Canadian filmmaker Daniel Roher is fine-tuning his career, but hasn’t forgotten about Navalny

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Daniel Roher never sits for an interview – he vibrates. The Toronto-born filmmaker, best known for his 2022 Oscar-winning documentary Navalny, is such an irrepressible dynamo of energy that it is difficult for him to simply sit down and play by the rules of a media junket. Instead, Roher often pulls double duty, politely and thoughtfully answering a journalist’s questions while at the same time illustrating one wild sketch after another on his personal drawing board, which he carries with him almost everywhere.

The split-brain act feels appropriate given Roher’s latest film, Tuner, in which a working-class piano tuner played by Leo Woodall must balance his love of music with a secret criminal life cracking safes – a side hustle he only got into to pay the medical bills of his mentor, played by Dustin Hoffman. The film not only marks Roher’s swerve away from documentary filmmaking into narrative features, but Tuner is also injected with the kind of electric hum of a director unleashing all his creative energies, all at once.

The day after Tuner’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this past September, Roher sat down – drawing board in hand – to discuss his evolution as a director with The Globe and Mail.

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This is a New York story, but parts of it were filmed in Toronto, where you grew up and have a lot of family. Did you ever think about setting the film in the city?

I thought about it, but the public health care system here would have negated an important point of the story. You can’t have a movie where a guy’s trying to get money to pay for his mentor’s hospital bills in Canada, the system doesn’t work that way. I also wanted to make a sexy L.A. movie, though what ended up happening is my financiers were like, this is how much money I’m getting, and it’s not enough to make a sexy L.A. movie. Maybe a New York or Chicago movie.

The movie does feel like a very New York movie, though, in its depiction of Judaism. It’s also more Toronto Jewish than Los Angeles Jewish.

My working hypothesis is that filmmakers are their films. I’ve had the pleasure at this point of spending time with some of my film heroes, and it takes you two minutes to be like, oh, Christopher Nolan, you are like a walking Christopher Nolan movie. Or Martin Scorsese, you are crazy, you’re a walking needle-drop explosion. It wasn’t my attention to write a Jewish movie or make a film that’s particularly Jewish, it just sort of happened. This whole convention of “write what you know,” I’m like, no no no, write what you want to know more about. So that’s what I did here. But of course your own life seeps into it, and that Yiddish quality of the movie came through Dustin and Tovah Feldshuh, two of the great Jewish American actors.

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Was this written with Dustin in mind?

It was, and I was thinking about it by remembering Quentin Tarantino talking about Reservoir Dogs and writing a role in the movie for someone who was legit enough that someone would finance it, and that was Harvey Keitel. And he built out the ensemble out of a bunch of no-name actors who ended up being the sickest actors of their generation. That was the technique emulated by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon later with Good Will Hunting and Robin Williams. I was thinking on that frequency, but also engaged on this premise of two mismatched guys rolling together, the older guy, the younger guy.

You mentioned Scorsese, and at the screening you also mentioned a kind of ADHD energy to this film and not to trivialize any of that, but the movie is rat-a-tat-tat and visually go-go-go. How much of that energy was written into the script, and how much was found in the editing room?

That cadence which you’re speaking to, that sort of staccato tempo and rapid-fire quality, had to be super designed because you can’t discover that in editing. You have to have the volume of material for those montage sequences planned out. It has to be designed, and it has to have this almost animated quality, like stop-motion, for it to work. Montage is a cinematic form that is purest to me – you can’t do that in theatre. When you do a very fancy camera move, that’s a day of your shoot, or maybe two, and we didn’t have the resources for that. So I was like, I’m going to bring the cinematic sizzle and steak via these propulsive montages, these jazzy sequences.

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So this production was a pressure-cooker for you, and your son was born while this was shooting?

He was six months old when we started shooting. My wife Caroline is a filmmaker, so she understands really well how truly tough this is. And that was the hardest part about making the movie, was that my co-director in life, Caroline, I had to turn to her and say, hey, I’m not going to be around for three months, which was eight weeks of bad times. Everyone supported me and understood that it was a unique dream I was chasing. My son didn’t know he was supporting me, but he will eventually.

Is there any bittersweetness to this current moment for you, given the recent passing of two of your doc subjects, Robbie Robertson and Alexei Navalny?

I think about those guys all the time. I love them, and I miss them all the time. But for my own self, I needed to transcend those films and go do something else, which I feel like I now have. So I can finally get back to writing Navalny 2: Resurrection, an action movie where Alexei survives the prison experiments, it’s like Rambo. You think I’m joking but I’m not. It’s like Rambo starring a fictionalized Navalny played by Jason Statham, and he goes on a quest to find Putin. This film will never get made.

I dunno, I’m ready to start crowdfunding it.

It’s my own action movie that’s me coping with the profound grief of losing this guy who had such an impact on my life. It’s crazy, but he would love it.

Wait, this is a real thing?

Dude, I’m not joking. It exists in the world. It started off as a coping mechanism for grief, like what are the conversations that I wish I could have with Alexei that I never got the chance to? The first act is like Shawshank Redemption, and then he wakes up with this bionic arm and fights his way out. The next act is him in Siberia, trying to survive Revenant style. All the tropes. It’s wild and bonkers and very much an exercise in grief. It plays to the New Yorker crowd and the John Wick crowd.

Well, if you can bridge that gap ...

We’ll see what happens. What’s the German word for something that seems so implausible but happens? I’m sure it’s a long word, but that’s the way I’m thinking about things now.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Tuner opens in theatres across Canada on May 29.