Keane (film) - Production

Production

A film about child abduction was prompted by Lodge Kerrigan's fear of his own daughter disappearing during a shopping excursion. "I realized, how in just four minutes, four minutes! your child could be abducted. Your life could be changed forever and there would be no way to recover from it. I knew that kind of visceral feeling would be a good starting point." The result was In God's Hands, produced by Steven Soderbergh and starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, which centered on the disintegration of a family after a child had been abducted. The film never was released due to "irreversible negative damage." With nothing left of his film to salvage, Kerrigan began researching and writing a new project that became Keane.

Kerrigan knew the location of the film would be a key plot element, and he wrote much of the script while walking around New York City, trying to get a feel for the main character and their surroundings. "It was exhilarating, working with that kind of energy. I also wrote a lot of the film there as well. I would go and play out a scene and try to act it out... to some degree try to find the emotions, by recreating, beat by beat, his mindset, the abduction of his daughter. It all goes back to location... when you are working in the actual area, you can answer all of the questions that would arise with much more immediacy."

The film was shot with a handheld camera with single takes lasting up to four minutes with no cutaways. It contains long periods of little or no dialogue and has no musical score. Shooting was completed within 32 days, and many of the Manhattan and North Bergen, New Jersey locations Kerrigan selected were remote, unfamiliar streets and backdrops used to help emphasise the downward spiral of the central character. "Poverty is part of it... people who suffer from mental illness are marginalized...and that place, the surrounding area, with all the confusion, the buses and people coming in and out...it is really an appropriate location."