“It’s not so easy as heroes and villains. I’m more interested in grey areas”: Derek Cianfrance on Roofman

Whether it’s doomed love in Blue Valentine (2010) or intergenerational trauma in The Place Beyond the Pines (2012), Derek Cianfrance’s films aren’t exactly a bag of laughs. Enter Channing Tatum, shades on, wheeling through Toys “R” Us in a pair of Heelys. He’s the star of Cianfrance’s Roofman, a mixture of crime, drama, romance and, yes, comedy. It tells the true story of Jeffrey Manchester, who robbed dozens of McDonald’s outlets between 1998-2000 by breaking in through the roof, locking employees in the freezer and emptying the cash registers. He was sent to prison but managed to escape, then hid in a branch of the American toy store chain for six months before being recaptured. Manchester, known as a ‘polite criminal’, rarely resorted to violence and encouraged the fast-food workers to put coats on before corralling them into the cold. Many who knew him speak fondly of him, including Leigh Wainscott (played by Kirsten Dunst), whom he dated during his time as a fugitive. Roofman isn’t a complete departure from Cianfrance’s heavier fare – desperation lurks beneath Tatum’s high jinks, and families are broken along the way. Still, it feels like the start of a new chapter for the writer-director, one that finds catharsis in comedy as well as tragedy.

Hope Rangaswami: You tend to tell tragic stories, and while Roofman has a measure of that, it also has several comic sequences. What made you want to weave humour into the film? 

Derek Cianfrance: After I Know This Much Is True [the 2020 HBO miniseries], I felt like I had come to the completion of something in my work. I had been making movies about ancestry, legacy, inheritance and the sins of the father, and I didn’t know what else I could say about it, so I was looking for something different to do next. And it’s actually not that different – tragedy and comedy are flip sides of a coin. When I heard the story of Jeff Manchester, a guy who robbed 45 branches of McDonald’s, giving people jackets before he put them in the freezer, and then lived in a Toys “R” Us for six months, I thought, “How deadly serious can that be?” I wanted to untether myself from any identity I had as a filmmaker and just play. That’s what the movie was – because it’s about a guy living in a toy store, it became all about play.

What’s your relationship with comedy?

The people who make comedy that I’ve known of are much more serious in their real lives. I’m an incredibly optimistic, positive person, and in some ways, making tragedies freed my dark imagination and gave it somewhere to go.

My wife [Shannon Plumb] is a comedian, and we’ve been living together as comedy and tragedy for almost 25 years. Her film Towheads [2013] takes on all these serious themes; it’s like a slapstick comedy version of A Woman Under the Influence [1974]. I love how free she was with that, so I took a lot of inspiration from her. A movie that felt like Roofman to me was Mrs. Doubtfire [1993]: there are real stakes in it, and there’s real tragedy going on, but it’s hilarious.

There’s some physical comedy in Roofman that looked tricky to choreograph, like the scene where Tatum runs around Toys “R” Us naked, trying to avoid being caught by the store manager, Peter Dinklage. 

One of the reasons I cast Channing was that he’s a dancer and has a mastery of his body and movement. When I was thinking about all the slapstick comedy geniuses, from Buster Keaton to Jerry Lewis, there’s this control of the body. The scene where he gets caught naked in the toy store was a real moment that happened to Jeffrey Manchester, so I wrote it into the script.

When I sent it to Channing, I was waiting for him to say that he couldn’t do it, or ask me, “How are we going to do it?” Then the day came and he was waiting there in a towel… Peter Dinklage had no idea what he was going to see. We shot that scene for a long time – he did it 15 times and we spent four hours there. He just committed his whole body to it. Another person Channing loves is Gene Kelly, so we talked a lot about An American in Paris [1951] and that kind of body control. That movie is a little bit more controlled than Roofman; I wanted all the physical scenes to be very freewheeling and loose. That scene was something I imagined forever, but to see it happen… maybe that’s the reason I did 15 takes. I don’t do playback when I make movies – I like being in the moment, and I just couldn’t stop laughing.

You’re associated with making expansive, epic films, but Roofman is quite a contained story; the bulk of it unfolds over six months. 

I grew up in the suburbs of Denver, so I’ve been wanting to make a movie about suburbia. It’s a very contained experience living in the suburbs. I worked at Walmart for a few years growing up – I was the fastest checker in the history of all Colorado Walmarts. That culture of living in big-box stores in America was something I wanted to reflect in the movie, and then I find Jeff Manchester, who actually did that. There are a lot of ellipses of time to be able to cover those six months. I decided to look at it through the milestones of holidays, starting at Father’s Day and then culminating with Christmas. My experience in the suburban world was a lot about what the next holiday was. And usually the next holiday correlated to what was going to be in a store, what they were going to be selling. Jeff understood this too. Christmas in a toy store is the best place you could be if you wanted to rob somewhere.

This movie was probably the hardest one I’ve ever made in terms of the budget and scale. I didn’t want to shoot it on a stage – we actually built a Toys “R” Us. We found an old one and built it from the ground up, one tile at a time, and brought it back to its former glory. We had only 37 days to shoot it in. It was hard. With I Know This Much Is True, I had anything I could have wanted. With this, I just had to put it all on the screen.

This isn’t the first time you’ve taken a humanising approach to criminality, whether that’s robbing banks in The Place Beyond the Pines or kidnapping in The Light Between Oceans [2016]. 

When I first started researching Roofman, I didn’t know what kind of movie I was gonna make. I didn’t know if it was gonna be Taxi Driver [1976] or The King of Comedy [1982]. I made documentaries for many years, and one of my strategies with that was to stay open and go into situations without expectations, so I tried to do that as I was researching this film.

I had a conversation with Ron Smith, who was the pastor of the church [that Manchester attended as a fugitive]. He said that the Old Testament is about judgement and the New Testament is about grace, and that in his life he always errs on the side of grace. And I thought to myself, with Jeff Manchester, he had already been judged when he was sentenced to 45 years in prison. I didn’t need to judge him again; I needed to handle him with some grace. With the criminal stories I’m attracted to, it’s not so easy as good guys wearing white, heroes and villains. I’m more interested in that grey area.

What led you to cast Kirsten Dunst as Tatum’s love interest?

Kirsten is just an acting machine and I needed to find someone who was super strong and warm, but also someone who you wouldn’t feel was being taken advantage of. Once I put them together, they just balanced each other.

Were there any surprises on the shoot?

Every day. I can’t move on unless that happens. If you looked at the script next to this movie, it’d be the same shape, but what people say is different because I want them to be inside the moment. I talked to Jeffrey after the trailer had come out. He hadn’t seen it because he doesn’t have the internet [in prison], but he did see clips on the local news. He said, “I saw a picture of Channing Tatum in his underwear, he’s wearing a pair of Heelys and he’s got a giant teddy bear around his neck and some sunglasses on. Where did you guys come up with that?”

And I was like, “Well, Jeff, I built this whole toy store for Channing, so that he could play and do anything he wanted. I was setting up a shot one day and, all of a sudden, around the corner comes Channing in a pair of Heelys, in his underwear, with a teddy bear around his neck and sunglasses on. So I shot it.” And he says, “When you’re locked in a toy store for six months, it really puts you in touch with your inner child. I’m so happy that Channing got a chance to be in touch with that.” That was a surprise. I didn’t write that.

► Roofman is in UK cinemas from 17 October.