Movies like Die Hard, Mrs. Doubtfire, or Tootsie were influential to Roofman, because they were larger-than-life stories, or roller-coaster rides, but they were also plausible. Like Roofman, Die Hard is also a low-key Christmas movie; those other two movies are also about people living lives that aren’t their own, who are living a lie.
I also just wanted to challenge myself. I have a dark or catastrophic imagination, and movies are a good way for me to not turn my life into a catastrophe. I could exorcise all my catastrophic thinking through my movies. But I have an optimistic consciousness, and I thought that I should be brave enough to make a movie where my consciousness was on display more than my imagination. But expend all your optimistic consciousness in a movie, and then you’re left with nothing but dark imagination in real life! I related to Jeff Manchester in a way; I feel very similar to him as a person in his toxic optimism.
AVC: Your work often explores people wrestling with the consequences of their choices, particularly with their legacies as father figures. Is there something that keeps consciously drawing you toward these types of characters?
DC: It’s this dilemma between being a provider or being a father. What do you provide in being a father? I wasn’t conscious of it when I was making the film but, in the editing room, I was thinking about how my father used to tell me, “I put a roof over your head.” And I started to realize that that’s what Roofman was about; it’s about a dad saying, “I’m the dad, and I’m going to provide you with all this stuff, because that’s what dads do.”
I had a middle-class upbringing in the suburbs of Denver, and I just remember how hard my parents worked for us, what they provided for us. At the same time, as a kid, I was watching my parents argue all the time. I was studying this relationship. Blue Valentine I made as a cautionary tale to myself, as to what not to do, what not to repeat, that my parents did. It had been my nightmare when I was a kid, but my parents split up when I was 20. I spent 12 years writing Blue Valentine, meditating on how I don’t want to go through the same thing they went through.
I needed to exorcise that. But with this movie, now I have kids, and my kids are turning into young men, and I was thinking about the “last times.” I’d already read them their last bedtime story, and I didn’t remember when that had happened. I started to hyper-focus on every moment. Every dinner, I tried to be there and to take pictures of it, but that was too much. These moments need to happen; they don’t last forever.
I was thinking a lot about Jeff’s desire to be a father. What was he going to give? He couldn’t give his kids what his parents had given him, because the world had changed. In the ’50s and ’60s, if one person in a household worked, it was almost guaranteed that you could have a house, a car, a garage. If two people worked, you could have a two-car garage and a pool. Nowadays, two people in a house can work two jobs and still not have enough to make ends meet, and there’s real pressure in that.
What Jeff learned, and what he told me about in prison, is that he wanted to provide for his family, and he did, but then all his agency as a father was taken away, so that he couldn’t provide anything. He couldn’t be around his family, and he couldn’t see them, and he couldn’t force them to come see him. Even when he broke out, hid in a tree, and watched his kids play all day, he couldn’t cross that invisible barrier. The desire he’d felt to create a home and to provide for his family had turned into him an empty-nester. It felt profound that, for me, the movie was about making a home. The very first word you read on the screen is “homemaker,” and that was what the movie was about: what home are you making for your kids?
AVC: “Homemaker” is seen right before “McDonald’s.” Roofman is set primarily when Jeff was hiding out inside a Toys “R” Us, and you fill it with countless brands. This got me thinking about the role of product placement in your work—even, to give another example, Ryan Gosling’s Metallica shirt in The Place Beyond The Pines—as indicative of this distance between your characters and these archetypes they aspire to, how their ideal is this commodity they’ve been sold.
DC: Exactly—it’s an identity. I grew up in the suburbs. I remember my house, on my block, in my neighborhood, was very humble. But, when we mowed the lawn, it looked like a golf course. It was a small lawn, but my dad trained me to cut it three times: this way, that way, and diagonal, so it was just perfect. We used to sweep the street. Our house was this perfect picture. Inside our house were perfect pictures of my family, all smiling. I used to always stare at those pictures and wonder why we had to present this perfection to the world.
When my parents split up, my friends were shocked, whereas I could see it coming every day of my life. I always knew. As a very young kid, I had a camera, and I used to try to take pictures of the family arguments. I would get such flack from my family. They were always super supportive of what I did and who I was, but when my dad blows a tire on a family road trip to Disneyland, and he’s pissed off on the side of the highway, and I’m filming it with my video camera, he’s over it. But that is what I was trying to shoot. I was trying to put the real image up there, of what we went through.
