MOVIES : ON LOCATION : ‘The Innocent’ Abroad : A Cold War thriller is under way at Germany’s DEFA studio, where Fritz Lang made ‘Metropolis’ and the Nazis shot propaganda films.

On the way from downtown Berlin to the DEFA film studio, in this leafy suburb that until recently was part of East Germany, one passes a wide clearing between tall buildings. “That,” says a German companion, “is where the Wall used to be. Strange. It wasn’t torn down so long ago, but sometimes we find it hard to remember how it looked.”

Long before the Wall was even contemplated, DEFA (Deutsche Film Ateliers) was playing a significant part in film history. Fritz Lang’s classic 1926 silent movie “Metropolis” was shot here when it was known as UFA, and four years later so was Josef von Sternberg’s “The Blue Angel,” which propelled Marlene Dietrich to international stardom. During World War II, Joseph Goebbels supervised the making of propaganda films here for the Third Reich.

But this sprawling lot has suffered a decline in the last decade, and its sound stages have been filled mainly with domestic TV series. At one time it seemed possible that DEFA, despite a glittering history and international reputation, might close.

Now the fall of the Wall and the reunification of Germany in 1990 have given DEFA employees cause for optimism. The state-run studio has become a private concern, and a French conglomerate, Compagnie Generale des Eaux, has been negotiating to buy the studio and keep it in business. Western advisers have visited and suggested ways DEFA might sell itself, which now translates into daily lines for a studio tour, including the “Metropolis” stage, the costume and vehicle departments and a set of a German TV miniseries.

The Universal Studios Tour it is not, though it epitomizes the studio’s determination to survive through turbulent periods of history. Still, the major cause for high spirits around DEFA is to be found on another sound stage, seen only from a distance by tour visitors. Here a big-budget international film is being shot, of the kind DEFA hopes to attract in coming years now that the restrictive shackles of East Germany’s Communist government have been thrown aside.

This is “The Innocent,” with a script by English novelist Ian McEwan from his own novel and starring Welshman Anthony Hopkins, still reveling in his Oscar for “The Silence of the Lambs,” Italian-Swedish actress Isabella Rossellini and American actor Campbell Scott (“Longtime Companion,” “Dying Young” and “The Sheltering Sky”). Director John Schlesinger is English, but hardly a stranger to Hollywood, where he once picked up an Oscar for “Midnight Cowboy.” Of the three producers, two are German and one is British. There are American dollars and German marks financing the film. The crew is a mixture of Britons and Germans.

“The Innocent” is the first international film to be shot at DEFA since reunification, which has added resonance considering its story. Most of the action is set in Berlin in the mid-1950s, about five years before the Berlin Wall was built. The script, like the novel, has a brief coda set in 1987, three years before the Wall was torn down.

Scott plays Leonard, a young English telecommunications expert sent to Berlin to install phone taps in a tunnel secretly being dug by the Allies beneath the city’s Soviet sector. The intent is to monitor communications that link East European capitals with the high command in Moscow. He is befriended at the installation by American Bob Glass (Hopkins) and falls in love with Maria, a young German woman (Rossellini). In this atmosphere of mistrust, nothing is quite what it seems and no one says what he or she means; soon, Leonard becomes party to a grisly crime.

The ambiguities of the story are enhanced by the casting. Scott is an American playing an Englishman, Hopkins a Briton playing an American and Rossellini portrays a German. “The casting is an equivalent to the melange of styles in Ian’s story,” says Wieland Schulz-Keil, one of the film’s producers. “I was pleased about that.” Schlesinger, who approved all three main choices, added: “I don’t care about nationality. You just get the best actors for the job.”

Yet 18 months ago, “The Innocent” was a very different project with a different set of actors. Back then, it was to be a Paramount movie with Kyle MacLachlan as the innocent Leonard, Lena Olin as Maria and Willem Dafoe set to join the cast as Bob Glass. Jon Amiel, best known for his TV masterpiece “The Singing Detective,” was to direct; Norma Heyman (a producer on “Dangerous Liaisons”) would produce.

Of that group only Heyman is still around. In February last year, just after the start of the Gulf War, Paramount put the film in turnaround three weeks before shooting was due to start. The decision came as a shock; “The Innocent” was to have been the first production start from the studio’s much-vaunted European office, based in London.

