'Marty Supreme,’ ‘Is This Thing On,’ & the best of NYFF; with ‘Roofman’ Producer Jamie Patricof

22:29That's the thing. Part of the doc and the other one that's on that list is the Alabama solution from Jarecki. It's an extraordinary movie, which I highly recommend. It's on HBO already. You can see it. it's terribly upsetting to see this particular state has allowed certain conditions to exist in the prisons. And the reasons they exist in all the prisons in the whole state, the reasons that they allow these, they beat up the inmates, they put them in horrible solitary with rats, they drag them around having been beaten up with blood, you know, on the floor. Or the reason we know about it is because they took a lot of coverage of it with their own phones and shared it with the filmmaker.

23:17But also, the state regards them as less than human. It doesn't consider anyone who's a criminal, not human. So they can do whatever they want. That's a bad situation.

23:32Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, I saw that one at Sundance. It's an extremely harrowing look at life in maximum security prisons and also works very well as an archival piece in terms of all of this contraband cell phone footage that he's able to compile. It's amazing. It's amazing. So those are, you know, then the one that's also showing up is Perfect Neighbor, which everybody, and that's a similar thing where the woman who is the director had been an editor and understood when she saw all of the police cam footage that was documenting the buildup to this murder in Florida from one neighbor to another. A white woman killed a black woman.

24:12And it was over, you know, just incredibly long buildup of perceived egregious behavior on the part of the children running around the neighborhood. I mean, it was really upsetting to watch, but she figured out that she could edit all that footage together and make it into a movie.

24:32Ryan Lattanzio:And there's catharsis at the end of that one because the woman actually is convicted, which is rare. When we see these kind of documentaries, that's not often the end of the story. It was interesting. When I interviewed the woman, I'm going to write a story about this. When I interviewed her, because it's about to open, I said to Gita Gumbier, the filmmaker, that I thought the police behaved relatively well, considering what we think about police in southern states like Florida. She disagreed with me completely. It was an interesting interchange. So you'll see. If you read my story, you'll see that discussion.

25:04Ryan Lattanzio:Well, on that note, we should sag into the next part of our podcast, which is that we have a special guest this week to talk about the movie Roofman, which is producer Jamie Patrickoff. He has been around for a long time. I remember he produced Half Nelson, which introduced Ryan Gosling. And he's worked with Derek Cienfranc, the director of Roofman, for quite some time. But you will get that introduction when you meet him shortly. Welcome to Screen Talk, Jamie Patrykhoff. Please meet my co-host, Ryan Latanzio. Hi, Jamie. Hi, guys. It's really nice to see you, and I'm really excited to be here, so thank you very much.

25:44No, no, we're excited to talk to you about Roofman, which just opened this weekend. And we are both fans of the movie, but there's questions. There's lots to discuss. But before, let me just introduce you a little bit. You're best known as a producer of movies big and small. With your Hunting Lane Films banner, you produced Hatton Nelson, which basically introduced Ryan Gosling to the world. Blue Valentine, Derek C. in France, and The Place Beyond the Pines, as well as such cool indies as Mississippi Ryan. That's a favorite of mine, actually, with Ben Mendelsohn and Ryan Reynolds.

26:22Ryan Lattanzio:so jamie to start to start off uh we'd love to know how you got to know derek c in france who's i think all of his features and his tv series i know this much is true you produced as well we actually had him on screen talk live during the new york film festival last year and he talked about roof man which is your new movie with channing tatum and kirsten dunst which just opened this past weekend. And he talked specifically about the true story that it's based on, which seeing this movie, it seems almost unbelievable, credulity straining. But then you realize most of it is very true. And he starts by breaking into McDonald's from the roof and eventually hides out in a Toys R Us after he escapes from prison.

27:08Ryan Lattanzio:But yes, tell us how you came to know Derek. Yeah, Derek and my collaboration goes back actually almost 25 years at this point. We were both working out of the radical media offices for a guy that many people know named John Kamen. We were both sort of there doing sort of our own projects. I wound up doing a project for VH1 that was actually a half-hour special on Ludacris. And Derek loves to tell this because he first was hired to be the director, Then he got hired to be the camera operator. And then the director and I sat him down and told him that he was being too creative with his camera shots.

27:52And we were going to demote him to third camera. So that was our first project. But I like to, that's all true. He did get sort of put in a box. But unfortunately, or fortunately, you can't really put Derek C. and France in a box. And the show to this day has one of the greatest opening minutes of a show that I've seen. And it was this extraordinary scene that he captured on his own with a camera off to the side doing his own thing. And I think in many ways that sort of began what I saw in him as such a unique and special filmmaker. It was a few years later that our Blue Valentine collaboration started.

