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� Lodge Kerrigan made a startling directorial debut in 1994 with Clean, Shaven, a striking, surreal, uniquely off-center psychodrama of a self-mutilating schizophrenic out-patient whose head buzzes with static like a radio between stations. Peter Greene, his eyes lost and rabbit-scared, plays the tormented man battered by visual and aural noise while he journeys to see his daughter and a relentless detective on the search for a serial killer closes in. Ten years later, Kerrigan returned to the same theme, right down to the schizophrenia and the lost daughter, but with a completely different approach. Keane, starring Damian Lewis (of Band of Brothers) as a soft-spoken man wounded to the soul by the abduction of his young daughter, is a remarkably compassionate portrait. When he slips out of control and turns obsessive and irrational - leaping to impulsive conclusions, acting on delusional hunches, diving into benders of booze and cocaine - we're scared of him. But when we see the look of panic on his face when he feels himself slip out of control, helpless to the power of his affliction, we're also scared for him.

Between the two films, Kerrigan's filmography only lists one other: Claire Dolan, featuring Katrin Cartlidge in a still, careful performance as a New York call girl who buries herself behind a taut mask of a face and Vincent D'Onofrio as an earthy but ultimately impotent cab driver whose love for her is crippled by doubt and distrust. One other film, In God's Hand, a story of child abduction starring Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie Gyllenhaal and produced by Steven Soderbergh, had all but completed photography when the lab destroyed the negative. "At that point, I was still interested in the theme of child abduction, but I decided to write an entirely new script - I couldn't imagine making the same film again - and we continued from there." That film became Keane.

I interviewed Kerrigan in October, 2005, at the Vancouver International Film Festival, where he was showing Keane as part of the American Independent sidebar. At the time, he had just participated in Criterion's new high-def telecine transfer of Clean, Shaven. "I'm just really thrilled. I'm really honored that they're including it in their collection." It's no surprise that the interview kept winding around these two films, their differences and similarities, and Kerrigan's deep interest in the experience of people suffering from schizophrenia and mental illness.

Clean, Shaven shook me up. You drop people right into the mind of a schizophrenic man and you show the audience what the assault on his mind is like. You portray him from the inside out, which is very different from what you do in Keane. It's more observational; you watch him intently. But while the stories are different, there are a lot of similarities. There are two men who both suffer from schizophrenia, both dealing with separation issues over a lost daughter. So why did you go back to that same seed in Keane?

I think it came from a different place. In Clean, Shaven, the primary objective is really to, as you say, place the audience in the position of the main character and have them experience what it might be like to suffer from various symptoms of schizophrenia like auditory hallucinations, disassociative feelings, increased paranoia, increased anxiety and so forth. In order, really, to try to imagine that if it's like that for 80 minutes, what would it be like to live your life like that, and to hopefully engender some empathy as a result. With Keane, the focus was really on a man trying to come to terms, on some level, with the abduction of his child and the grief and self-blame and self-incrimination and really just an emotional journey. It came from my being a parent and my worst fear is the idea that my child would be abducted. So that, for me, is the big difference between the two, what the primary focus is on. But I have a long-standing interest in mental illness. I have friends who suffer from it. I think it's a devastating illness, not only mentally, psychologically, emotionally, but also economically. I think it isolates people tremendously, and again, I want to try and engender some empathy for people who suffer.

About halfway through Keane, his obsessive search for his daughter slips when he starts connecting with Kyra, the girl in the neighboring hotel room. He stopped searching and he put his energy into her. Then he talks about his marriage and divorce. I started to question whether his child was abducted or if that was something he had put in his mind to deal with the fact that he had lost her in a divorce settlement.

Sure. There definitely is a question throughout the course of the film whether his daughter Sofia ever existed or not. I was very conscious of it while writing. In the interactions that I've had with some people that suffer from mental illness, I'm never really sure, or there have been times I haven't been sure that the stories they tell me happened or not. And I don't think it's a question of deceit. I think it's more that fabrication and delusion are symptoms of the illness. So, as a result, I thought it would be more realistic to place the audience in that perspective. So they're spending time with Keane and they have to make up their own mind. Did he actually have a child or not? For me, not as a filmmaker but as an audience-goer, I think he did, personally. Simply because I think... I just see the care he has and the patience he has in his interactions with Kyra, and I think that shows that he was a father. But the information, again, is shown. It's shown through behavior; it's not communicated through dialogue, and I think the traditional form of confirming facts in a movie is to communicate it through dialogue, but here it's communicated really through behavior.

I was going to say exactly the same thing. I was convinced he had a daughter because he acts, he behaves like a very attentive, compassionate father when he's with Kyra. His attention to her is paternal. He's protective of her like a parent.

And patient. For me, it was really his patience. But, you know, what's going on inside Keane in his struggles to find some measure of peace with his child's abduction is similar to a recurring nightmare. There's a theory that if you suffer a traumatic event in your life, you dream about it over and over again in an unconscious desire to change the outcome of the actual event that occurred. And it may not be unconscious. It may be completely conscious that you wanted to change it. But the dream state is this attempt to try to change the outcome, so you dream about it over and over and over again. And I think that that's what Keane is really struggling with.

Because the film opens a number of months after his daughter has been abducted, I think he understands that, on one level, he's in denial. He's desperate. He keeps searching for her. But I think on another level, he knows that she's really gone. And so he's trying to replace her on some level. He's trying to recreate a family, and his first attempt is with Kyra and then Lynn, Kyra's mom. And then, when he realizes that it's not going to work out, he abducts Kyra and goes to the bus terminal and really recreates his own child's abduction, the exact way that it occurred, or the way he imagined it occurred, and all the events leading up to it. Really, I think, in an effort, because he's so helpless, to gain some kind of control and to change the outcome. And, on some level, emotionally, psychologically, he does change the outcome.

Damien Lewis gives a remarkable performance. You've got the camera in on his face almost the entire film. He's kind of scary, but there's really no malice in him, just a helpless kind of anger. But when you start to see him lose control, his face registers the fact that things beyond his control are happening within him. And especially when he's with Kyra, you see the absolute fear of losing control because he has to be in control to protect her. It's an amazing sense of self-awareness that you don't expect to see in a character like that.

Yes. I think Damien gave a really remarkable performance, not only in that aspect, but in the range of emotions that he goes through in the story. He's really exceptionally talented. I cast him off of Band of Brothers, the HBO series. I think a lot of times casting is very backward looking. I mean, beyond trying to cast stars, taking that off the table because the whole business is oriented towards trying to cast the biggest name. But once you get beyond that, then it becomes... I think a lot of times, actors are cast because they've played similar roles in the past and I think that's very limiting. What I try to do is really to see the command they have with their craft, how talented they are, how charismatic, what presence they have, and the rest is very intuitive. There's nothing in the role of Major Winters that's even remotely similar to Keane. But I really believe that talented actors can play a wide, wide range of roles and most of them are really underutilized. What's interesting to me about the performance is how much weight he has. He's so heavy and worn down. When you see Damien in life, he's so different and people are taken aback sometimes, because they almost expect him to be older.

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