Daniel Roher’s Tuner feels like a classic: There’s an intriguing setup (a young piano tuner realizes his skills lend themselves to safecracking), a romance, and even Dustin Hoffman, an old pro at these kinds of capers.
When I tell Roher I assumed the film was the work of a seasoned old man, he’s delighted.
“I’m blushing,” says the director, 32. “That’s so sick. Nope, that’s unbridled youthful naivete and energy that you’re mistaking for a steady hand.”
Tuner owes its existence to Roher’s precocious success. In 2023, he won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for his film Navalny, about Russian activist Alexei Navalny and his costly campaign against Vladimir Putin. The director was just 29.
“I came to filmmaking through cinema, through Scorsese and Tarantino and Fellini and Mike Lee — some of my film heroes. So it was always in the back of my mind: ‘Oh God, wouldn’t it be great to make a movie?’ That was my dream, but I didn’t know how to do it, or what the right opportunity would be.
“Cut to: I make Navalny. Some doors opened because of that movie, and then I had the extraordinary privilege to sit there and think, ‘Okay, what kind of career do I want to have? What kind of artist do I want to be?”
He decided it was time to make his first narrative feature.
Roher grew up in Toronto and later studied at the Savannah College of Art and Design. He made several documentary shorts and a documentary feature before breaking through with Once Were Brothers, a doc about Robbie Robertson and The Band that opened the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival. He followed it with Navalny, which debuted at Sundance in 2022.
The film’s success drew the attention of the late, great Rob Reiner, who gave him notes on the Tuner script. When he debuted the film at Sundance, Roher dedicated the screening to Reiner and his wife, Michelle, who had died just weeks before.
“Rob told me, ‘Make the movie fun,” Roher said at the screening. “Create something that people want to watch, make it entertaining. Put substance in there but keep it fast on its feet.’”
That may help explain the breezy craftsmanship of Tuner: Like Reiner’s two collaborations with screenwriter William Goldman, The Princess Bride and Misery, it ticks by with gleeful precision.
Roher was inspired to make Tuner by meeting Los Angeles-based piano tuner Peter White, who is significantly younger than many in the profession. Tuner explores that dynamic by pairing the twentysomething Niki (a magnetic Leo Woodall) with a piano tuner mentor and father figure, Harry (Hoffman, who looks like he’s having a blast.) In classic screenwriter fashion, Roher realized a criminal element would make the story more intriguing.
“I love the moral stakes of crime stories,” he says. “I love a good guy doing a bad thing for the right reason.”
In 2022, Roher was screening Navalny at a Croatian film festival, Ponta Lopud, when he realized husband and wife Joel Coen and Frances McDormand would be giving invitation-only talks. Roher wasn’t invited, but went to Coen’s anyway — “because I’m not going to not go to that,” he explains.
He remembers asking the director: How do you start writing a movie?
“And he said, ‘Well, typically, we’ll write the first page, and then the second page, and we sort of repeat that process. Then we’ll have a scene, and we’ll come in the next day, and we’ll do that again, and, you know, we’ll have the first act, and then we sort of repeat, holistically, that process, you know, until we’re finished the movie.’
“And, you know, in a way, it demystified it for me,” Roher says. “I don’t think he was being a smart ass. I think he was answering the question as best as he knew how. And it’s like Sutton’s Law — the simplest answer is often just the answer.”
He adds: “When I was writing the screenplay, as someone who hadn’t written a screenplay since I was 15 or 16 years old, I sort of felt my self-doubt was conflicting with my stubborn conviction to finish. … On this hemisphere of my brain, it was the internal monologue of, ‘Who the f— are you to be doing this? Think about every schmuck at a Coffee Bean who’s writing a better screenplay than you. You think this is going to be any good? Just quit. People like your documentaries. You got a good thing going. Why are you trying to do this?’
“And then over here,” he continues, gesturing to the other hemisphere, “it was like, ‘Nah, you might as well finish it. See it through.’ And for me, both are very powerful forces.
Another Coen connection: Roher co-wrote Tuner with Robert Ramsey, whose credits include co-writing the Coen Brothers’ 2003 comedy Intolerable Cruelty.
Roher got additional inspiration from his wife, Caroline Lindy, a writer-director whose film Your Monster premiered at Sundance in 2024.
“When we started dating, just seeing her work and seeing her sit down at nine o’clock in the morning and write for six hours — just seeing that routine and that process up close was kind of like, ‘Oh, I could maybe do that too,’” he says.
Tuner Director Daniel Roher on the Future
If all this makes Roher sound like an old-soul throwback, living in some lost cinematic past, he isn’t. Consider the other movie he released this year, which also debuted at the latest edition of Sundance.
The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, which he co-directed with Charlie Tyrell, looks bluntly at the world our children will inherit. Roher made the film more or less simultaneously with Tuner, an experience he describes as “really hard.”
“The AI Doc had this extraordinary team of filmmakers. It was kind of like an ‘Avengers assemble’-style filmmaking team, and they covered my ass when I was shooting Tuner, because I had to peace out for about four months when we were actually shooting,” he says.
But the two projects complimented each other well.
“On one hand, I’m making something that is this intense, really challenging, hard subject that’s scary and intimidating, and I don’t like waking up to it every single day,” he says. “And then on the other side of the spectrum, I’m making something that’s kind of buoyant and fun, a movie for a movie’s sake, and is intended for entertainment and to not be this heavy, serious thing, but this fun, musical, cool thing.”
Making his first narrative film also meant working with actors for the first time. In addition to Hoffman and Woodall, the film stars the assured Havana Rose Liu as a brilliant piano student. She starts a relationship with Niki after Harry plays matchmaker.
Woodall was 27 during shooting and Hoffman was 87, and Roher was struck by their different styles. But if you expected the veteran actor to be the more old-fashioned: nope.
“Leo is a classically trained British actor who seeks comfort in the pages, and Dustin is all improv and all spirit and he could give or take the pages,” Roher says. “Dustin is his best self when he can improv, and Leo is his best self when he can stick to the script. And I was kind of the mediator in between those two modes and mediums.”
Roher, who wasn’t born yet when Hoffman starred in Steven Spielberg’s 1991 Peter Pan film Hook, says the actor also made other big contributions.
“He’s just a f—ing lovely guy. He’s just like grandpa. And he would show up to set early, and he would stay late, and he loved to be there, and he got everybody an ice cream truck. And when morale was low on a night shoot, I’d say, ‘Dustin, morale’s low. Do Captain Hook.’ And he would start talking to everybody as Captain Hook. And it was just delightful being around him.”
Tuner is now in theaters from Black Bear.
Main image: Leo Woodall in Tuner.
All photos courtesy of Black Bear