“I was looking for something that focused on a person people could relate to and what their hearts and desires were. I heard this story, and it walks the line between comic and tragic, which are two sides of the same coin. So, I was looking for something more palatable for people to see and found this.”
So says director Derek Cianfrance regarding his new film, Roofman, a delightful new dramedy starring Channing Tatum that tells the true story of Jeffery Manchester, a wayward Army veteran who took to breaking into McDonald’s restaurants to provide for his family. His technique was to cut through the roof of these restaurants, something he did 45 times, netting hundreds of thousands of dollars. Though one would suspect he was an unsavory character, by all accounts, Manchester was as congenial a thief as you’d like to meet, a man whose troubles you could relate to, if not his methods of solving them.
Cianfrance was in Chicago recently to promote the film, and we talked about its unique structures. “I always thought Channing Tatum played three characters in this movie. There’s Jeffrey Manchester, an Army vet who can’t get it together. A loser dad and bad husband who hires Roofman to take care of some of his problems. Roofman is very effective and intelligent and if only people would do as he says, things would work out. But they don’t and the problem is, he has Jeffery Manchester’s heart. And then he gets in trouble only to become the idealized version of himself, John Zorn. If only he could have been Zorn earlier, he wouldn’t have had the problems he had. So, with Channing we were always talking about who they are and what do they want to get from the world.”
In having to repeatedly pretend he’s someone he’s not, the role of Manchester posed some unique challenges for Tatum. The filmmaker found in him an actor eager to take on this complex man. “He was the greatest ally a filmmaker can have,” Cianfrance says. “He was so ready to go. He threw all parts of himself into the role. The naked scene in the movie took us eight hours to do. But that was easy for him. His emotionality and presence were great. He’s one of the great movie stars because he has worked in so many genres and I think Jeff was imagining his life as a bunch of different movies. It was a crime movie, a prison break movie, a love story, a comedy and a tragedy. Channing is one of the few actors who can wear all those hats.”
The director had access to Manchester, who is currently serving a 45-year sentence in Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina. Having interviewed him for over 400 hours, he came away with a distinct impression of the man. “The thing that most impressed me was his optimism and his positivity,” he says. “After the events you see in Roofman they were very mad at him, and he spent nine years in solitary confinement. I asked him how he dealt with that and how he was able to keep it so together. I realized his superpower was his brain. I asked him what he did while in solitary confinement and he said he built houses. He said he would imagine he has $100,000 and he would imagine a house in which all his children had rooms, and he would think of the most minute details, like what the hinges were like and what the doors were like. He would spend about six months building and living in this house in his mind. And once he had memorized it and knew every aspect of it, he would give himself $1,000,000 and make a million-dollar home. And that’s what he did for nine years.”
Not only did these conversations give Cianfrance insight into Manchester, but they provided a clear notion as to Roofman’s purpose. “I remember my dad would say, ‘I put a roof over your head,’ and I realized the film is about a father who doesn’t know how to be a provider and he’s going about doing that in all the wrong ways. He just wants a home for his family and doesn’t quite know how to get it. If he’d only gotten out of his own way, he would have been able to do just that.”
This article appears in October 9-15, 2025 and Illinois Times.