One problem was that the war created insurance difficulties for actors flying to Germany.

When Paramount backed out, Heyman accused the studio of “creative hesitation,” and she still believes it found the story unappealing. “It’s a spectacular story, with love, passion and paranoia,” Heyman says. “But I know it’s a hard sell too. I knew how to sell ‘Dangerous Liaisons’--that was ‘Dynasty’ with long frocks. This wasn’t as simple.”

Of Paramount’s decision to pull the plug, Heyman now says: “I was in a slight state of panic. I set about trying to refinance it in three weeks--and of course, I couldn’t.”

An International Creative Management agent introduced her to Schulz-Keil and a fellow German producer, Chris Sievernich, who had collaborated on John Huston’s last film, “The Dead,” and who brought funding to the film. Then production money came from World Films in the United States, and “The Innocent” was back on track with a $16-million budget. “Even so,” Heyman says with a sigh, “it’s taken longer than I dreamed possible to get this film started.”

With production under way, Heyman bounds around the set enthusiastically, grabbing production designer Luciana Arrighi by the arm and marching her and a visitor to the sound stage where the tunnel of McEwan’s story was created. The huge tunnel is lined with an intricate system of bare phone wires, and wagons piled with earth run through it on narrow tracks. “Look what Luciana did!” Heyman cries. “A woman designed this, and it’s a real macho set, don’t you think? A real guy’s set!”

Later that day Hopkins and Rossellini are involved in a small, intimate scene in Maria’s bedroom. This is a small, drab, poor place, suffused in yellow light. A collage of 1950s movie magazine portraits has been pasted on Maria’s wall; in an affectionate gesture to Rossellini, a picture of her mother, Ingrid Bergman, has been placed prominently.

Schlesinger sits on the other side of the apartment wall in a canvas chair and views proceedings through a monitor.

Schlesinger has been associated with thoughtful films, some commercial successes (“Midnight Cowboy,” “Marathon Man”) and some interesting but not-so-commercial works (“The Falcon and the Snowman,” “Madame Souzatska”). He has often said he does one film for “them” (meaning commercial material) then one for himself.

“I’m quite conscious that my taste is not the average taste,” he says, “so there have been films in my life which I’ve taken on because I felt they had a chance of being popular. ‘Pacific Heights,’ for instance, came at a time when I had just done ‘Madame Souzatska.’ ” The latter was a small British film, he says, that he made for himself.

So, he says, is “The Innocent”: “Certainly no one is breathing down my neck to say, ‘Do this to suit the lowest common denominator.’ It has an element of suspense about spying, it’s a love story, it has violence, plus a black farce element. Of course, none of us can prophesy how it will do.”

Espionage and treason are common themes in his films, from “The Falcon and the Snowman” to “An Englishman Abroad,” the critically revered film he made for BBC television about an episode in the life of British spy Guy Burgess. Last year Schlesinger filmed a companion piece, “A Question of Attribution,” about another British traitor, Sir Anthony Blunt; both works were written by playwright Alan Bennett.

“It’s a fascinating area,” Schlesinger says. “To become a spy must be a difficult line to cross. Either you’re totally venal or politically motivated. But selling your country down the river is something Americans don’t like to see on film, which may be why ‘Falcon and the Snowman’ was not a commercial success. There was no one audiences could root for. Whereas we British regard spying with a sort of detached irony.”

When Schlesinger first became involved in “The Innocent” a year ago, he was confronted with the original contracted actors. “They wouldn’t have been my cast,” he says. “Well, Lena Olin, maybe. But I couldn’t be happier with the cast we have. They all have depth--there’s more going on with them than meets the eye.

“We considered British actors for Leonard, of course. Then the casting director told me to take a look at Campbell Scott, and he came in and wiped the floor with all of them.”

As for Rossellini, “She’s been terribly underused,” says Schlesinger, watching her in scenes shot that day replayed on the monitor. “I think she’s wonderful. But the attitude has been--well, she’s a Lancome model, she was married to Martin Scorsese, then she was with David Lynch and did films with him, and she’s Ingrid Bergman’s daughter. I don’t think anyone has realized her potential. Isabella has the most extraordinary sense of herself. She’s bright, intelligent, and she’s fun.”

