Before Derek Cianfrance decided he wanted to direct what would become Roofman, he asked if he could speak to the movie’s subject, the robber Jeffrey Manchester.
“I couldn’t call him because Jeff is in a max security prison, so I got him my number and somehow he called me. I picked up and he called me back and I picked up and over the course of the next four years, I would get three to four phone calls from him a week,” Cianfrance says.
Eventually, Manchester started to address Cianfrance, best known for dark films like Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines, as “Dr. Derek.”
Why the moniker? “He said I was shrinking his head,” Cianfrance says.
Manchester’s wild story is documented in Roofman, which just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and will release in theaters on Oct. 10. Channing Tatum plays Manchester, who became notorious in the late 1990s for his unique method of robbing mostly McDonald’s and other fast food franchises via their rooftops.
Manchester, an Army veteran, was arrested in 2000, but four years later escaped the North Carolina prison where he was meant to serve 45 years. On the run, he holed up inside a Charlotte Toys ‘R’ Us for months, using baby monitors to surveil his surroundings when he was hidden during the day. He eventually ventured out and even started dating a woman he met at a local church, played in the movie by Kirsten Dunst.
Roofman highlights the almost unbelievable aspects of Manchester’s tale through an at times sweetly goofy and at others deeply moving performance from Tatum. It emphasizes how he was almost polite for a thief, telling McDonald’s employees to get their jackets before he locked them in a freezer. The film roots Manchester’s actions in a search for family and stability: Lacking other marketable skills, he begins his spree to provide for a wife and child who quickly reject him once they learn where the money came from, and then gravitates to his new love to be a father figure to her daughters.
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“I think it’s really easy when you meet him to understand how those things are not just possible but likely, because he’s like a 10-year-old boy and he has all of the foibles of being a 10-year-old boy in the sense that he gets into all kinds of reckless trouble he shouldn’t be in,” Cianfrance’s co-writer Kirt Gunn says. “And then you sprinkle in the fact that he has this mind that can see complexity in systems.”
Roofman is also, very explicitly, a dramatization. For one, Manchester’s girlfriend Leigh Wainscott, unlike the character played by Dunst, did not actually work at the toy store. And the movie doesn’t show how Manchester also used the vacant Circuit City next door to the Toys ‘R’ Us as another living space. A fellow veteran played by LaKeith Stanfield is based on a guy that Manchester knew who could provide him with falsified documents, but Manchester wouldn’t give Cianfrance his actual contact’s name.
“I let [Jeff] know that if I was going to tell his story there was going to have to be fictionalized elements to it and he completely had faith,” Cianfrance says. “He told me, ‘You tell this story in whatever way you see fit.’”
But Cianfrance and his co-writer also deeply researched Manchester’s exploits, by speaking not only to the man himself but also members of his family, Wainscott, the pastor of the church he attended, and the sergeant who arrested him. Cianfrance offered everyone he spoke to a part in the movie, which filmed on location in Charlotte, including at the church where Manchester and Wainscott met. Cianfrance even found a real abandoned Toys ‘R’ Us to shoot in, refurbishing it and stocking the newly installed shelves with retro toys found from eBay.
“I try to bring everyone in and make it like a home movie,” Cianfrance says.
Wainscott plays a crossing guard. In one scene, the real-life police officers that interviewed Wainscott play cops asking questions of Dunst on screen. Cianfrance didn’t have them recite lines. Instead, they simply asked the questions they did 20 years prior. Dunst responded as Leigh. Wainscott watched that all unfold.
“I think it was cathartic for her,” Cianfrance says.
Both Cianfrance and Gunn expected Wainscott as well as Pastor Ron Smith to be angry with Manchester when they first spoke with them. Instead, they spoke about Manchester with warmth. Gunn says Wainscott immediately started explaining how her relationship with him was the most exciting time in her life and how he is a “wonderful” person.
Cianfrance explains that a conversation with Smith about the Bible influenced the tone of the film.
“He was like, ‘To me, the Old Testament is all about judgment and the New Testament is all about grace. In my life, I’ve always tended to err on the side of grace,’” Cianfrance remembers. “I thought to myself with Jeff, here’s a guy who was judged pretty harshly and sentenced to 45 years, and I was like, maybe I’ll follow Ron’s lead on the movie and err on the side of grace.” But although the movie depicts Manchester as a guy who’s genuinely trying to be nice despite his criminal exploits, it doesn’t fully let him off the hook for the consequences of his actions, namely in terms of the hurt he caused the people he loved when his house of cards finally came tumbling down.
After getting involved with the film, Wainscott and Smith started to visit Manchester in prison again, Cianfrance says.
Manchester, meanwhile, always understood his life was like something out of a movie, though he had an initial complaint when Cianfrance cast Tatum.
“He was like, ‘You need to cast someone uglier,’” Cianfrance says. “Then he started talking to Channing and he was like, ‘You know, Channing and I have a lot in common. We both have a very high motor. We both played defensive end and we’re both extremely good looking.’”
Being in prison, Manchester has not seen the movie yet, but he did see a clip that aired on local news, specifically a sequence where Tatum as Jeff skates around the Toys ‘R’ Us in Heelys with a teddy bear on his back. Manchester asked Cianfrance how he got the idea for that. Cianfrance explained that while they were setting up a shot, they encountered Tatum just fooling around.
“Jeff says, ‘That makes me so happy to hear,’” Cianfrance says. “‘The thing that most people don’t realize is that if you lock yourself in a toy store for six months, it has a way of bringing out your inner child, and I’m really happy that Channing got a chance to experience that.’”
The post The True Story Behind Roofman and the Fast-Food Robber Who Hid Out for Months in a Toys ‘R’ Us appeared first on TIME.
