<em>Roofman</em>: You Won’t Believe the True Story
Here’s a way to gauge what’s true about the alleged “true story” depicted in the new Channing Tatum crime comedy Roofman. Whenever your gut tells you, Okay, come on ... chances are it actually happened.
The hard part for writer-director Derek Cianfrance was toning it down. Too often, the story sounded either preposterous or contrived. “It happened all the time,” the filmmaker says. “If I wrote this as pure fiction, I’d be a terrible screenwriter.”
Was there really a North Carolina man named Jeffrey Manchester who was convicted of robbing 42 fast-food joints by tunneling into their rooftops overnight and sticking up the minimum-wage workers in the morning? Yes, that’s entirely true. The crime spree lasted two years and ended (temporarily) when the then 28-year-old was convicted in November 2000.
And yes, he really did endear himself to his victims by being apologetic and friendly while holding them at gunpoint—which made the witnesses remember more about him. The Charlotte Observer headline when he was convicted declared: A ‘Polite’ Robber Still Goes to Jail.
He really did escape from prison in 2004 by hiding out underneath a delivery truck. And Manchester remained on the loose for nearly a year by living inside a Toys “R” Us, where he survived on jars of baby food and fistfuls of candy. (He built a nest in an abandoned Circuit City that was next door, but Roofman streamlines this to keep him only in the toy store.)
Manchester would also sneak out of his retail hideaway and attend events at a local church, where he befriended and started dating a single mom named Leigh Wainscott (played by Kirsten Dunst). The one major leap of fiction that the move takes is having Leigh also work as an employee at the toy store. That part is false.
Finally (spoiler warning), there’s the bittersweet climax of the movie, when Manchester is headed to the airport with a pocketful of cash and forged identification documents. He’s nabbed by police because he feels obliged to go back and see Wainscott one more time. That has to be bullshit, right? Except no. That happened too.
“In fact, it was Jeff’s humanity that made him a bad criminal,” says Cianfrance. “He would lock someone in a freezer at McDonald’s but make sure they had their jacket. He was at the off-ramp to an airport with a plane ticket in his hand to his freedom, and he turned around because he didn’t want to just leave his girlfriend without saying goodbye. I think if he was more coldhearted, we wouldn’t know the story of Jeff Manchester. He would be in Venezuela or Brazil or Costa Rica or someplace with no extradition laws. He would be on a beach somewhere.”
Instead, Jeffrey Manchester is back in Central Prison in Raleigh. He’ll be there for a long time to come. With nothing left to hide, he became the primary source for Cianfrance as he researched the Roofman story. “I can’t call him. He can only call me,” Cianfrance says. “Phone calls last for 15 minutes. They’re always being recorded and supervised by someone listening in. I’ve had hundreds of hours of phone calls with him.”
After a while, the Blue Valentine and A Place Beyond the Pines filmmaker began to fear he was just another dupe falling prey to Manchester’s lies. “There was a time during our conversations that I was like, I’ve got to talk to someone else, because this sounds crazy,” Cianfrance says. “I mean, I was starting to wonder: Is Jeff just a tall-tale teller? Is he conning me?”
To avoid relying solely on Manchester, the filmmaker began reaching out to the other true-life figures in the incident. “I talked to so many people in his life,” Cianfrance says. “I talked to the police that arrested him, the judge that sentenced him to 45 years, his mom, his brother, his girlfriend Leigh, the pastor of the church, basically anyone that would talk to me. Those people validated these stories.”
Cianfrance also feared he was being suckered by Manchester’s spin that made him sound more like a nice guy than someone who had caused irrevocable harm to the people he had deceived. But the filmmaker was surprised again.
“I thought, They’re probably pissed off at him. They probably feel betrayed by him. They’re probably going to tell me he was a piece of crap,” Cianfrance says. “But they spoke of him as this unicorn that had entered their lives. Leigh said, ‘He was the greatest adventure of my life.’ And, ‘I don’t regret a second of it.’ So that perspective was also something I had to keep in mind.”
