Writer and director Derek Cianfrance knows what audiences might think of him. The worst things in the world happen to Cianfrance’s protagonists: Relationships fall apart; parents die; children get kidnapped. His work is almost always about love, but it’s also going to bum you the hell out.
Between his films Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines, The Light Between Oceans, and Sound of Metal and his HBO miniseries, I Know This Much Is True, he’s known for stories about fraught romances, generational trauma, and the spiritual cost of caring for another person — how trying to protect others can push us to make terrible decisions and also be the most fulfilling part of our lives. These were Cianfrance’s preoccupations for a decade, and after 2020’s I Know This Much Is True — which starred Mark Ruffalo playing twins struggling with mental illness — it felt like time to hang it up.
“I had friends who wrote me and were like, ‘We watched the show until the guy cut his hand off.’ And that was a minute in!” Cianfrance says with a laugh. “And I was like, ‘Geez, maybe I went too hard core.’ My experience on it was amazing. But I came out of that and thought, I don’t want to repeat myself again. I don’t want to go into another examination of tragedy on tragedy on tragedy.”
The filmmaker’s latest, the Channing Tatum–starring Roofman, is lighter than his previous work, more comedy adjacent than anything he’s done before. Roofman is based on the true story of Jeffrey Manchester, an American veteran who became a sort of criminal folk hero in North Carolina after robbing dozens of McDonald’s locations by breaking through their roofs, treating the employees inside with surprisingly kindness, and then escaping from prison and secretly living in a Toys ’R’ Us. The film’s whimsical marketing campaign has focused on Tatum’s gleeful roller-skating and dancing in that bastion of ’90s consumerism, but Roofman itself is a slippier thing. Part thriller, part domestic drama, and part romance, it examines both the paternal kindness and the recklessness that led Manchester to the multi-decade prison sentence he’s currently serving. The movie will still break your heart, but this time around, Cianfrance says, he’s more interested in grace.
Around 2021, you hear about Jeffrey Manchester for the first time. What about his story was attractive to you?
I had just made I Know This Much Is True. It basically opened to the world right when the pandemic was hitting, and I had no idea how heavy duty it was for people. I’ve always been interested in darkness, my imagination has always led me in that way, and I’ve always just embraced that path for myself. I was making movies for 15 years that were all about ancestry and legacy and inheritance. When I finished I Know This Much Is True, I felt like I had said everything I needed to say. It was such a dark show, although it did have a glimmer of light at the end that creeps in. Afterward, I was thinking about why I fell in love with movies in the first place — those movies of the ’80s and ’90s that I grew up watching in theaters and then would come home and rent on VHS, and then when the movies came on HBO I’d record them and watch them over and over again. I was thinking, What was it about those movies that got me hooked on this dream of mine to make movies? I was just searching.
Roofman does nod to Risky Business, to Big, these movies that were comedic but also had a melancholy core.
Yes, and Mrs. Doubtfire. After I made I Know This Much Is True, I’d used everything up, and I was, like, waiting for it to rain. And you can’t make it rain. You just have to wait and listen and be patient. My producer, Jamie Patricof, said, “There’s this script called Roofman that I think you should read. It’s about a guy who robbed 45 McDonald’s, but he would give people their jackets before he locked them in the freezer. And then he went to prison, but he broke out. And instead of hiding out in a forest, he hid out in a toy store.” I told Jamie, “I am interested in this, but I’d have to talk to the person. I’d have to talk to Jeff Manchester.” Jeff is in a maximum-security prison in Raleigh, North Carolina. He called me, and in that first phone call with Jeff there was this guy who was so jovial and kind of optimistic and funny and charming. He was telling me stories that were unbelievable. When you talk to someone who’s in a maximum-security prison, they cut you off after 15 minutes. And Jeff called me back. He started calling me about four times a week for the next four and a half years. I had hundreds of hours of conversations with him. He eventually started calling me Dr. Derek. It was very good for him to have someone to talk to. He loved movies and I started to realize that as he was living his life, he was the protagonist in his own movie. He was imagining all these things as someday being told into his life story.
Derek Cianfrance on the set of Roofman with Kirsten Dunst. Photo: Davi Russo
So you felt tapped out by themes about legacy and the sins of the father. But I found a fair amount of that in Roofman, too, as Jeff struggles with becoming a father figure to his girlfriend Leigh’s family while evading the law. Do you have a sense of why these are concerns you keep coming back to?
