This month marks the thirtieth anniversary of a film that, at the time of its release, seemed like a mishmash of bad ideas and incompatible genres: A semi-pacifist thriller with a swooning romance at its core; a subtle, sincere drama with a high-concept premise —Amish cop! — better suited for a broad comedy; and a star-driven studio picture that forced its charismatic lead to tone down his roguish charms.

That movie was Peter Weir’s Witness, the Harrison Ford-starring thriller that would go on to earn eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. Everything about Witness was unusual, starting with its origin story. Screenwriters William Kelley and Pamela & Earl W. Wallace were TV veterans with no major big-screen credits before (or after) this one, and the plot they concocted seemed ripe for mockery: A big-city police officer goes into hiding in Pennsylvania’s Amish community to protect a young boy (and his widowed mother) after the child witnesses a murder perpetrated by corrupt cops.

The script had made the rounds in Hollywood for most of the 1980s, with the first studio, 20th Century Fox passing on the film, reportedly because the company didn’t make “rural movies.” But Paramount stepped up, and after a few false starts with casting (Sylvester Stallone recently confessed he’d passed on the movie), Ford signed up, with Australian director Peter Weir (The Year Of Living Dangerously) brought in to direct.

The movie was a bold choice for Ford. The actor had spent the first half of the ‘80s mostly alternating between playing Indiana Jones and Han Solo, and Witness was his first real foray into quieter, more nuanced work. Nevertheless, the studio sold the movie as, well, a Harrison Ford film, with a trailer that positioned it as a gritty, gnarly B-movie soaked with neon and an ominous synth score.

So it’s likely some moviegoers were baffled by the film’s Ford-free first scene, which quietly and meditatively introduces us to the Amish world. It’s a sorrowful time: Rachel (Kelly McGillis, in what became a breakthrough role) has lost her husband, and she, her son, and the rest of the community are in deep mourning. Yet Weir and the writers are determined not to make Witness maudlin: The first lines of English dialogue in the film are spoken by a group of joking Amish men, immediately humanizing a world that could be very alien. Instead, it’s “our” world that’s the strange one, as we see it through the eyes of Rachel’s eight-year-old son Samuel (Lukas Haas, who’d grow up to appear in films like Inception and Lincoln), as he experiences the big city for the first time.

Weir imbues these early moments with a real sense of awe and wonder — a tactic that pays off beautifully as the plot kicks in: Samuel goes to the bathroom, and witnesses two men (including future Lethal Weapon star Danny Glover) murder another.

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