Osgood Perkins makes nightmares, and watching sneak peek clips from his upcoming film Keeperwith no context, void of the wonderfully dreadful build I adore in his work, felt especially nightmarish.I wasn't exactly sure what was going on due to the lack of context while previewing scenes, which added to the unsettling and uncomfortable atmosphere.
So far, Keeper has been shrouded in mystery. We know from a recent teaser trailer that a romantic relationship is hanging in the balance, and the action appears to primarily take place in a single location. Neon is already going wild on the marketing campaign without giving a single damn thing away. (See this hour-long loop of Keeper star Tatiana Maslany scribbling as if in a trance.) As Perkins puts it, “We're sort of playing coy with this movie.”
To be clear, this sneak peek was not the movie in its entirety, but rather a collection of scenes from all three acts. To be perfectly honest, I am a bit envious of the surprises that will remain intact for you because Perkins is so great at that build and seeping the audience in a certain dreadful anxiety. What I saw was primarily a reveal of the secrets within, minus the wondrous build that unfolds across the runtime of
the feature, but with enough masterfully unfolding in each of those previewed scenes to know this is going to be a doozy.
I can'tsay I know exactly what the movie is about (I don't).But I can say my excitement to find out has grown, even though I more or less know where the ride is ultimately taking us, I have more unanswered questions now than I did going in.
Perkins was in attendance to discuss his upcoming feature, and I can share some of that with you here without spoiling anything at all. So please, feel free to confidently read on, I promise to leave the secrets intact for you to uncover when Keeper hits theaters this November.
Perkins introduced Keeper as being based upon the concept of being “Afraid of people. People with bad intentions, sure, but also the person you share a bed with or no longer share a bed with.” Ultimately, it centers on the duality that is both the fear and desire of being known and knowing. “These notions of unease around the people in our lives, the people we are intimate with, is the framework of this movie.”
Perkins actually shot Keeper immediately after Longlegs, before heading off to shoot The Monkey. Coming off the Longlegs shoot, feeling good about the team he was working with, they wanted to make more together pretty immediately. “Nobody knew that Longlegs was going to work. No one knew that anybody was going to see it. No one knew that it was going to do what it ended up doing. We were just scrappy at the time and feeling like we found our people. We loved each other, me, the crew, and we needed a movie. We just wanted to make a movie.”
Enter Dangerous Animals screenwriter, Nick Lepard. “Nick writes very visceral stuff. He writes much grittier than I do. I tend to be a little poetical, a little sort of, ‘Mm, I'm curious about this and I'm curious about that.' He's a little bit more like, ‘No, it's going to be a fucking shark and he's going to throw the fucking woman to the shark, literally. It's literally a serial killer who kills with sharks.' I can't find much problem with that.”
It's interesting that Keeper isn't written by Oz, because from what I experienced, it feels like another deeply personal film. Maybe that comes from building this world with his collaborators as they went along.
In addition to bringing Nick Lepard on to write the script, Perkins also enlisted The Monkey star Tatiana Maslany and Murder In A Small Town's Rossif Sutherland. “Increasingly, I let other people do the work. That's the great part about being me at this point in my career, is that I trust the people who I work with to do their jobs.“ Perkins explained.
“I talk to actors in a way that makes them feel interested in what they're doing. In the case of Tatiana, we were just writing the script, we had 40 pages of something, and I had a call with Tatiana and said, ‘We're kind of making one up as we go. We're going to try to figure it out. I'll see you there every day. I'll meet you on the set every day, and we can sort of figure out and talk about what we think it might be. If you're up for inventing this together, then you should come and play with us.‘ On the same call, she said, ‘I'll be there. When do I fly?‘Because it turns out you find actors and artists who just want to work and play and expand themselves, and they're not precious and they're not guarded, they just want to go there. If anybody wants to do that, it's Tatiana Maslany. She's a force of nature.”
Co-starring opposite Maslany is another actor who was game to go there, Rossif Sutherland. “He's one of my dearest friends and I love him like a brother,” Perkins said of the actor. “He's the only actor that I've ever worked with who said, ‘Give me the FDX file and I'll type on it.‘ Now, the FDX file, for those of you who don't know, is the working file on [screenwriting software] Final Draft. It's like the script in its fucked-with form. You can write on it on an FDX. He asked me for the FDX, and he wanted to explore it. We didn't end up using any of it. But I thought it was such a bold thing.”
In terms of films that influenced Keeper and became a sort of touchstone shorthand for director and crew, Perkins' pick may seem surprising at first glance. “I find that you find one movie that you're going to rip off. You take one movie with you into every movie that you're making. It's usually Don't Look Now. It's almost always Don't Look Now, for everybody by the way. I'm not the only person who thinks that.“ Perkins quipped before revealing his main inspiration and reference with cinematographer Jeremy Cox.
“In this case, it was Robert Altman's Three Women, which is a beautiful, beautiful movie with Shelley Duvall and the great Sissy Spacek. We just watched that a bunch of times, we're sort of like, “Well, we looked through things and kind of zoomed past windows to find the thing and kind of foreground a lot of this stuff.‘ We didn't think about it. That was always great about this, we didn't think about it very much. We weren't in our heads. We were in our bodies. We were in our cameras and stuff. We were just doing the thing.“
When it came to making a somewhat surprise movie with his scrappy crew, Perkins found it to be a freeing experience. “There was no money andthere was nobody watching us. We had no budget and we had no time. When you have no budget and you have no time, it means nobody's freaking out, right? Because if you have $90 million and 300 days to shoot, everybody's freaking out all the time. That's why it's so hard to make a movie like that. But to make a movie for no money, no one notices you're even doing it, it's very freeing and you're very relaxed.”
I, for one, am very much looking forward to unveiling the mystery this scrappy team has put together when Keeper lands in theaters on November 14. Watch the most recent Keeper teaser trailer below.