I can only be me. That’s what I realized making this movie: I am always going to be me. Comedy and tragedy are flip sides of the same coin. My wife’s a comedian. I know the life of a comedian very well. Most comedians that I know are very serious in real life, and me being into tragedy, my imagination is dark, but my consciousness is incredibly optimistic. But yes, this movie is about being a dad. The most important experience of my whole life is being a dad. And it’s one of the reasons I haven’t made as many movies over the course of all these years, because, honestly, I’ve tried to do everything in my power to stay home. I write at my kitchen table. I would wake up at 5:30 a.m. and start work before my boys would wake up, and I could make them breakfast and send them off to school and get back to work, and I could be there to pick them up from school. I could just be present. Family has just always been just a profound influence on me.
We’re conditioned to think of heroes and villains. In real life, I’ve never met a hero and I’ve never met a villain. I’ve met people that have done heroic acts and I’ve met people who have done villainous acts, but I don’t know if those archetypes actually exist. With Jeff, I was interested in this person who was full of contradictions. I think it had less to do with legacy in this movie and more to do with providership and what it meant to be a father. The real Jeff, he fell off the path a little bit and I think it’s easy to do this when you live in a society that values things and stuff. Your value is predicated on what airline class you’re in, or how big your house is, or what kind of car you drive, or what kind of clothes you wear. It’s materialist, it’s capitalist — it’s things. Jeff came out of the Army, and he couldn’t give to his kids the life that he had growing up. That’s because back in the ’50s, if a single parent had a job, you could pretty much have a house and a car.
You could have a life.
Nowadays two people can work two jobs each and still not be able to make ends meet. What Jeff was feeling was that desperation of trying to be a provider, and he made these huge mistakes. With the Jeff character, there’s three people in this movie. Jeffrey Manchester can’t get a job. He’s not a good dad. He’s not a good husband. He enlists the help of Roofman, who uses his brain and gets what he wants. He makes a bunch of bad decisions, but Jeff won’t let him hurt anyone. And then there’s John Zorn, the fake name he gives to Leigh when they start dating, who is the idealized version of who Jeff can be. But those other sides of him, Jeffrey and Roofman, are still battling to take the wheel. And I find his story to be tragic and beautiful.
Like Jeff, Ryan Gosling’s character in The Place Beyond the Pines becomes an outlaw because of this consumerist pressure. I think about Luke saying, “I’m still his father, I can give him stuff,” and he’s robbing banks to provide. Do you feel a personal connection to that pressure?
One hundred percent. When I was a kid, I would walk into my living room on Christmas morning and I couldn’t move. My parents were incredibly supportive parents. I was psyched as a kid to get a drum set for Christmas. But also, what I really always only wanted was them and their time. As a father, I’m hyperaware of time, almost to a fault. It started when I was working with Jeff — I started to become aware of last times that people have in their lives. At that point, I had read my sons their last bedtime story. You don’t realize when that moment happens. And when you start thinking about it, you want to make all of those times the best times and the most memorable times. My wife, when she read this script, she said, “This movie is the most about you that you’ve ever made.” Mahershala Ali saw it the other day and he was like, “You succeed where Jeff fails.” I think a lot of my characters are cautionary tales for me on how to navigate my own life. I put so much pressure on that last time, to try to blow everyone’s mind and to make it memorable, because I want to be here together. And I think Jeff does that.
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The real Leigh told me that when he came into their lives, he left her family better than when he found them, because he did provide so much. But Jeff overdoes things. If he wants to kill an ant, he uses a sledgehammer. You can’t sustain that. That’s something that I relate to, the extreme choices. To make this movie, I had to make it in the Jeff tone, which is heightened and multigenre. I was at the park walking my dog, and I was thinking about the scene when he gets arrested at the birthday party, like, How do I do this? My dog was pulling me one way, and there was a mariachi band in the park doing a birthday party. And I was like, Jeff would hire a mariachi band. I have to go with all of Jeff’s over-the-top instincts on this movie.
Channing Tatum and Derek Cianfrance on the set of Roofman. Photo: Davi Russo/Davi Russo
For this movie, you worked with your entire crew from Blue Valentine again, including your DP, production designer, producers, and editor. It’s been 15 years since that movie came out. What did working with the same crew lend Roofman?
