Trivia / The Keep

• Box Office Bomb: Depending on sources, the film earned anywhere between 3.5 to 4.5 million dollars, which wasn't even enough to cover the budget of 6 millions.
• California Doubling: Micheal Mann visited Romania and loved the locations he found, comparing them to Paris and got along with the locals. For practical reasons (Romania was a communist dictatorship at the time) the exteriors were shot in Wales instead.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: This is the reason for the Einsatzkommando's black uniforms. Michael Mann was concerned audiences would mistake them for regular Wehrmacht troops when they showed up if they were in the accurate wartime gray. This was a big concern because he wanted to portray the regular German soldiers sympathetically. To make it more immediately clear the Einsatzkommando were SS and therefore different from the regular troops, Mann employed the iconic (but inaccurate) all-black outfits.
• Creator Backlash: Michael Mann doesn't like giving interviews about this film because of the Troubled Production and the extensive Executive Meddling it suffered. Although Mann still praises the production design, he never showed any interest in releasing a new cut of the film. However, he has also hinted in interviews that the deleted material probably no longer exists in Paramount's vaults.
• Creator Breakdown: Michael Mann was so beat down by the film's troubled production that afterwards he returned to television with Crime Story and Miami Vice, not making another film for three years.
• Deleted Scenes: The workprint cut ran just over three hours long. Though Mann had intended to trim the runtime to two, this still means that around ninety minutes of footage were cut. Some of said footage has been reinstated in certain television broadcast, though there is no one comprehensive "complete" version of the film in existence. What was cut can be determined with reasonable confidence based on the shooting script, behind-the-scenes interviews, promotional stills, and shots from the trailer not in the released version. These include:
  • An important subplot about how Molesar's evil spreads to the townspeople around him, turning them violently against one another in increasingly disturbing ways. This was to culminate in a montage of the villagers succumbing to their madness and violently attacking each other, with Alexandru the Caretaker's sons murdering him. The only remnant of this in the final cut is a brief scene of Father Fonescu drinking the blood of a dead dog.
  • More scenes of Molesar killing people, at one point attacking Glaeken's boat. The Captain would try and steal Glaeken's weapon box, and he would be forced to kill him.
  • A scene of Eva snooping around Glaeken's room and finding his belongings. This and an exchange after he caught her would lead into their infamous sex scene, and explain how she knows both his and Molesar's names.
  • A scene of Molesar massacring Kaempffer's men and leaving him standing alone. This scene was only partially shot toward the end of production, and was scrapped midway through due to Paramount's reluctance to pay for yet more effects for a film that was already running overbudget and overschedule.
  • The planned final battle between Glaeken and Molesar, scrapped because the visual effects supervisor passed away and none of the production team knew how to assemble the disparate elements prepared for it, and no one had enough time or money to figure it out.
  • An alternate ending (actually an extension to the one already used), where Eva finds Glaeken alive and mortal in a lake, and the two leave the keep hand-in-hand. This is the ending that appeared on a number of television broadcast cuts, and is available on some home video releases.
  • Overall extensions to various dialogue exchanges.
• Died During Production: Wally Veevers, one of the leading figures in special effects industry, passed away during late stages of filming. Since he was the only person having both skills and plan how to work with the raw footage of the final scenes, the ending had to be scrapped and reshoots were made post-haste.
• Disowned Adaptation: F. Paul Wilson called the film "visually intriguing, but otherwise utterly incomprehensible." He also said that Molasar in the film looks like "Darth Vader with bronchitis".
• Executive Meddling: The studio supposedly ordered quite a bit of scenes cut and re-edited, resulting in the film being a confusing mishmash of nonsense. The ending in particular was changed at least twice (the first time was due to Wally Veevers dying during production). The reshot ending had Glaeken surviving his battle with Molasar and being found alive by Eva... but for some unfathomable reason this was deleted and the film's third ending has the hero presumed dead.
• Fake Nationality:
  • Needless to say, none of the Romanian characters are played by actual Romanians.
  • The German Erich Kaempffer is played by Irish actor Gabriel Byrne.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The film was officially released on DVD... on January 20, 2020! Before that, for almost four decades, anyone interested in watching the film would have to appeal to VHS, Laserdisc, copies or versions available in streaming, all with horrible image and audio quality, unless you were lucky enough to catch the film at an exceptionally rare cinema screening.
  • There circulates a fan funded 4K scan of a 35 mm print on the internet which has way better quality than any official release.
• Shown Their Work: The uniforms, vehicles and weapons used by the Germans are all way more accurate than they probably needed to be. Even though the Einsatzkommando are wearing prewar black (see Color-Coded for Your Convenience), the outfits are still extremely accurate, just in the wrong time period (so accurate inaccuracy?). But where the costume designers and armorers really shine are the border guards in accurate Iron Guard (fascist Romanian) uniforms. They could've halfassed it, considering the Iron Guard are relatively obscure, but they went the extra mile.
• Troubled Production: Where do we start?
  • Production started in September 1982 and lasted for twenty-two weeks due to additional re-shoots (original schedule was only 13 weeks).
  • One of the main problems was the physical appearance of the main villain of the movie, Molasar, who was changed several times during filming because Michael Mann just couldn't decide what he would look like. Originally, a mechanical figure was built to be used, but that design was changed to a man in a suit during filming.
  • Two weeks into post-production, visual effects supervisor Wally Veevers died, which caused chaos because nobody knew how he planned to finish the effects in the movie.
  • Because of the death of Wally Veevers, Mann had to finish 260 shots of special effects himself. Also, a new ending had to be filmed. The original climax was more faithful to the novel in some aspects and would involve Molasar and Glaeken in a battle at the top of the tower. Glaeken would open an energy portal and fall into it along with Molasar. After that, Glaeken would materialize in the cave below the keep, now a mortal man. At this point, Paramount had clearly lost faith in the film and refused to pay for the filming of the additional footage needed for this finale, so Mann put together a more simplified ending for the released film.
  • The original cut of the movie was 210 minutes long, but the studio made it clear that the film could only be two hours long. Test screenings of the two-hour cut were negative and that was the last straw for Paramount. The studio cut the movie down to 96 minutes and did not allow Mann to have any creative control over the final cut. This explains why the final cut is a mess, with plot holes and continuity mistakes (like the fact that Glaeken and Eva became a couple almost immediately after they met). All these problems in post-production inevitably forced the studio to postpone the original release of the film from June 1983 to December 1983.
  • In the end, The Keep turned out to be a box office and critical failure, becoming an Old Shame for Mann, who refuses to release a new edit of this film. The film, now considered a Cult Classic, was only officially released on DVD in January 2020!
• What Could Have Been:
  • Michael Mann's preferred and intended run-time was two-hours from a three-hour workprint. After the film performed poorly in test screenings, he was locked out of post-production and the runtime was reduced to 96 minutes, creating innumerable plot holes and inconsistencies.
  • An elaborate, visual effects-heavy climactic battle between Glaeken and Molesar was planned but scrapped at the last minute after visual effects supervisor Wally Veevers passed away. Since only effects plates with the actors had been shot (essentially just footage of them fumbling around on wires in front of a black background) and no one quite understood exactly what Veevers had had planned, both it and a number of other intended effects were scrapped and the ending hastily retooled.

---