be some larger conspiracy around [Carolyn Polhemus’] death, between the hiding evidence, whatever with Tommy and Della Guardia, and what might be going on there, and Rigo having to dig in. And, at the same time, gender-swapping some of the characters posed challenges, because in the movie, the John Spencer character is really a real friend to [Rusty], and we kind of combined the Brian Dennehy character with the John Spencer character in Bill Camp. And so when Rigo shows up, there’s only so far that that relationship can go because, you know, Harrison Ford and John Spencer were having beers and hanging out as guys. Here, there’s much more professional relationships, so how can you push that without tipping somebody over into compromising their own ethics and doing something illegal? So there were things like that, that we drove up to and had to figure out and it was great, because I think creativity comes out of limitation. And so when you’re faced with some of those things, when you sit and discuss it, it pushes you in certain directions.

Paste: Greg, you directed a lot of the episodes that had Peter [Sarsgaard] and Jake [Gyllenhaal] go head-to-head, which was always so much fun. What was that like to witness; how did their innate camaraderie and long history play into shooting?

Yaitanes: Well, they have such trust for each other—I feel that you can’t have trust without love and that love is there, even when they’re playing bitter opposites. I think they were even roommates at the time in L.A., so they were able to work that scene and show up and just knock it out. I had cameras going on each of them at the same time so I didn’t miss any magic. Peter and Jake—and this isn’t always the case when I work with actors—they both work from a real place of joy, which is also a place that I work from. The two of them together just allowed those scenes to hum.

Paste: The camera often felt so mobile in those courtroom scenes; it gave this more kinetic, or frenetic, energy to a genre that is often viewed as more sterile. Since you directed the bulk of the court episodes, how did you balance the natural tediousness of the court with the desire to not only keep audiences entertained, but ratchet up the very high stakes that are already present?

Yaitanes: Thank you for noticing that! That was something that I went headfirst into for Episode 7; I thought that this one needed to feel that the entire ground of the show was out from under us. A lot of the previous episodes also took place in that same courtroom, so approaching 7 differently, more frenetically, was really important, as was getting into Rusty’s subjective experience more. I wanted things to feel like we were in the room with these scenes so they weren’t traditional masters and coverage. I love Michael Mann’s work in The Insider in terms of just being right behind people’s heads, so that was something that I was channeling for sure. I didn’t want to go out wide, I wanted to be inside and just pacing around with the character. One of the things that we really did—David gave us good inspiration on this—was to leave the scene and go to flashes, to go to things and get inside the characters heads, which I loved doing. There’s an elegance to that. And I’m just fascinated by intrusive thoughts, you know? When you’re with somebody and it’s, like, the most inappropriate time to be thinking about somebody and or something, and yet it pops in anyway, what does that mean? I wanted something that was connective. You just have to intuit where the right place is to go for it. It can’t be a crutch. It just has to be a piece of punctuation.

Anne and I actually had a conversation about this—that she could do whatever she wanted in [Episode] 8 because anytime we’re seeing these flashes of the night of the murder, they’re through the lens of the person telling them or perceiving them. It’s not necessarily 100% what took place or how it went down. Everybody’s gleaning their best, and I wanted to try to point towards that subjectivity—that people can look at evidence however they want to look at it and find the story that they’re looking for it to tell.

Paste: Those middle episodes were a kind of balancing act between the intimate family affair at the show’s heart and the courtroom drama that they’re caught up in. How did you approach those two sides of the story to make them more into one interwoven tapestry?

Yaitanes: Doing five [episodes] in a row and being able to block the work together allowed us to go into the Sabich house, specifically, in sequence. So, we always knew exactly where we were coming from emotionally. And that’s one of the great things that David [Kelley] did here: being able to spend more time with the family, this family that’s in crisis. Coming from a big dysfunctional Greek family, I can draw from so many aspects of my life, and I just really enjoy being in the mud of those kinds of stories. And then balancing that against the thriller elements… One of the things that I wanted to do when I started directing, what got me excited about directing, were the ‘80s and ‘90s thrillers. So this is me exercising that muscle, once and for all, and that was exciting to lean into—because you don’t know where the killer is hiding and if they are in plain sight or not, that gave me a lot of room to maneuver around.

Paste: Anne, your episodes [1, 2, 8] really honed in on the family; it felt less like an impersonal crime procedural than an emotional family drama. When you signed onto the adaptation. was that kind of always the direction in which the series was set to go, the tone you all wanted to strike? Or did that kind of develop over time?

Sewitsky: I think that was the direction that we decided that it would go. I brought on my DP from Norway, so we’re this small Norwegian clan coming into a very American environment—this very typical American family caught up in this American courtroom procedure. And I remember we were thinking, “How do we approach this? How do we make this interesting or understandable for us?” I guess our take on it was kind of bringing that more Nordic way of observing things. We’re not big on words. You have a longer tradition with television and movies and the written word. We’re quieter people. So we thought very early on that we wanted to have a naturalistic observational approach to these characters. There are so many important moments between the words, between the characters—that silence, those looks—that also gives the audience an ease. When we were shooting it, we did a lot of takes where we took out all the words, and then we put them in again, and then created those moments from there. Some people probably thought we were strange, but hopefully I think they enjoyed it. 

