The director of Keanu Reeves’ latest movie has defiantly taken his name off the film, and sources say friction with Reeves is to blame.

Reeves’ cop thriller “Exposed,” by director Declan Dale comes out in January, and stars Reeves as a detective investigating his partner’s death. But sources exclusively tell Page Six that “Dale” is a pseudonym chosen by first-time indie filmmaker Gee Malik Linton, who legally battled to remove his name when he disagreed with Reeves and studio Lionsgate Premiere over the project.

Reeves signed to star in 2014 with Spain-based actress Ana de Armas when the film was called “Daughter of God,” and he also came on as a producer.

“The movie focused on a young Latina and a Dominican family,” said a source. “There was a small white male role. It was a 60-percent Spanish-language movie.” But the source contends that when distributor Lionsgate boarded the project, “it was sold to them as a thriller.”

A friend of Linton’s said he “intended [the film] to be a serious drama that focused [on] social issues that affect women . . . [but] they wanted to turn the movie into a Keanu Reeves cop thriller, and the director was adamant against it.”

Sources said that when Linton turned in a version of the film edited by Hervé de Luze, who’s worked with Roman Polanski, “Lionsgate told him, ‘We don’t know what this is. We bought an action movie. We like it . . . We can’t do anything with it.” A deal for Linton to buy the film back then fell through.

Sources said that the film was then re-edited. “Keanu Reeves was the supervisor . . . It’s Keanu’s movie, it’s all about him . . . They took out the whole Dominican family. It went from 126 minutes to 102 minutes and [became] a boilerplate action thriller. That’s his version.”

But Reeves’ rep countered, “Keanu Reeves did not supervise any of the editing.” A source close to the film said, “The movie is the same film it always was. Keanu was never in the editing room.”

Linton has moved on to a crime movie, “The Seventh Swords.” Reeves is starring in Lionsgate’s “John Wick 2.”