A
fter earning a 2023 best documentary Oscar for Navalny, Daniel Roher has pivoted to scripted storytelling with Tuner, a high-concept drama about a piano tuner drawn into safecracking, and with a will-they-or-won’t-they love story thrown into the fast-paced thriller for good measure.
Roher tells The Hollywood Reporter he faced a “very, very steep learning curve” with his narrative debut, after his real-life documentaries Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band and Navalny, about the late Russian opposition leader and political prisoner.
“Everyone really understood that this was my first movie … and they had seen my previous work and understood I was no slouch either,” he adds about directing Tuner, which centers on Niki White (Leo Woodall), a young man who has perfect pitch hearing but suffers from sensory overload due to an oversensitive hearing condition.
So, bent over piano keys or with an ear pinned to old spin-dial vaults, he goes from a day job as a piano tuner, with Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman) as his mentor, to moonlighting as a safecracker, only to turn his life upside down.
Roher shows off the same filmmaking polish with Tuner that he brought to his Robertson and Navalny docs. But for the first time, he directs on a film set with acting legends like Hoffman, Jean Reno and Tovah Feldshuh, who share the screen with Fauda star Lior Raz and romantic leads Woodall and Havana Rose Liu.
Ahead of a Canadian premiere for Tuner at the Toronto International Film Festival, Roher talked to THR about following up his Oscar-winning documentary with a scripted thriller about love, loss and perfect pitch.
What transfers over from directing documentaries to filming the fictional world of Tuner?
When you make documentaries, typically, you don’t have to think about how to talk to actors and what that mystical process is like. So I had a sharp learning curve there. But at the end of the day, it is storytelling. There are base skill sets of taste and sensibility and narrative propulsion that transfer over. If you look at a film like [the Robbie Robertson doc], or you look at a film like Navalny, you can see the connective tissue to how those films inspire a movie like Tuner — the music, the editing, the propulsiveness. I really enjoyed the process. That was the most important thing. You dream about doing this. But you’re not sure if you get there, if you’re actually going to like it, if it all actually feels like it’s your thing. And I was really delighted that it felt like it was really well suited for my skill set and sort of the ultimate culmination of everything that I had been studying and working on and dreaming of in my life.
When making a documentary, the director is always looking for the ending of the film, until hopefully it appears. Did you know all along how Tuner would end?
That points to one of the key differences in the two mediums. Documentary, as you pointed out, it’s sort of open ended. It’s not always clear when your story ends. It certainly wasn’t for my film about Alexei Navalny. History keeps going. The drone beat of time keeps marching on. And at a certain point of the story, it just has to stop. When you’re dealing in the mode of fiction and you’re tooling around in make believe, you choose when it stops. You understand that the focus of your film is around a specific, heightened moment in this fictional character’s life. And the process is almost reversed when you’re making a documentary. You are writing while you’re editing. You shoot the movie, and then you write it. When you’re making fiction film, you write the film, and then you shoot it. There are challenges and complexities to both processes. But at the end of the day, I got to tell you, knowing how your movie is going to end is a really nice thing. I really, really appreciated that.
Where did the inspiration for Tuner come from?
Well, the inspiration for the movie came from a couple of different directions. I felt the principal job of thinking about fiction and stories is really having your antenna up to what’s going on around you in your life, and pulling in these disparate, different elements and spinning them into a cohesive story. For me, I personally was feeling very anxious. I was feeling sort of rudderless after I made Navalny. I didn’t know what I was going to be doing next. And I entered into this prolonged phase of a creative, almost depression. I didn’t feel like making anything. I didn’t know how I could possibly top this film I just made, and the pressure to do so was mounting. I wasn’t feeling like myself. I didn’t feel like drawing or painting, and I was confronted with this very challenging question: If I’m not Daniel, the creative, the artist, the filmmaker, who am I? That’s very much the core of my identity.
How did you break free of what held you back?
Sometimes the solution is vested in the question itself. I started examining and thinking about and dreaming of maybe a character who’s thinking about similar challenges. And I thought, could this guy be a chef? Could he be a this? Could he be a that? And then the other piece of inspiration that was floating around the ether that I scooped up is that I had just met the woman who is now my wife. And she was sort of taking me around as the boyfriend to meet her friends. And I met Peter, the husband of a friend. Peter was a piano tuner. I was very fascinated with his work. I think he was confused by my fascination. Typically when he talks about his job, people don’t have too many follow up questions. I certainly did. And I immediately understood this ethereal liminal space in between the engineering and the art. There are no piano players, there is no music without the technicians who work in a quiet servitude of maintaining these instruments. And the piano tuner talked like a philosopher. He did not talk like a technician. He spoke about atrophy and entropy and the forces of the universe that want to keep a piano out of tune. That was catnip for me. And that’s where this story came from, and that was through the inception point of this idea of a piano tuner, this itinerant worker, and the broader story flowed from those points of inspiration.
