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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…
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