A key insight came from Crossroads Church pastor Ron Smith (played by Ben Mendelsohn in the movie.) “I asked Pastor Ron to tell me about the Bible, and he said, ‘Well, the first thing you’ve got to know is the Old Testament’s about judgment and New Testament’s about grace.’ And he said in his life, he tries to err on the side of grace. So I thought, Okay, society has judged Jeff pretty harshly: 45 years in prison, nine of those years he’s been in solitary confinement. Maybe the movie could kind of see him with a little bit of that grace. Not let him off the hook but understand the humanity of it.”
Not everyone was so forgiving. Among those holding a grudge was a local dentist who treated Manchester as a patient during his months on the lam. It turns out wolfing nothing but candy really is bad for your teeth. Manchester later burned the practice to the ground, fearing that his dental records might help police track him down. (This part of the movie is also true, of course.)
“I talked to that dentist and he very much didn’t want to be in the movie,” Cianfrance says. That’s why in the credits, when the filmmaker’s interviews with the real individuals are featured, it’s a “neighboring” dentist who recounts that part of the story.
One doubt Cianfrance had trouble getting over was how Manchester could carry on a double life out in the open while on the run from police. “I was asking him, How could you leave the toy store and go to the church and have no one recognize you? Weren’t you all over the news?” he says. “And Jeff told me, ‘Today’s news is tomorrow’s toilet paper.’ There’s so much news that you go from the front page to page 2, to page 3 to page 4, and pretty soon you’re out of the paper and out of people’s minds.”
Manchester would sneak out of his retail hideaway to attend events at a local church, where he befriended and started dating a single mom named Leigh Wainscott (played by Kirsten Dunst).
To add even more veracity to Roofman, the film used several real locations from the story. So, for instance, the Crossroads Church plays the Crossroads Church onscreen. “I had to go down to Charlotte, because this story is so wild. I had to go down there to be in the place to say, Wow, it actually happened here,” Cianfrance says.
The filmmaker offered bit parts in the movie to pretty much everyone who spoke to him. “Sometimes they play themselves, like the prison truck driver, Charles Cummings,” the director says. “He asked me at the end of our meeting, ‘Who are you going to get to play me?’ I was like, ‘I’m open to any ideas.’ And he was like, ‘I think it should be me.’ I was like, ‘All right, it’s you. Take it.’ ”
Former Charlotte police sergeant Katherine Scheimreif and several other law-enforcement officers who tracked down Manchester back in the day also played themselves, and Cianfrance cast actual ex-cons as the prisoners Tatum’s character interacts with behind bars. The filmmaker recalled a strange moment at the hometown premiere for the movie, when all of them were on the red carpet. “[The police] were all decked out in their nicest clothes. And then over to the left was all of the ex-prisoners that I cast,” Cianfrance says. “Here I was on the red carpet between the cops and the robbers.”
The last bit of authenticity came from Tatum himself, the director said. In their initial conversations about the role, the actor didn’t look much like the wiry Manchester. “In that meeting, he was like 240 pounds. He was just this hulking mass that is Channing Tatum,” Cianfrance says. “He said to me, ‘Hey, I think I should lose some weight for this role, because Jeff has to get into tight spots. He has to be able to cut holes in roofs, and I’m this big guy, it’s just harder to get in.’ I was like, ‘That makes sense.’ And then he showed up to set a couple months later and he had lost 65 pounds.”
The filmmaker said he became worried that the actor, like the character he was playing, was taking things just a little too far. “He was almost emaciated. It was a bit scary. My assistant director was like, ‘You need to eat a cheeseburger,’ because he was kind of starving himself,” Cianfrance says.
Tatum was fine and clearly had the energy for scenes like Manchester’s naked sprint through the toy store after being surprised in the midst of a restroom sponge bath one morning. Cianfrance says the actor’s physical transformation captured something of Jeffrey Manchester’s spirit too.
“In a way, I think what he saw with that character was this great emptiness and this great kind of loneliness,” Cianfrance says. “This guy had tried to keep this family together but made these giant mistakes and now was incarcerated and alone. He had so much love, but he was empty, and so Channing wanted to feel empty.”
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