Tuner is about a piano technician with unusually sensitive hearing whose skills transfer to safecracking. But is it also a movie about hearing and finally, at the movie’s climax, being heard?
Look, at the end of the day, what do we all want, other than to be heard and understood and appreciated? I took that metaphor to a literal extreme by having these two characters at the beginning of the movie together. There’s this old guy, played by Dustin Hoffman, who cannot hear, and this young guy, played by Leo [Woodall], who, in a sense, hears too much. But you put them together and they can kind of get through the day and function as an unlikely, but adorable, unit. And I just think that’s a truism of anyone on Earth. We just want to be understood. We want to be heard. We want to be appreciated for what we have and, in that sense, the movie works almost like a story about sensitivity and about hearing and understanding.
In any movie with Dustin Hoffman, there’s the challenge of performing opposite a Hollywood acting legend — or for you, directing one.
Well, I appreciate that. As with Leo, it’s intimidating for anybody to work with one of the great legends in any medium, let alone one of the great actors of cinematic history. But it’s just a credit to Dustin, to his personality, to his character, to his work ethic — and I’m not talking about the character he played — I’m talking about his own character. He is so disarming, and he is just such a sweet, sensitive, gentle, funny, loving guy that you would be shocked how quickly the intimidation factor wears off. You are instead left with a collaborator and a friend. There would be pinch-me moments while we were making the movie. It’s a long day, the crew is losing morale. So he gets in character as Captain Hook. And you are reminded, “This is one of the greatest artists of all time.” Or he would casually tell me things like, “That thing you did reminds me of Mike Nichols or Steven Spielberg.” And I would think, “Oh yeah, he’s Dustin Hoffman.” Leo and I both understood that when Dustin was around, we were on Dustin’s frequency. But we were fortunate, because it was so lovely and he made things so easy for us. It was just an incredible learning experience, both for me and I think Leo as well.
In the movie, Leo as Niki White meets and feels a spark for Ruthie, a classical composer student played by Havana Rose Liu. And you’re almost cheering for them to fall in love, if only to break the tension around an increasingly fast-paced thriller.
I appreciate your question because, of course, I wanted you to want them to work. That’s a mark of success in my mind. Look, romance is really hard. And of all the things I had to do with this film, from the sort of propulsive montages to directing some of the great actors of our time, the hardest part was the romance. But I had a secret weapon. My wife [Caroline Lindy] is also a filmmaker. Her favorite genre is romance. Her last film was sort of a rom-com. So having her by my side on some of the challenging days was really, really meaningful. Havana and Leo knew where I was going when, if we had a difficult moment we were working through, I would sort of disappear into a tent and have a little conversation with Caroline and then come back out, having been aided by her genius. But at the end of the day, it comes down to two brilliant performers. I can only take so much credit. It seems to me that directing actors is about casting the right ones. That’s sort of an old trope. But casting really is 95 percent of it. That’s what I believe. Havana and Leo, they were both magnetic. They both have that magical quality where, if you stick a camera 6 inches from their nose, they have this presence, this movie star thing that most people do not have. So, in that regard, it was actually quite easy, because they were so brilliant.
To pull out their performances, are you a director who gives much direction to actors on set, or do you just trust them to do their job?
I’ll share with you an anecdote that speaks to the answer to the question. There was one scene we were shooting. I don’t remember which day it was. I had a note for Leo. So I emerged from my little tent and I walked toward Leo. He looks up at me, and he says, “I know, I know,” dismissively. I got it. I do a 180 on my heels. He does the next take and he knew, he understood, and he got the note without me even having to say it to him. That, to me, is a very, very successful director-actor encounter. I feel very much like, if the DP is the department head of how the movie looks, Leo is the department head of the character. While I do have thoughts and opinions, I typically try and just let them do their thing. It’s just having trust in yourself that you got the right people to show up on the day. And so, yeah, I’m more of a hands-off kind of director.
