Director Derek Cianfrance is known for creating emotionally wrenching dramas like “Blue Valentine,” “The Place Beyond the Pines,” and “I Know This Much is True,” movies and TV series that are justly praised for their insights into the human condition but that also demand a lot of their viewers — “fun” doesn’t come to mind as a quality one would associate with Cianfrance.
Which makes his latest film, the crime comedy “Roofman,” such a pleasant surprise. In telling the true story of Jeff Manchester, a prison escapee who hides out from the law in a toy store where he falls for one of the employees, Cianfrance exhibits his usual strengths — richly textured cinematography, attention to idiosyncratic nuance in the performances, editing patterns that reflect the rhythms of real life rather than narrative conventions — but applies them to a lighter piece of entertainment that’s deep without being heavy.
It feels like the kind of thing Hal Ashby might have made in the 1970s, a comedy that’s smart and funny and filled with warmth toward its characters. If it feels like a departure from Cianfrance’s usual fare, that’s entirely intentional.
“‘I Know This Much is True’ came out right at the beginning of the pandemic, and I had so many friends tell me that they had to turn it off when the guy cut his hand off,” Cianfrance told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “I was like, ‘Geez, you only made it one minute!’”
With “Roofman,” Cianfrance opted for a slightly lighter direction while still telling a story with dark crime elements. Part of what makes “Roofman” such a fun ride is the style, as Cianfrance softens the visual edges to make the movie feel not just like a film that takes place in the early 2000s, but that was shot in the early 2000s.
”That was one of the intentions of the movie,” Cianfrance said. “It’s a Christmas movie. And to me, Christmas movies are all about nostalgia, and they’re traditionally about a return home. Those were some of the themes I wanted to deal with in the movie.” To that end, Cianfrance chose to return home himself, crewing up with the collaborators he had worked with on “Blue Valentine.”
“I was really feeling reflective in my life,” Cianfrance said. “I was feeling like I needed to have a bit of a reunion with the people I loved the most.” That meant reuniting with the production designer, costume designer, cinematographer, producers, still photographer, and many more who had brought Cianfrance’s breakthrough feature to life. “Irrespective of what the conversations were, I just wanted to bring the band back together.”
Because “Blue Valentine had been made in 2009, just a few years after the events of “Roofman,” Cianfrance thought a reunion would generate the right kind of vibe onscreen. “I thought we needed our collective energies and the scrappy spirit of all of us kids who wanted to be on Broadway,” Cianfrance said. “We were like a bunch of Off-off-Broadway kids who were just trying to make it, and we had this movie, and we all made it to Broadway.”
While Cianfrance initially saw “Roofman” as an opportunity for him and his “off-Broadway” friends to get together for a Broadway production, he found that “Roofman” ended up being a bit of a hybrid because of how the film business had changed. “I kept hearing from a lot of financiers and studios that they didn’t make this kind of movie anymore,” he said. “So it was an interesting opportunity for us all. We expected that we were going to make a Broadway production of ‘Roofman,’ but as it turned out, we had to make the off-Broadway production of ‘Roofman.’”
That meant putting every dime on screen, and spending money where it was most important. For Cianfrance, one key place where he put a lot of his resources was the Toys “R” Us store where Jeff (Channing Tatum) spends most of his time. “We found this old Toys ‘R’ Us that was completely gutted, and one tile at a time [production designer] Inbal Weinberg put it back together,” Cianfrance said. “2000 fluorescent lights. She had to put in all the copper wire that had been stripped. We had to restore the electricity, and then we had to fill it with period toys. It takes a lot of toys to fill up a toy store.”
Making the store real and fully stocked was important to Cianfrance, whose approach has always been to give his actors the tools they need to completely get lost in the scene. “I’ve always made movies that were experiential, and I like to drop my actors into an aquarium of real life,” he said. “I want them to be immersed in this place so that they can play. It was almost like a big sandbox.”
While the period detail of the Toys “R” Us and other locations is part of what makes “Roofman” feel like a movie from the 2000s, another key component in this regard is Cianfrance’s decision to shoot on film. “My chosen format’s always two-perf 35 millimeter,” he said. “I feel like it has a great texture to it. And if you’re gonna shoot film, it’s the most economical choice to me. It’s also a great format to unify a time period. I love digital and HD, but the challenge is you see everything.”
Cianfrance feels film has a magic that comes not only from the things you can’t see, but the dreamlike nature of the technology itself. “I attribute it romantically to the shutter, because as you’re watching 24 frames a second, you’re also watching 24 frames of black per second,” Cianfrance said. “Imagination erases those frames of black and tricks you into persistence of vision, and I love the magic of that.”
Cianfrance briefly considered shooting on a video format that would have been in use at the time “Roofman” takes place, like SD video. “I love SD,” Cianfrance said. “Some of my favorite movies were made on SD — ‘The Celebration,’ ‘Julien Donkey-Boy,’ ‘Meeting People Is Easy.’ There are so many great films shot on SD, and I’ve always longed to make an SD movie. This couldn’t be that because it was our off-Broadway production of a Broadway play.”
Cianfrance felt it was important to not only shoot on film, but to go to the places where the real story took place. “I grew up in the suburbs of Lakewood, and I grew up in big box stores, and I worked at Walmart for a long time,” Cianfrance said. “This is my culture. Suburbia, big box stores, fast food restaurants. And I didn’t want to see it in an ironic way or a satirical way. One thing I have in common with Jeff Manchester is he loves that stuff.”
In order to convey Jeff’s point of view, Cianfrance romanticized the environment, something he felt shooting on celluloid helped him accomplish. “I didn’t want to see all the edges,” he said. “I wanted to let it be elegant, poetic. I wanted it to have some mystery. I wanted it to feel cinematic, and film was able to do that.”
Film also aided in the creation of the movie’s uniformly terrific performances. “The other reason I love shooting film is it’s a tool to elicit performances,” Cianfrance said. “If you’re shooting two-perf 35mm, with a 400-foot magazine, you get about 11 minutes. I don’t like saying action. I don’t like saying cut. I just want [the actors] to go and live in a scene, and pretty soon they start to learn the time of a mag of film. It makes them more urgent.”
The difference between that and digital shooting is considerable, in Cianfrance’s opinion. “I’ve shot a lot of things on digital,” he said. “I shot the second half of ‘Blue Valentine’ digitally because I wanted to erode moments. I didn’t want to have the urgency of these two people falling in love. I wanted to have the erosion of two people that had lived together for so long, they were now boring each other to tears. And I was shooting 44-minute takes on digital. I could use the digital format as more of a surveillance device.”
Cianfrance says that in the digital sections of “Blue Valentine” the takes went on so long that Ryan Gosling actually fell asleep during one of them while eating spaghetti. “That’s what video will get you,” Cianfrance said. “That’s what HD can get you, an actor falling asleep. But film, they have to wake up. They have to get some points on the board.”
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