At the same time, I grew up in this place. I worked at Walmart. My upbringing was going to McDonald’s for birthday parties, and there was no judgment about that. It was just my culture, growing up. I understand that, if my parents hadn’t worked so hard for stuff, it might have been different. My dad used to draw monsters as a kid; he was a great artist, and I used to sit next to him and watch these monsters that he would draw for me and my brother. Our minds would be blown, and I used to beg him to do that instead. If anyone saw this, they would be blown away, just like I am. But he saw no choice in that he had to be a provider, because he had to pay the bills and provide, so he didn’t live the life that he probably should have. I remember as a kid thinking to myself that I’m always going to choose love over money and over perfection. I’m going to choose the authentic over the perfect.
There’s a version of this movie that, when we were writing it, we were thinking about: “Are we going to make a movie that’s a satire about what society breeds? Are we going to make a movie that’s a takedown of capitalism, of this culture that makes people crazy like that?” And I felt like it wasn’t going to be true to Jeff or really true to my heart. Jeff desperately wanted to fit into that society. He just couldn’t. He never judged it. He never thought about American capitalism and corporations, but he did know he wasn’t going to steal from mom-and-pop stores, right? He thought to himself, “McDonald’s can handle it: billions of customers served, billions of dollars, and who’s going to miss it?” He wasn’t going to really hurt anybody, because he would never really hurt anyone, and he was going to give them their jackets as he put them in the freezer. What he realized later was that he did hurt people—not physically, but emotionally and psychologically.
AVC: Jeff received a 45-year sentence. A week ago, Sean Combs—who you made a TV documentary about almost 20 years ago—was sentenced to 50 months after a trial that laid bare his brutal, decades-long abuse of women. I appreciate that Roofman isn’t saying justice was done.
DC: Jeff was originally given a plea bargain of seven years if he pleaded guilty. And he said, “Seven years? My kids are going to be teenagers by the time I get out of here. I didn’t hurt anybody. They can’t put me in jail for seven years.” And so he went to trial, and they gave him 45 years.
I talked to the judge; she’s actually in the film. She plays the prosecutor in the film. And I was like, “Tell me about your sentence.” And she was like, “Those were kids he put into those freezers.” And she was like, “I wanted those kids to feel a sense of justice.” I’m not a judge. I don’t really judge people, or at least I try not to. Ron Smith, the pastor of the church [Manchester frequented while hiding out], told me, when I asked him about this, that the Old Testament is about judgment, and the New Testament is about grace. I relate more to that. I tried to see Jeff with grace.
The world is very corrupt. Jeff had a public defender, and this judge made a point. She did what she thought was right. [Long pause] I did a film with Puffy—Black And White: A Portrait Of Sean Combs. I think I saw the person he was that night. I spent one night with him, and it’s all in that film. It was a very, very stressful night. My DP, actually, the next morning, had a herpes stress sore that developed on his face, because it was so stressful being in that place.
I used this old Irving Penn photograph; he used to photograph people in corners, and I wanted to take Sean Combs, I wanted to put him in a corner, so it was just me and him. It was called Black And White, and it was just two cameras: Super 16, black-and-white film. He had seen some documentaries I had made, including the basketball documentary I made in Chicago here, and he said, “I want you to do that for me.” I pitched him, “Let’s do a documentary where it’s just me and you talking from sundown to sun-up.” We shot it from midnight to 5:30 in the morning in his apartment in New York. It was a very stressful, intense moment.
With Jeff, whom I’ve spent a lot of time with, the times that I felt stressed were more when I went and visited him in prison, when I saw a man in a cage. Jeff felt like he had been preserved in formaldehyde, because he keeps himself in very good shape. He doesn’t eat prison food. He eats bagged mackerel from the commissary and granola bars, and he has such mind control. But it was devastating to talk to a guy in a cage through a tiny little window. I could barely hear his voice for four-and-a-half hours.
Riding the elevators to visit him, I was riding with other family members, mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and parents of people who were incarcerated, guys who’d messed up and done a bad thing and were locked away. And I could just feel the true tragedy of these people, and they were all people that probably couldn’t afford big-time legal budgets. I don’t know if I want to talk about it being fair, but the wheels of justice are intense, and that’s why I’ve never tried to think of myself as judgmental.
On the news, you hear about good guys and bad guys, but I’ve never met a hero or a villain in my regular life. I’ve met people that make heroic actions and make villainous actions, but they are never the full thing, one or the other.
AVC: You offered Channing Tatum the lead in Blue Valentine early on, but he turned it down. Tell me about coming together to tell this story.
DC: The first time I saw Channing was in A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints. I’ve only seen it one time, but I remember the moment where I first saw Channing Tatum on the screen. He was walking down the street. He had a vest on with no shirt underneath, and his body was a dancer’s body, and his face was a boxer’s face. He was like a mix between Gene Kelly and Marlon Brando.
