by MATTHEW HAYS

Lodge Kerrigan has a powerful connection to mental illness. As the New York-based filmmaker tells it, the link came about due to an old friend he has who suffers from a severe case of schizophrenia. “Knowing him really changed things for me,” reports Kerrigan. “It makes you realize how people can become disconnected and isolated so quickly, especially if they have few or no economic means.”

It was in 1994 that Kerrigan, fresh out of NYU film school, made his feature directorial debut with Clean, Shaven, a film that delved into the interior mental landscape of a schizophrenic. Kerrigan brought that film to the ’95 edition of the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, where I sat down with him to talk about the film—one that I dubbed “the first schizophrenic pride movie.” This week led to a strong sense of déjà vu, as I attended a press screening of Kerrigan’s latest, Keane, another film that has wowed fest audiences and made a number of critics’ top-10 lists.

Keane is another unblinking look into the despair one man faces as he attempts to grapple with a past trauma and his own mental breakdown. Shot in intimate close-up, the film begins with Keane (played brilliantly by Damian Lewis) wandering around Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal desperately seeking his long-lost daughter. According to his manic babbling, it seems Keane lost his young daughter in the crowded terminal years before and is still understandably suffering the emotional fallout. Lewis breathes damaged life into Keane, weaving in and out of crowds and eventually traffic, growing more and more anxious. As Kerrigan clearly indicates through the film, the huge numbers of people in an urban space as crowded as Manhattan are no guarantee a person isn’t going to feel isolated. As the film goes on, Keane encounters a young single mother and her precocious nine-year-old daughter, and a friendship grows, one that offers Keane a chance to come to terms with his past.

“The choice of the bus terminal seemed obvious to me,” explains Kerrigan. “The poor often have the toughest time with mental illness, and they are riding the bus, because it’s the cheapest way to travel.” The setting also tied in to Kerrigan’s own personal life: “I have a young daughter, and of course, my worst nightmare is the thought of her wandering off in a crowded place and my losing track of her.”

It’s Soderbergh calling

Kerrigan confirms that making unusual, stark films about topics like mental illness is an uphill battle. But the story behind the making of Keane sounds like something out of a movie itself. One day, Kerrigan got a call that he thought was a practical joke. It was Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, who said he’d really liked Kerrigan’s work and asked if he had any projects Soderbergh could produce. “It’s been amazing working with someone as supportive as Steven is,” Kerrigan says.

With his own distinctive vision in mind and a supportive name producer in place, Kerrigan was able to make Keane on his own terms. As well as being dark, Keane breaks with a long-held standard, even for independent films: it has no soundtrack. “Films are often formulaic, and it seems that people are often afraid of silence. Often, I feel filmmakers are treating the audience like rats, handing them the same stimuli over and over again. How often do we go to a movie and as the final credits roll, a bombastic song begins playing, as if to convince us what we’ve just watched was actually exciting? Once I chose to make something very realistic in style, it would have been wrong to have put a score to the film.”

Despite the difficulties faced by independent filmmakers—Keane is only making it onto Canadian screens two years after it was heralded at the Toronto International Film Festival as a resounding success—Kerrigan says you won’t catch him griping. “I really do feel fortunate. The films I make are unusual and challenging. They have a real power to them, and I hope they are rewarding to the audience. They are a two-way process, something that requires a bit more from the audience. The only trade-off I’ve had to make is that I’ve made these films cheaply. But I’m happy with that trade-off.

“I’m getting the opportunity to do what I love in life, which is to make challenging films.”

Keane opens at Cinéma du Parc on Friday, April 7

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