Clean, Shaven (1995)

Interesting facts

Clean, Shaven is a 1993 drama film written, produced and directed by Lodge Kerrigan, in which Peter Winter is a man with schizophrenia desperately trying to get his daughter back from her adoptive mother. The film attempts to subjectively view schizophrenia and those who are affected by it.

Production

Director Lodge Kerrigan said the inspiration for the film came from a friend who had schizophrenia. Kerrigan said he had always had an interest in mental illness and, tired of the way mental illness had been portrayed in the movies, wanted to approach the subject more realistically and show "the kind of anxiety [people with schizophrenia] live with on a day-to-day basis." Kerrigan spent a year researching the subject and then wrote the script in…

The film was shot on 16mm on a budget of $60,000. The production took place over a noncontinuous period of two years due to its piecemeal financing. Kerrigan, who is half-Canadian, shot the majority of exterior scenes in August 1990 in Miscou Island in New Brunswick. Most of the interior shots were filmed in November 1991 in New York.

Of the film's plot and ending, Kerrigan commented, "I really tried to examine the subjective reality of someone who suffered from schizophrenia, to try to put the audience in that position to experience how I imagined the symptoms to be: auditory hallucinations, heightened paranoia, dissociative feelings, anxiety.

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