This movie came at a time when I’m entering the middle of my life. People have midlife crises, I’ve heard. [Laughs.] Some people buy Ferraris. I wanted to build a toy store and tell the story about this guy who brings out his inner child. That Peter Pan quality led me to really desire these reunions with people from my life who had been there at the beginning. Since I don’t make many movies, I just wanted to surround myself with the people I loved so much. I was shooting a commercial in Los Angeles, and I was working with Andrij Parekh as the DP, and a lot of the crew from Blue Valentine was here. We had everyone over for a barbecue, and I was like, We have to do more of this. Everyone come back. Let’s get the band back together. When we did Blue Valentine, 16, 17 years ago, we made it for nothing. The movie was like 12 years of my life, and I had 23 days to shoot it in. Roofman comes, and it’s gonna be a movie with Channing Tatum in a toy store. But when I was trying to pitch this to studios, they were like, “We don’t make those kind of movies anymore.” Fortunately, we had Miramax and High Frequency and Paramount that came onboard, but we made this movie for nothing, too, you know? But all those people on that Blue Valentine crew, we all knew how to do it. There was a moment where everyone was like, “We have a 55-day schedule. What do you mean, 35 days?” We had to figure out a way. And we had to shoot it on film. I was like, “Guys, this is an opportunity for us to say ‘yes’ to being those people that we were 16, 17 years ago and get back to the core of why we were doing this.’” And it’s a lot harder to do that years later. You get spoiled, in a way. But I believe that a lot of the struggle of this film is like, in it. You can feel like the energy of that, the urgency.
Cast-wise in this film, there’s another reunion — you’re working with Ben Mendelsohn and Emory Cohen, who co-starred in The Place Beyond the Pines. Mendelsohn plays a pastor and Cohen plays Otis, a bullied employee at the Toys ’R’ Us.
That character of Otis actually had no lines in the script. I’d seen The Bikeriders, Jeff Nichols’s film, and I thought Emory was so incredible. I could not take my eyes off him, and I called him right after to say, “We need to work together again. I have a script, but I don’t have anything for you in it. This guy, Otis. Maybe you want to build something with him.” Emory came back the next day, and he had written the M&Ms scene. He gave Otis this beautiful arc of a kid who’s getting bullied and learns to get his courage. And with Ben, I just dreamed of him singing a Randy Newman song, “I’ll Be Home.” When we were rehearsing, Ben’s first instinct was to go deep and gravelly, somewhere between later-age Leonard Cohen and Barry White. And I was like, “Man, I want you to go toward the light. I want you to sing falsetto.” And he did it. Life is short, and the experience I have on set with the actors and crew is as important as the movies themselves to me.
We have been talking about reunions. Is there anything you can tell me about Wolfman, which you and Ryan Gosling were working on together before you both left the project?
Wolfman, I worked on for a couple of years. With my dark imagination, it was such a joy to unleash that in the Wolfman script and to work on it with Ryan. Ultimately, it didn’t work out. George Romero’s Creepshow was the first movie that I ever watched on VHS, and I bumped into Sam Raimi in an elevator yesterday and told him, “You don’t know how many times I watched Evil Dead growing up.” I have a horror movie in my heart. I definitely will make one. And Ryan is such a magical human being. I really hope Ryan and I work together again someday. Only time will tell, you know?
You cast Ryan and Eva Mendes to play a couple in The Place Bond the Pines. They fall in love and start a family. You cast Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender to play a couple in The Light Between Oceans. They fall in love and start a family. Have you considered that you are one of the most influential matchmakers of our time?
Yes! [Laughs.] That’s good casting. I love each of those people. For all of those situations, it’s not like I did a chemistry read with them. I just had a gut feeling about them fitting together onscreen. With actors, I don’t do auditions. I don’t care about the lines. When I met Channing for Roofman, I took a six-hour walk in the park with him and didn’t mention one thing about Roofman because I wanted to know about him as a person — because that person is going to be on the screen. I knew Ryan really well. I remember Eva came to an audition for The Place Beyond the Pines, and she was like, “Okay, let’s do this.” And I asked, “Would you rather not?” And she was like, “Oh, I hate auditions.” And I said, “All right, do you wanna take me around L.A., show me where you grew up? I would love to see where you grew up.” I got in her car and she drove me around and told me, “That was this house, that was my elementary school.” We got ourselves a cup of coffee, and a couple hours later she took me back to the office. And I was like, “Wow, she’s awesome. What a cool person. I think her and Ryan would get along, too.” I know Ryan, I know her, and so it happened. Same situation with Alicia and Michael. It’s just important to be around good people. I’m so psyched that they’ve found each other.
I love the idea that you could have a matchmaking sideline.
Hey, if this doesn’t work out!
