How ‘Roofman’ helped lift Derek Cianfrance out of darkness

Several years ago, Derek Cianfrance decided he needed a change.

The acclaimed filmmaker had been known to linger in melancholy. His breakout movie, 2010s “Blue Valentine,” toggles between depictions of a budding romance and its bitter end. Follow-ups “The Place Beyond the Pines” and “The Light Between Oceans” grapple with immense loss. By the time he completed the 2020 miniseries adaptation of novelist Wally Lamb’s “I Know This Much Is True,” starring Mark Ruffalo as twins, one who has paranoid schizophrenia, Cianfrance wondered whether “I was just falling into the darkness too hard.”