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 keane interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Director Lodge Kerrigan on madness in New York. “I was very interested in this idea of how all of our lives can change irreversibly in a very short period of time,” explains writer/director Lodge Kerrigan of his new film, Keane. “If I was living on the streets of New York and very few people talked to me, and people rejected me day in and day out, I think – like all of us – my mental health would deteriorate quite quickly.”In Kerrigan’s remarkable Keane, executive produced by Steven Soderbergh, the eponymous drifter (Damian Lewis, astounding), haunted by the loss of his young daughter, fruitlessly scours New York’s underbelly to find out what happened to her. It’s an intense, unsettling portrait of a tortured soul fuelled by alcohol, cocaine and incessant voices within. Sometimes it seems as if the camera isn’t merely inches from Lewis’ head, but somehow inside it.  “I thought it would have the biggest emotional impact on an audience,” observes Kerrigan, “if they had a real empathy for what he was going through. To achieve that I decided to keep Keane in frame, keep Damian in frame, in every shot of the movie. In terms of coverage, all the scenes are shot in real time and in one shot; all of the cuts are jump-cuts. Again, that was trying to foster this idea that an audience could actually feel it occurring and developing in front of them.” It’s a bold strategy to use when filming on location in Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, where over 200,000 people arrive every day. Shooting extended takes meant that, say, three-and-a-half minutes into a four-minute take, if one passer-by looked into the lens, the footage was unusable. Yet Kerrigan has few regrets. “Most of the people walking through the frame in the Port Authority scenes are actual commuters,” he notes. “It was a lot of hard work, but it was exhilarating - the energy that the environment and shooting live gives the actors and the crew. I’d definitely do it again.”  The third in a series of films (after Clean, Shaven and Claire Dolan) to have focused on emotionally fragile protagonists, Kerrigan hopes his films can deliver an alternative perspective on those blighted by mental illness. “Usually when the media covers them it’s in the context of violence and it definitely creates a prejudice,” he argues. “But, statistically, people who suffer from mental illness are no more violent than anyone else in society.”
Leigh Singer
Keane, on selected release 22 September 06.
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