28:32I went off and made Half Nelson and then felt that, you know, I was capable to come on and be helpful in that project. And, you know, and we've been working together ever since. And it's been an amazing collaboration. And, you know, Blue Valentine was the start of a lot of our kind of creative collaborations, which is really exciting. All of our HODs came back on Roofman from that movie as well, and it's been this long, 16-year collaboration on feature since then. So talk about Roofman and the development of it and how long. That's part of what we talked about with him. It took so long. What did you have to do to score a green light from a studio like Paramount?

29:16What were the hurdles along the way? It strikes me as an unusual commercial venture in the usual sense. You know, the lead is sort of a loser, right? Yeah. The ability for him to resolve his issues is a challenge, you know? Yeah. You know, it's funny you say this as long. You know, we have one project that Derek and I have been working on for almost 18 years now. Blue Valentine took 12 years for Derek. I was involved with it for probably six or seven before it got made. So this was under five from hearing about it to getting to the screen. So this feels like a sprint. But, you know, it's like everything that a Derek does, it's slightly off center.

30:08And, you know, this is definitely a different type of film for him. uh i think you know on the one hand i think there's a lot of elements that make it a very traditional kind of more studio film because you have the action element you have the comedic elements um but the same you have the romance yeah well said um a beautiful romance uh but um but you know today in today's world you sort of don't have those genres you mix them all up a bit and that's really what you do with this one. So, you know, for this, it was a combination. Obviously, everybody loves Derek as a filmmaker. People get excited when you talk about his name, both with the actors and with studios.

30:51And I think, you know, this had the makings always of something that was going to be a studio film. But it took getting Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunn to talk about being really smart with the budget. you know this was a 19 million dollar film which you know for a studio that is a modest budget yeah i mean it's you know very small i mean you know i think if you uh so you know and we had to stretch every dollar because derrick you know his way of of making movies although uh you know when you look at him on kind of one-off basis a lot of them are you know he doesn't think about big things and big cranes and big effects and volume stages and all this stuff but he likes to give his actors time he likes to create real worlds uh he likes to shoot on film when he thinks it's the best medium for something um you know he likes to shoot in the real locations if possible so you know you could have gone to south africa shot on digital recreated the toys r us in a in a sound stage and probably cut this budget in half um or you could have done it you know in a more traditional studio manner and probably increased at times four at the same time.

32:07So, you know, the development process is challenging always. It is for everybody. I mean, you know, but we got it there in, for us, a shorter amount of time, ironically. Well, it's a triumph to get a green light from a studio. It's a triumph to get anything made at Detroit, especially something as idiosyncratic as this. So I congratulate you on that. I know Ryan really loves this movie. He saw it last night.

32:35Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah. So I finally saw it yesterday. I bought a ticket and went to the AMC Times Square. And I just thought it was so delightful and extremely moving, especially with the chemistry between Kirsten Dunst and Channing Tatum, who is both a movie star and an actor. Not everyone is both of them. And this movie showed a new kind of range for him. And I think a lot of that has to do with having Kirsten as his screen partner, who is someone who is used to working in really naturalistic registers. And being in this audience screening, I could feel something I find interesting about the movie is the kind of tension between the indie movie and the studio movie.

33:19Ryan Lattanzio:And I know that Derek has talked about wanting this to resemble a kind of studio movie from the aughts. And so I'm in the screening and I'm laughing at things like him apologizing to the dentist for having 14 cavities or whatever it is, because he is one of those people who wakes up and sort of starts apologizing for himself at the beginning of the day. But then other people in the audience are laughing at the slapstick material, like him naked and running from Peter Dinklage in the Toys R Us. Yeah, 100 percent. I mean, it's first of all, Ryan, I'm going to push back. You didn't laugh at the naked scene in the Toys R Us.

33:53Of course I was laughing, definitely.

33:56Ryan Lattanzio:But that got a real laugh out of all the people in the room. Yeah, I mean, Derek talks about the sort of how similar comedy and tragedy are, which I think is really an important aspect to think of this film and this lens of this film. He likes to say how funny he is in his regular life, but in his filmmaking, he's a much more dramatic filmmaker. and his wife, Shannon, is an accomplished filmmaker in her own right, and she's the comedian of the family, but much more dramatic at home. And, you know, he looks at comedy and tragedy as kind of two sides of a coin and really depends on where it lands.