He had this wounded, beautiful masculinity. I offered him Blue Valentine, and he said no, but things worked out for me, I’ll say. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams… I offered the movie to so many people, talked to so many people. If Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams hadn’t believed in me, I wouldn’t be here today. They’re the ones who gave me a shot, so I owe it all to them. I’m thankful it worked out the right way.
But I also became a super fan of Channing. He’s amazing. The comedies he’s done are some of the funniest, most iconic comedies of the last 20 years. He is always great in his dramatic roles, like in Foxcatcher. He’s great in Foxcatcher. As an action star, a romance star, as somebody making memoirs of his life as a stripper… I knew he was courageous.
The real Jeff also loves movies. I feel like when Jeff was living his life, he was imagining he was the protagonist in his own film. One of Jeff’s favorite films is Career Opportunities, and he loves Miami Blues with Alec Baldwin—which are crazy movies, right? Anyway, I think he was writing a script in his head as he was doing this; the story he was living—writing and acting in—was a crime movie, a love story, a tragedy, a comedy. And I was just thinking, “Channing can wear all those hats.”
I met with him in Prospect Park, and we had a five-or-six-hour walk, and I didn’t pitch him the story, but I learned from that walk how important his daughter was to him, and how he was in a custody situation with his daughter. I could feel that pain, and I could feel the love. I was like, “Wow, that’s very Jeff-like, too.”
Channing could tap into that. And then he had a physicality, in the way he moved. Not every actor can move the way Channing moves. So many actors now are dialogue delivery machines, because of the “golden age of TV,” but Channing can move. I knew so much of this story had to be told physically. It’s like Castaway in how he engages with it. I rewrote the script for the next nine months in his voice. The last time I saw the movie, I was blown away. He was born for the screen.
AVC: Your films have always featured extraordinary portrayals of romantic relationships, and the chemistry between your actors has been crucial to this. What can you say about finding those moments with Kirsten Dunst and Channing Tatum, and how would you describe their dynamic as collaborators?
DC: I’m obsessed with onscreen relationships between characters, and the best way to enrich that is to cast properly. I suppose I have a knack for this. I do it by first understanding who the actors I’m casting are as people. For instance, when I cast Eva [Mendes] in Pines, she came to an audition. She was clearly nervous. I asked her if she would rather take me around Los Angeles and show me where she grew up. She got so excited and then took me on a two-hour tour of her upbringing. This journey told me so much about Eva. and I realized, since I knew Ryan as well as I did, that they would be a great match.
Regarding Kirsten and Channing, I’ve always wanted to work with Kirsten and think she’s one of our greatest actors. I knew her a little bit and knew that she was a dedicated mother as well. This was important for her character (to understand the selflessness required to be a parent), so I cast her. When I told Channing that I had cast her, I saw him get nervous because he respected her so much as a performer. And, honestly, I think he was intimidated by her. Sensing this, I decided to keep them apart during prep, making sure they never met until we shot.
And then the day came for us to shoot the Red Lobster scene, and that was going to be the first scene they shot together. I was outside the restaurant with Channing and the last thing he said to me before going inside was, “I hope she likes me.”
And I knew that that was half Channing wanting Kirsten to like him, and half Jeffrey wanting Leigh to like him. When he finally did go inside on the first take—the one we used—I could see his nerves and relief when he locked eyes with her and knew he was going to be OK. Their dynamic was very supportive and warm. They both have strong nurturing instincts and I think carried that for each other.
AVC: You’ve spoken about editing as a painstaking process. What was it like to edit Roofman? How was establishing and maintaining its tonal balance, the two sides of that coin flipping in the air?
DC: Editing Roofman was intense. Thankfully, I was working with my longtime collaborators Jim Helton and Ron Patane. We always follow the same process when we work together. We don’t cut an assembly. Rather, we watch every second of footage and build each scene individually before stitching everything together.
We edited in a shared apartment for the first three months, and then we ran out of money and had to edit the rest of the movie from our homes. The way I see filmmaking is this, and I’ve said this before: writing is dreaming, shooting is living, and editing is murder. That was true in the making of this movie. Murder, because you have to be ruthless.
Editing is also an amazing process of alchemy. And that was on full display while maintaining the tonal shifts in this film. Actually, from the very first cut, the tone of the film was working. I think it was because I was searching for this specific tone on set. My actors and I referred to it as “duende,” something sad but sweet. And from the first cut that was apparent and working.
The big challenge of editing was suffering through having no money and no separation between work and life—because editing is a marathon and it takes so much endurance to get to the end, making sure to turn over every rock and try all the possibilities. Certain scenes that we threw out earlier turned out to be crucial in the big picture. Similarly, some of my favorite, most emotional scenes with Kirsten had to be sacrificed for the greater whole. The only way to know that was to edit and screen the film to audiences repeatedly.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