Paste: Obviously, the show updated and elevated the depictions of the female characters a lot, which I definitely appreciated. What was your perspective coming into that, especially as a female director? How did you know what you wanted to change while also being able to make it very noticeably still the same story?

Sewitsky: Well, from the very beginning, the original story feels universal in some ways, feels relevant today in very many ways, but perhaps the female characters felt a bit dated. So from very early on, that was a topic that we discussed a lot: how do we elevate the female characters into becoming modern women? It was the same way that we did it with the men, as well: how do we also make them modern men? How do we make a modern relationship? We’ve seen so many movies and shows now that go deep down into the psychology between a couple, so that was a huge focus. Especially seeing Carolyn, her part, I guess, from the 90s movies, was more femme fatale, very kind of sexualized villain. But here, we try to make her more complex and also bring something more raw and natural into it. And I think probably casting Renata Reinsve, who I knew from Norway, brought something kind of different tonally—her specific kind of sensibility added a lot. I also think broadening the story over eight episodes was important, although before I read the script, I immediately was like, “How can we make this story into eight episodes? What do we do?” But there’s that opportunity to go into each character much more, you can go into female characters much more and you can kind of dig deeper.

Paste: I loved how much attention was given to Ruth Negga’s Barbara in particular throughout the show. How did you decide what direction to take her character to expand her, make her more than the passive wife turned eventual murderer that she was in the original content?

Sewitsky: Oh, yeah. It was always about trying to see her point of view in each scene. It was also important to give her a life outside [of Rusty], give her more screen time to witness her emotions throughout. I think also bringing a therapist into their relationship, both seeing [Barbara] with a therapist and seeing [Barbara and Rusty together] with the therapist, let us dig deeper quite early on. Also, of course, Ruth is just a really great actress; she’s so watchable. I think the casting of her made [Barbara] also grow quite big as a character.

Paste: I have to ask: at what point did you know that Jaden, Rusty’s daughter, was going to be the killer?

Yaitanes: I was aware of it earlier on, but the scripts were coming out, so nobody wanted anybody to tell anybody the ending until they had the final script. We played with the amount of times you’re seeing Jaden, and when to see her—we didn’t want to tip it off, but we also didn’t want to unfairly put her in the background in any way. This is where we landed, and I think it was the right balance. 

Sewitsky: Well, that was a long discussion back and forth. It was kind of a new twist to the whole thing, but at the same time, we wanted to keep it within the family, since we’ve already widened the family, added an extra person. David [Kelley]’s motivation for renewing the movie and the book was to search more within the family. So I knew that it would be potentially Jaden, it could be someone else. And we were kind of playing with that. I think probably early on, we just saw that Chase [Infiniti], who plays Jaden, was brilliant. She has that ability to evoke both warmth and suspicion while being very secretive in all of it, so [the series] kind of went there by itself in some way. But she did not know until the very ending; I told her right before we started shooting the last episode, so that was quite crazy. And we always kind of try to track that backwards. I think she knew that there would be a possibility. There were some other options, but they were all kind of within that group of directions. We always were planning on misleading the audience—always trying to make a show where you would suspect everyone, always trying to make it quite layered and complex, both in plot and character. So much of this show is about the core of the family and what happens within it, the emotional journeys they have. But we wanted to do that with all the other characters too—they all have their own secrets and lies. And at the same time, we’re trying to normalize them. We tried to give them all both a secret life and a very normal kind of life, even while they were attacking each other and becoming suspicious.

But it’s always scary to do the last steps of shows. By the end of the seventh episode, we knew people would be watching the eighth episode, and that’s really, really scary: did we do the right thing? Will people understand it? And how do they track it back? Are they satisfied? Or do they become haters? But yeah, we felt it was right. And I think it seems like most people also feel very content.

Paste: Now that the series is out in its entirety, is there anything you’re hoping people will go back and find now—little foreshadowing moments or Easter eggs; things that you subtly layered in the hopes that maybe someone will look back and see and be like, “Oh, my God”?

Yaitanes: Yeah! We would often talk on set about “Upon second viewing, we would like people to perceive things this way.” For example, when you’re looking at Rusty looking at pictures of Bunny, of Carolyn, on first viewing you don’t think much of it, just “Oh, he’s trying to investigate and solve the crime.” But what he’s really doing is, like, “How well did I tie up those knots to match this?” So often what he’s doing is trying to pin the pieces elsewhere in order to get as much off his family as possible. When you’ve watched through knowing that he did what he did, and Jaden did what she did, everything that came before is now like, “Oh, okay.” It’s all there for you. I did a huge audit of that with the EPs to ensure that we were good in all that area, just to make sure that everything tracked—that there wasn’t any mistake on dates or there wasn’t anything that wasn’t fair to the audience, anything they didn’t have an opportunity to look at. So if they go back and watch it again knowing what they now know, they’ll actually have a new and even more enjoyable experience out of it. 

Paste: One last question: congratulations also on being renewed for a second season, which is huge! I’ll admit, that came as a bit of a surprise when I first saw it because the original source material, both the book and the film, left little room for continuation after the case closed. So is there anything you can tease about what Presumed Innocent might look like after Carolyn Polhemus’ trial is done, even though the specter of her will surely still loom?

Sewitsky: Yeah, well, what can I say? It’s most likely a new case. There’s most likely some of the same characters. And other than that… yet to be known!

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