Hopkins is another Rossellini fan. “Looks just like Mum, doesn’t she?” he says. And as Maria, in a 1950s-style wig, she certainly does. “We did this scene at Templehof Airport,” Hopkins says. “Sort of a farewell scene, rather like ‘Casablanca.’ And I couldn’t help it, I just turned to her and said (here he lapses into a perfect Humphrey Bogart imitation): ‘Kid, this could be the end of a beautiful friendship.’ Cracked her up, it did.”

In her trailer, Rossellini reflects that “The Innocent” is probably her most challenging work to date: “Everyone is suspicious of everybody else, everything is impregnated with mistrust. You’re left with suspicion, you’re left with ambiguity. Which is hard to play.”

She says cautiously that she is happy with her eight-year stint as an actress, which continues alongside her career as a model and spokeswoman for Lancome, now in its 11th year. She also acknowledges that she may be stepping from the long shadows cast by Scorsese, Lynch and her mother.

“I’ve never perceived myself as being somebody else’s person,” she muses. “I may be perceived by others that way, but what can you do? At the end of my life, I’ll be 80, and people will say, well, it wasn’t just David Lynch or whoever, it was her. I know there’s already been too many occasions when I’ve been hired by people other than those who loved me. I’ve noticed that first, of course, because this is my life. In the future maybe other people will notice too.”

Rossellini relishes working with Schlesinger, who, she says, “explains everything to you in detail. Which is such a change. Tony (Hopkins) said to me about David (Lynch), who he worked with on ‘The Elephant Man’: ‘He’s not very verbal, is he?’ And I completely understood. I was much more in the dark with David, who on the set would ask you to do things and you didn’t understand why. It’s much better to have things explained to you. You don’t feel like a tool of the director. You participate and you get enthusiastic.”

Hopkins in the adjacent trailer is only becoming enthusiastic slowly. “It’s no one’s fault,” he says, “but all the scenes we did first were big crowd scenes or purely mechanical scenes. Which meant there was a lot of getting in and out of cars or opening doors, that sort of thing. Gradually the scenes have become smaller as we have gone along, which gives you more to do.”

“The Innocent” provides another chance for Hopkins to demonstrate his dazzling gifts of mimicry. “Glass is from the Midwest,” he says--McEwan’s novel specifies that he is from Cedar Rapids, Iowa--”and I’ve been working with a dialogue coach to make sure I’ve got him down OK.”

He then launches into an imitation of Schlesinger’s plummy, Oxford-educated accent: “John is detailed and precise. There’s a certain volatility about him. He’s on a short fuse; he wants everything right now. But everyone has a temperament. That’s OK. It’s only when it gets in the way of the work and makes things unpleasant for people. That isn’t happening here.

“And although John is determined in his vision, he’s also quite accommodating to people’s ideas. This morning a scene wasn’t working, and I asked him if we could try playing it slower. He agreed quite happily, and it worked much better.”

Scott looks quite relaxed for a man who has spent two grueling days in makeup tests, trying out different looks for the parts of “The Innocent” that show Leonard 30 years on. “It’s worth getting it right,” he says. “John says if this looks wrong, the whole movie looks wrong, and I agree.”

Leonard is a crucial role for Scott’s film career. At 30, he has a solid stage background, but is best known for his roles in “Longtime Companion,” “Dying Young” and Bertolucci’s “The Sheltering Sky.” (He will also be seen in the upcoming Cameron Crowe movie “Singles.”)

“Film is something new to me, and I’m still learning from it,” says Campbell, the son of actors George C. Scott and the late Colleen Dewhurst. “That’s why it’s so terrific to be around Tony. There’s no bull---- about him; he’s just so damn good at his craft. Still, at the moment, film’s travel and theater’s home, and while I don’t quite know what I’ll do next, I’d like to get back to the theater for a while.”

Each night the cast and crew return to downtown Berlin, across a now invisible dividing line that once brutally separated east from west. There remains a faint whiff of mystery in the air of Berlin, a city slowly awakening from a 30-year fever dream. It may well be now that everything is what it seems, that everyone means what he or she says. But even before the Wall, this was the world capital of espionage, a city of torn loyalties, dual meanings, casual duplicities. The perfect place, one could conclude, to shoot “The Innocent.”