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Orderly inquiry into the disordered mind

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Times Staff Writer

Damian Lewis acknowledges that his performance in “Keane” can be tough on an audience. For 90 minutes, viewers are trapped in the mind of Keane -- a schizophrenic young man suffering from acute grief over his young daughter, who he says vanished the year before at the Port Authority bus station in New York.

Looking like a wounded animal, Lewis’ Keane haunts the Port Authority every day. Holding a tattered newspaper clipping, he asks everyone he comes in contact with if they’ve seen his daughter. He mutters to himself, screams at imaginary people and indulges in reckless behavior with women and drugs.

“It should be relentless,” says the British actor, 34, best known for his roles in “Band of Brothers” and “The Forsyte Saga.”

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“The point of the aesthetic of the film is to remain in Keane’s head. That can be pretty oppressive, and as a result, the camera is only ever three-quarters on profile or just behind me. I think it is never directly in front of me. I think it was tempting for director Lodge Kerrigan to pull out into wider shots and give it some space and some breadth. But he said, ‘I have to commit to stay with Keane and keep the audience with Keane.’ ”

“Keane,” which recently tied for runner-up at the Deauville Film Festival, also stars Amy Ryan as a woman living in Keane’s fleabag hotel in New Jersey and Abigail Breslin as her young daughter, who develops a bond with the troubled young man.

Kerrigan (“Clean, Shaven,” “Claire Dolan”) said Lewis “was fantastic” in “Band of Brothers,” “but there is nothing in his character that is similar to ‘Keane.’ ”

“I think there is a tendency in casting to be somewhat backwards. People look toward performers who have done similar roles in the past. It doesn’t lead to really surprising choices. I tend to look at actors by the command of the craft and their talent and the rest is intuitive.”

After sending Lewis the script, Kerrigan went to London to meet with the actor. “Since he’s in every frame of the movie, I knew the collaboration was going to be really intense,” says the director.

“We chatted about the script,” Lewis recalls. “It was really crucial that we liked each other and we got a good feel from each other.”

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Lewis went to New York early. “We spent time on locations,” he says. “If Lodge was unsure about the scene he would know it himself. He was extremely open to suggestions. It is sort of a contradiction about him. He’s incredibly exacting, incredibly controlling of his own material and knows exactly what he wants at specific moments. But if he’s unsure, he’s not afraid to ask of your input.”

He never talked to anyone who has lost a child to understand the overpowering grief -- “good actors use their imagination and you get there with that” -- but Lewis felt responsible to depict people suffering from schizophrenia in a realistic way.

“I read a lot of books, watched tapes, visited a psychiatrist and went to a day center in New York where I spoke to people who were very lucid about their illness, and observed people who were in states of extreme anxiety.”

But Lewis gleaned the most information from the dispossessed, trouble people who, like Keane, roam the Port Authority.

“I don’t consider myself to be a method actor,” says Lewis. “But I like time to prepare and engage my imagination. And I was able to just be one of them for hours at a time” at the Port Authority.

Between takes, Lewis would wander around and walk “straight into a group of people who were talking to themselves or talking to an imaginary friend or constantly looking over their shoulder.”

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One woman told him she was Tina Turner.

“She wanted to tell me all about her relationship with Ike and how she had just come from the club,” says Lewis.

“She said, ‘I live on the subway. I live on one of the trains, but I get to the club from there.’

“It was sad and fascinating,” says Lewis. “It can be a dilemma for an actor. You want to suck the marrow dry, if you like, of information that is in front of you, but you have to do it respectfully because these are real, suffering people.”

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