Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst's ‘Roofman’ tells a stranger-than-fiction story with rigorous accuracy and a whole lot of toys

The lengths writer-director Derek Cianfrance goes to create immersive environments for his actors has grown into a kind of legend. After making the much-improvised doomed romance of “Blue Valentine” (2010), Michelle Williams said she would have to remind herself that she was never, actually, married to Ryan Gosling.

Cianfrance’s last feature, 2016’s “The Light Between the Oceans,” was shot almost entirely at a remote New Zealand lighthouse. The making of that film did lead together its stars, Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander. So did Cianfrance’s “The Place Beyond the Pines,” with Gosling and Eva Mendes. Method filmmaking can produce real-life results.

But Cianfrance’s ways are for a purpose. He wants his actors, as much as possible, to live in a movie. For his latest film, “Roofman,” starring Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst, that approach was especially important because the story was so far-fetched.

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“I wanted to immerse the entire cast in this story because it’s a crazy story,” Cianfrance said in an interview. “Jeff’s actions are kind of unbelievable. I felt like just for me, to have my suspension of disbelief, I needed to be down there. I think that’s why I do a lot of this immersion because I need to believe it. I need to believe it’s actually happening.”

In “Roofman,” which Paramount Pictures releases Friday in theaters, Tatum plays Jeffrey Manchester, a U.S. Army veteran who found civilian life difficult. In 1998, he began robbing McDonald’s by sawing through roofs. He’s believed to have robbed more than 40 stores. Both his novel entry point, and his reported cordial manner with employees, made the “Roofman” an intriguing figure on the local TV news.

In 2000, Manchester was caught in North Carolina and was later sentenced to 45 years in prison. But in 2004, he escaped and, to elude the authorities, hid out in a Charlotte Toys “R” Us. He clandestinely lived there for months, eating what was on the shelves, and, most audaciously, trying to live a seemingly normal life outside the store. He attended a local church and dated a woman named Leigh Wainscott (played by Dunst).

Mostly, the events of “Roofman” happened as they’re portrayed. But how do you make a stranger-than-fiction tale believable? For the filmmakers of “Roofman,” it meant going to some extreme lengths to give real-life authenticity to a made-for-Hollywood story. At a time when major studios seldom release star-led original films at all, let alone fiercely realistic ones shot on location, “Roofman” — a modest sized production cobbled together with an assortment of companies, including Miramax, FilmNation and Limelight — effectively tunneled its way to the big screen.

“I had many producers tell me: Why don’t you shoot this in South Africa? You’ll have double the amount of days,” Cianfrance says, referencing the appeal of tax credits. “I said, ‘Well, because the people aren’t there, and the ghosts of this story aren’t there.’”

Hunting for Tickle Me Elmo

Cianfrance wanted to shoot in the Toys “R” Us where Manchester hid out, but he couldn’t. The toy chain went bankrupt in 2017, and the one where Manchester camped out in is now a mega church. So, he turned an abandoned Toys “R” Us in Pineville, North Carolina, into a nearly fully operational one. The production redid the electricity, added plumbing, installed new fluorescent lighting and stocked 40,000 square feet of shelves with truckloads of period-appropriate toys.

“That was my ‘Fitzcarraldo,’ bringing the steam ship over the mountain, building that Toys ‘R’ Us,” Cianfrance says, chuckling.

That gave Tatum, whom Cianfrance had initially sought for “Blue Valentine,” a box store sandbox in which to play. The biggest gift Cianfrance could give to Tatum, he felt, was “to unleash him in a toy store.”

“It was 360, all around,” says Tatum, speaking alongside Dunst. “It’s not like this is a giant budget movie. It involved, like: ‘There’s not even enough toys from this era in the world to fill this place.’ And Derek kept going. ‘I promised Chan that he would have a fully working store where he could do whatever he wanted.’ He put it on me!”

Dunst was particularly drawn to Cianfrance’s process. “The kind of acting that Derek likes,” Dunst says, “is the kind of acting that I like: when it doesn’t feel like it’s acting.”

That doesn’t mean that their director’s fidelity to realism didn’t sometimes strike the actors as borderline absurd.

“I remember because of sound someone put a fake ice cube in my drink,” Dunst says, laughing.

“And he lost it,” add Tatum. “He shook it. ‘This doesn’t sound like ice!’”

‘I got greedy’

Yet much of the most extensive work to give “Roofman” veracity was below the surface. Manchester is currently serving out his sentence at Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina. He can only make outgoing calls, but Cianfrance estimates that he spoke to him more than a hundred times. That gave Cianfrance an understanding of Manchester’s motives and mistakes and turned “Roofman” into a comic but tender examination of misguided materialism.

“Jeff wrote a crazy movie for himself, and he lived it,” Cianfrance says. “What made me ultimately understand what the movie was that Jeff — he was just trying to figure out how to be a dad. He was doing it all for family.”

Tatum also spoke frequently with Manchester by phone. Manchester, among other things, expressed his approval of the movie poster, featuring Tatum with a stuffed bear on his shoulders, a floaty around his waist and a gun in his right hand. Tatum says they bonded talking about their children and their hopes for the future. Manchester is scheduled to be released in 2036.

“I got more than I could possibly convey. I just found myself being held almost by him, taken care of,” Tatum says. “I didn’t grow up bad. But I definitely am a couple bad decisions away from hopefully not being in jail for 45 years. But I think we’re all one or two bad decisions away from having a completely different life. Jeff did tell me, ‘I got greedy.’”

As he prepped the movie, Cianfrance interviewed everyone he could who was associated with Manchester’s escape. Usually, he gave them parts. Wainscott plays a crossing guard in the film. The pastor of the church attended by Manchester, Ron Smith, plays a pawnshop owner. Dunst is interrogated by the police officers who actually interviewed Wainscott.

Cianfrance cast Tatum and Dunst, he says, partly because they are each parents themselves. Dunst spent time with the actors who play her daughters, going shopping and making a meal together.

“It builds layers that people feel when they watch a film,” Dunst says.

Some things, like being a parent, you can’t fake.

“I don’t know if I could have done this movie without having my daughter, and specifically my journey with her. I miss her a lot,” says Tatum. “That loneliness and wanting for that was something infused in there. I didn’t have to create that.”