34:38Like slipping on a banana peel, right? Which is, you know, inherently funny, but also hurts. And so I think that was some of the guiding principles of this film was really, you know, looking at all aspects of, you know, the tragedy and the comedy of Jeff and the scenes he's in and the fact that he's trying to do good but just can't get out of his own way and just doesn't realize the things that he's doing that ultimately either can cause pain or can be seen as just, you know, just the opposite way you would do something. And ironically, I mean, the true story that the true elements that we left out of this film are so unbelievable.

35:20You know, it's one of those moments where truth is stranger than fiction. I mean, Jeff, the stuff that he did and does and that was one of the bigger challenges is how do you make it so this is a believable character?

35:34Ryan Lattanzio:Well, I read that he moved to a different location even at some point like it wasn't only at the Toys R Us. yeah exactly i mean that you know so yeah and and we did a derry i think did a great job of weaving in the the true story and the and keeping the elements and the heart of it true and at this point now some of jeff's family's seen it and people who are part of the story you know that was one of the amazing things and why it was so critical to shoot in charlotte is we were able to use a fair number of the people who actually participated in jeff's life during that time whether it was somebody from the McDonald's, the prison guards, the captain.

36:14And it was very, they've all seen it now and all agreed that it really did capture the true story. So how did you manage to get this hefty cast? I mean, it's an amazing, how did you get Ben Mendelsohn to play this little tiny part? I guess he likes to sing. Yeah, who knew? I'd like to say it was all because of me. But, you know, it is every actors want to work with Derek. I mean, Channing talks about Channing said last night, you know, I would have played cop number two. You know, Kirsten the same way. You know, we he he was very deliberate in his casting. And to be honest, it really wasn't. I mean, Derek's not about how do I get the most famous person for something?

37:01And to be true, to be fair to the studio and to, you know, John Glickman and Miramax, they, they weren't saying, hey, you need more and more names. I mean, we sort of, Derek wanted the, Bonnie Timmerman is an awesome casting director. She keeps coming up with just wonderful ideas. And he just really wanted the perfect people for each role of, you know, and, and the amazing thing about these actors and then work, getting the chance to work with Derek is Derek gives them a lot of freedom. So, you know, he had a great script that he and Kirk Gunn wrote to start this movie. But as the actors come in, the script begins to take shape based on their storylines and what they come to.

37:43And to be honest, you know, Juno Temple, who ultimately shot for one day on the movie, which is just wild. um you know that backstory of her being a hairdresser and her you know wanting to she wanted to open a salon with with uh you know in the movie and all he had she brought all this stuff to it and that same thing that does it you know same thing with Uzo Adubo and her singing in the original script she wasn't even this that character wasn't even a singer and we just got Uzo came in had such an extraordinary voice it was like we have to use her as a singer um so So what did you think the box office appeal of this movie would be?

38:25Like, who would the audience be for this movie? What was your idea? You know, it's interesting. You know, in many ways, and this was maybe sound a little delusional, it's like it kind of is a four-quadrant film, but at the same time it's a film for an audience that wants a movie that's a little deeper and has got a little more thought to it and a little more substance in it. And there was times when we had talked about, okay, can this be a PG-13 film? When you go through it, there were really minimal things, but we made the decision that it wasn't worth cutting what we would have needed to cut.

39:10We are going to our grave saying it's a Christmas film, just like Die Hard, the Christmas film. Um, you know, it's a family film. I mean, I've talked to a lot of people that, um, you know, uh, who are, you know, come out of, you know, um, in religious groups and church groups who really love this film and, you know, appreciated the messages behind it. So, uh, you know, it's one of these films that I think everybody can get something from it. And, you know, it is are, but I do, I have two teenage daughters and I genuinely think, you know, that there's, you know, that it's a film that a family can see.

39:49And I think there's something for everybody. Yeah. So you're hoping that it will have a good word of mouth over the, after an$8 million weekend. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, listen, we were really happy with the box office. I mean, you think about in a challenging time and box office in general, we, you know, we basically made back almost half our budget in North America on opening weekend. And, you know, not, you know, it's challenging to make any money at box office right now. And you had other films coming out this weekend that had a really tough time. And, you know, you look at some of these other films, like One Battle After Another, which is an amazing film, you know, with a significantly higher price tag, and they're going to have a much harder time getting back to their budget.

40:34So we'll, you know, we'll do fine at the box office in the end. And I think we're going to have a long life for this film. I think you are, too. I bet the word of mouth is good. I bet the fall off is is is light. I bet you hold really well.

