Channing Tatum Sparks the Evolution of Writer-Director Derek Cianfrance
Interview By: Adam Freed
October 10, 2025
Despite a warm critical reception and prominent positioning on HBOmax, I Know This Much to Be True writer and director Derek Cianfrance looks back on his experience with the limited series almost mournfully.
“I lost my audience,” Cianfrance said. “It was too heavy a time [in the midst of the Covid-19 global pandemic], and when Mark Ruffalo’s character cut off his hand in episode one, the audience went with it.”
Introspection doesn’t feel difficult to Cianfrance, a 51-year-old soft-spoken Colorado native, but neither does critical acclaim. The writer and director has come very close to mastery within the world of dramatic filmmaking, with titles like Blue Valentine (2010), The Place Beyond the Pines (2012) and The Light Between Oceans (2016) all credited to his name.
Add to those credits the fact that Cianfrance wrote the 2019 Academy Award winning film The Sound of Metal, and it becomes clear that the filmmaker is no stranger to heavy storytelling.
“I made a series of very serious films…and so I spent a year looking for a project that resembled the films I grew up watching in the 80’s and 90’s,” he said. The result of that tone-shifting twelve month pursuit is Cianfrance’s latest film, Roofman (2025), a humorous and sentimental Channing Tatum (Magic Mike, Blink Twice) vehicle about a military veteran named Jeffrey Manchester, who, out of desperation, becomes a criminal without exchanging his golden heart in the process.
Roofman opens with the all-too ominous “based on a true story” title card, which Cianfrance worked feverishly to ensure was as factual as possible.
“I shot the movie in Charlotte, N.C., where the events took place, because I wanted to be around the real people involved in the story,” Cianfrance said. “All of a sudden, people just started showing up, people who had known Jeff [Manchester].”
His quest for authenticity led Cianfrance into the path of Charles Cummings, a former truck driver who inadvertently aided Manchester in his escape from the Brown Creek Correctional Institution in June 2004. The scene, and the details specifically connected to its execution, make it without question one of the highlights of the delightful cinematic experience.
Cianfrance laughed while recalling, “I thanked [Cummings] for his time and we shook hands. He asked me if I had any idea who would play him in the film. [Cummings] thought it should be him. I hired him on the spot.”
This type of playful quest for authenticity has become a mainstay of Cianfrance’s work, especially when it has come in pursuit of finding his perfect leading man, a mission that was accomplished in spades with the casting of Channing Tatum, a process that didn’t happen overnight.
“The first time I saw Channing was in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006),” he said.”I’ll never forget seeing [Tatum] on screen for the first time. It was a scene in which he was shirtless and was wearing only an open vest. He moved like a dancer, but you tilt up and he had a boxer’s face. It was like he was given Gene Kelly’s body and Marlon Brando’s face; he just had it. [Tatum] is the perfect image of wounded masculinity.”
If the director’s effusive praise of his leading man feels overblown, Cianfrance makes it very clear that his belief in Tatum was due to his rare ability to cross genres without compromising the story’s vision.
“I was putting this story together and had a meeting with Channing in [Brooklyn’s] Prospect Park,” Cianfrance said. “We just walked and talked. We walked for almost five hours together, and I never told him a single thing about Jeff Manchester. I just wanted to get to know him.”
As the possibility of Roofman became a reality, Cianfrance knew that casting a criminal with a heart of gold would require an actor adept at crossing genres.
“He is funny, he is a big man but moves with stealth and grace…and could handle the physicality of the role,” Cianfrance said. “I called my writer and told him that it had to be Channing. So, we spent the next nine months writing the Jeffrey Manchester character in [Tatum’s] voice.”
The result is a tonally perfect performance and film that never shies away from the realities of Manchester’s wrongdoing, while preserving the humanity of a character that never meant anyone harm, only to find a misguided shortcut to financial freedom.
Cianfrance smiles with supposition; “If [Manchester] had been cold blooded, he’d probably be on a beach somewhere right now, but I loved that about him.”
Jeffrey Manchester wasn’t a great criminal because he was instilled with far too much humanity, a positive trait in almost any other profession.
Like the bulk of Cianfrance’s filmography, Roofman is a humanist story about an imperfect person. There are shades of the way the director’s lens catches Tatum that may remind audiences of the playful flash of brilliance present in the eyes of Ryan Gosling a decade and a half ago in Blue Valentine. Despite the veil of heaviness present in the work of Cianfrance, his latest film is an intentional move to find a lightness of heart and allow it to breathe on screen. The writer and director’s optimism leaks through, as is evidenced by the press tour on which he is currently partaking.
“We’re showing [Roofman] at San Quentin [federal penitentiary] right after we get back from London,” Cianfrance said. “I’m excited about it. Jeff’s story is one that I think will resonate with the men who live there.”
With a little luck, the humanity found within the film’s main character, marquee performer, and its director may act as a guiding reformatory light to the inmates housed behind San Quentin’s concrete and razor wire exterior. As for Cianfrance, his attempt to lighten his filmography without compromising authorial intent should be considered mission accomplished.
Roofman opened nationwide on Friday, Oct. 10. The film stars Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dunst, LaKeith Stanfield, Juno Temple, Peter Dinklage and Ben Mendelsohn.