There are many lock-opening scenes in Tuner, which show extreme close-up shots of clicking and turning of wheels in a safe. Can you talk about the effect you were going for?
I love insert work in movies. A lot of our insert work was inspired by David Fincher, who’s one of my cinematic heroes. There’s so much detail that you can get. I like the idea of putting the camera in places the cameras don’t go, getting impossible shots, figuring out how to break open the mechanism and stick a lens impossibly close to things like this. And there was this motif of the inner workings of things that carried over from the pianos into the safes, of trying to put the camera inside the guts of something to show how it worked. The other thing is, I had this vision to have these propulsive, energetic scenes. And I thought those insert shots created their own little sonic world in a way, which spoke to the broader motifs of the movie.
As your thriller draws to a climax and your propulsive scenes accelerate, the jazz and classical music-infused score is mixed with ambient noise as a sensory-flooded Niki feels overwhelmed and in distress. How did you mix the sound design?
Sound is so often an overlooked component in cinema. When I go to a movie, I’m as impressed and attuned to the sound design as I am to the cinematography and the editing. So I wanted to make a sound movie. This is an opportunity to be visceral, right? Via the lens of the character who has a hearing condition, you can put the audience in his head a little bit in ways that are cinematic and brutal. And the trouble with sound design is for about two years, you’re telling all your colleagues the sound comes from over here, and it’s then this and that happens. And then you have your rough cut, and the sound design isn’t done. The sequences are, you guys just have to imagine what the sound design is. That’s going to be great. Then, of course, Johnnie [Burn, the sound designer who won an Oscar for his work on The Zone of Interest] comes in as the very last step. It’s like Dr. Frankenstein on the table, and the lightning bolt strikes down and it’s alive. And this thing sits up, and that’s what it was like working with Johnnie.
What about your music choices?
It’s a musical movie, and we have these amazing needle drops. We have fantastic music by Marius de Vries, which is all the live music in the movie, accompanied by the music of Will Bates, who did all the movie music in the film. And Johnnie put it all together in this sort of sonic delight. I’m afraid some people might think it’s going be too loud, but I want people to turn it up and really listen to it.
You had a real-life piano tuner on your film set?
That’s absolutely right. We had two piano tuners on set. Leo and Dustin had to go to piano tuning school. We had Wayne Ferguson, who’s the great piano tuner in Toronto, and he has this sort of shock of white hair. He looks like a magician. And I was also delighted to have Peter White, the original piano tuner who inspired this entire movie, come on set for a week or two to make sure all the piano tuning stuff was accurate.
Getting back to the score — you had classical music and jazz music. You wanted a mix?
That’s right. Ruthie, this brilliant young composer whom we meet, and Niki, Leo’s character, of course falls for her. First and foremost he hears her before he sees her. That’s a key detail for me. And then, of course, he rounds the corner and he sees her. He likes what he sees, but he hears her first. That’s a centerpiece of their relationship. But Ruthie is this classical composer. That’s her world and that’s the world that she loves. And so we wanted to have the movie infused with her work. Whereas Harry and Niki are jazz guys. Dustin is an old jazz hound who name drops people like Herbie Hancock, and that’s the world he came up in. And what we found, and what we hoped, is that the movie music — which is not jazz and not classical, it’s almost like minimalist, this incredible sound that Will found — works as a counterpoint to the jazz and the classical. All of those are complemented by these needle drops — Nina Simone, Oscar Peterson. It’s these different musical ingredients that we threw into the gumbo. I’m really delighted with the musical identity of the film.
You’re going to premiere Tuner at TIFF. With your two feature docs, you were this young guy from Toronto and everyone was wondering how you persuaded Robbie Robertson and then Alexei Navalny to agree to be filmed by you. Now, with Tuner, people won’t be talking about this young guy from Toronto. They’ll be talking about the Oscar winner Daniel Roher.
Somehow, I’m feeling less and less like that young guy from Toronto. But I think it speaks to the core of who I am. And the one other thing that I’ll say is I think a lot about both Alexei and Robbie. They both passed away in sort of proximity to one another. And I remember Robbie, I had lunch with him while we were promoting that movie, and he said dismissively, “Enough of this documentary stuff. You’ve got to go find a script that you can really sink your teeth into.” I did take his advice. I went off and found this Navalny film. But his words, I never forgot them and they always inspired me. I think about those two guys a lot. I owe them both everything I have. I miss them both. And I think Robbie would be proud of this movie. He would love the music. I think he would dig it.
Source link