40:47Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, it's interesting about what we ran an interview with Derek yesterday and he said he had considered shooting the movie in SD, which obviously the movie is in 35 millimeter and very much has that C in France look to it. But when you think about what the indie version of this movie would be, I guess the SD one would perhaps be that. That certainly I don't think that that would come to pass in a movie of this level. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, it definitely there are a lot of different versions of this film. And I and it's interesting. I asked Derek Scott, great long term editor collaborators and all of his creative HOD user club.

41:26Ron Patane and Jim Helton, Jimmy and you from film school, and we were on a panel, Ralph Alpelbaum series at SVA, and I said to Ron and Jim, I said, I said, Derek shoots so much and shoots every scene in so many different ways. How many different versions of this movie do you think really exist? And they said, there's only one, the one you see. And that really is the case. I mean, there's, you know, I mean, somebody else could have made a different version, but shooting on film and shooting in Charlotte and shooting with the real people and shooting with these actors from Channing Tatum to Jimmy O.

42:03Yang and everybody else in between. That was the only version of this film. And it's like we're beyond proud of what the final product was. Well, I want to talk about your podcast. I think of it as a podcast, your substack. I want to think about the subs. I just am fascinated by how much time it must take to do that and put in all the time. I mean, when you interview someone like Kara Swisher or James Carville, you really do your homework and, you know, you hold your own with them. You talk about food. You talk about politics. You talk about Hollywood. Talk about the evolution of the this is Lunch with Jamie, of course.

42:44Yes. Yes. Thank you. Yeah. You know, it started really it was a it was a covid baby. It was something where it started just as a Zoom conversation I did for friends and friends of friends because we had a little time on our hands. And I personally am just a very curious person, both in the world of politics, but also, you know, in all different areas. And, you know, so I did it. It was it was again, it was really just for a small group of people. And then about a year ago, I started saying to myself, well, this is, you know, my goal is really just to find interesting people, talk to them and share what I learned with as many people as possible.

43:21So why not make it open to a wider audience? And it's been really fun. I mean, it does take a lot of work. I think the, you know, the, I'm lucky because I get to prepare for these things and just get to learn more about topics and people that are interesting. So whether I'm interviewing Jonathan Haidt or I'm interviewing Kara Swisher or I'm interviewing Richie Torres next week, it just gets to a point where I get to really get under the hood of who they are and listen to their podcast that they've been on and read either their book or – yeah. And that's – so I'm really spoiled in that sense. I love doing it.

43:59It's so fun. I tied it into my newsletter, which is Jamie's List, which – and that started originally as a food focus. You shared your food preferences. I got on there somehow at some point. Yeah, exactly. I sort of, I put a bunch, I just kept putting friends on it because I didn't really have a sign-up process. And then one day I was like, you know what? What goes together better than food, politics, and culture? And I sort of put it all together. So now I have the podcast, Lunch with Jamie. I have the newsletter, Jamie's List. And it's a lot of work. It definitely is. I've hired two people now to help me with that.

44:38but it's so much fun and it's really inspiring. So if I ever wanted to do this, is it remunerative? You know, listen, it's, it's, it's challenging, but it, it definitely can get there. And if you, again, like anything, if you put the time and effort into it, it is, but it just takes out of work. The paid subscribers, right? It's paid subscribers. That's really what it is. Yeah. I think I pay. You give away a lot for free, though, which is nice. I do. I, you know, the funny thing is I, I, I really, my goal is to charge so that I can just bring more, more interesting, unique content and tools to people.

45:24That's really the goal. I mean, I, you know, it is not my full-time job. My full-time job is producing movies and TV. But I do, the more I can make off it, the more I can add, the more value I can add to the community. And that's really what it is. It's great. You know, I started doing live events as well last year, which was so much fun and and bringing people together in a community i think that's so important right now that's why going to a theater to see roofman or anything else is so important because getting people together being out talking to people in real life is is just the is is what was so critical in this time especially people from different walks of life and different backgrounds and um so i love it so ryan and i both want to know what's what's in your pipeline What's coming up?

46:10Derek has a couple of projects that we're working on that we're hoping one that took us 18 years already may be coming next year. That's probably the closest thing. I have another filmmaker named Elgin James that I work with that we have a project that we're working on that could happen next year. But at the same time, you never know. I mean, I'll tell you, the one that Derek and I started 18 years ago, we didn't think was going to take us 18 years. Can you say what it is? I can't really talk about it. It's a TV project, though. Well, thank you for coming on. It was a pleasure. I will continue to enjoy your Substack and your movies, both.

46:54Thank you very much. I appreciate it. You're welcome. Thank you. I'm on my way to the London Film Festival premiere right now. So very excited to share this with the London audience. Have fun. Thank you. Okay. Bye. Bye-bye.

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