Creating Harmony Out of Chaos: A Conversation with ‘Tuner’ Co-Writer and Filmmaker Daniel Roher

Daniel Roher made his name pointing cameras at people living through something irreversible. His documentary Navalny, which won the Academy Award in 2023, followed a man who had already survived a poisoning and chose to walk back into the country that tried to kill him. That kind of filmmaking demands a specific quality of attention: the ability to stay very still while everything around you is moving very fast, and to trust that what the camera catches in those unguarded, unscripted moments is more truthful than anything you could have staged.

Tuner, his debut narrative feature, co-written with Robert Ramsey, carries that same quality of attention into a very different genre. It is a crime drama that moves with the rhythm of a musical, a character study wearing a heist film's clothes. It centers on Niki, a piano tuning apprentice played by Leo Woodall, whose acute sensitivity to sound has ended any hope of a performance career but sharpened his perception to near supernatural levels. When Niki discovers that the skills he uses to tune pianos can crack a safe just as precisely, the film's moral geometry begins to quietly, irrevocably shift.

The film had its world premiere at Telluride Film Festival 2025 before travelling to Sundance 2026, where I was lucky enough to catch it, and where Roher also debuted The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, reportedly becoming the first filmmaker to premiere both a documentary and a narrative feature at the festival in the same year. Two films, two very different subjects, and yet, as this conversation reveals, the same preoccupations running underneath both: what it means to lose the thing that defines you, and what you are left with when it is gone.

I spoke with Daniel about the making of Tuner, the logic of sound, and what a documentary filmmaker learns about storytelling when he finally points the camera at something he invented.

This interview has been edited for flow and clarity.

Rahul Menon: In my review, I described Tuner as a crime drama that moves with the rhythm of a musical. When you were developing the film, did you consciously think of it in terms of tempo and movement, almost like composing a piece of music, or did that rhythm reveal itself in the edit?

Daniel Roher: When I was developing the film, I wanted to make something that was fast-paced, propulsive, fun, and definitely had a musical backbone intrinsic to the original conceit. Cinema's unique art form is editing and montage, and I love montage, I love fast editing, propulsive editing, and I really wanted the film to explore a musicality and have that rhythm to it.

Rahul: The film has a fascinating relationship with genre. It starts as something lightly comic and observational, then morphs into a thriller, while still holding onto warmth and even romance. What were the key tonal rules you gave yourself so the movie could keep shape-shifting without losing its identity?

Daniel: The tonal shifts were the biggest challenges of the film. I didn't know if we could pull it off. I was nervous about it. When we started editing, we really had to find the right rhythm and tonal fluency throughout the whole movie, and that required massaging. Greg O'Bryant, the film's editor, was invaluable in helping us find that right rhythm and keep the tone consistent. How could you have a lighthearted buddy film with Dustin Hoffman and Leo Woodall, and then in the same movie a gun goes off and someone's head gets blown up? How do you hold those two elements together? That was a real challenge, and ultimately I think we really figured it out.

Rahul: Niki is such an interesting protagonist because he is quiet, precise, and almost emotionally sealed, yet the film never feels cold. What did Leo Woodall bring to the character that surprised you once you saw it on set?

Daniel: Leo is just like a Swiss watch of an actor. He shows up with his decisions made, off script immediately and totally dialed in. He had a very clear understanding of how he wanted Niki to be, how he wanted to feel, how he wanted to sound, and it seemed like my job was to get out of his way and let him do his thing. This character was fully formed when he arrived and I maybe gave him two or three notes over the entire shooting process. He's such a phenom.

Roher comes across as a filmmaker who trusts his collaborators absolutely. He did not impose Niki on Woodall; he created the conditions for Niki to emerge. The same instinct applies to his editorial relationship with Greg O'Brryant, where the film's tonal fluidity was found rather than forced. There is something very documentary about that approach: building a frame and then letting what is inside it reveal itself.

Rahul: The way Tuner uses sound feels closer to subjective filmmaking than traditional crime cinema. You place the audience inside Niki's head so that quiet becomes thunderous and silence becomes sanctuary. What was your earliest creative conversation about sound design, and how did you decide what Niki's world should actually sound like?

Daniel: I knew we needed a brilliant sound designer on this, and when Johnnie Burn agreed to do the movie, it was like a huge day for me, as exciting as when we got Leo or Dustin or anyone else in the cast. Johnnie was just extraordinary and we honestly didn't know what Niki's world would sound like. It's complex. It's not as straightforward as he's losing his hearing. He has his hearing, but there's tinnitus and a pain index that comes with it, and he has to wear earmuffs which change the sound. There was a lot for us to negotiate and navigate, and it was only through trial and error that I was able to find the cadences of Niki's world with Johnnie.

Rahul: Hyperacusis is not treated like a gimmick in the film. It becomes psychology. It becomes an identity. It even becomes a kind of fate. How did you approach portraying Niki's auditory condition in a way that felt cinematic but still emotionally truthful?

Daniel: First and foremost, it's really important to consult individuals who have hyperacusis and seek consultation from people who actually suffer from this condition, to really understand what it is, how it impacts people's lives, how alienating it is, how socially and emotionally alienating it can be. It was both Leo and I talking to individuals with this condition to really understand what these people navigate and go through, and that was instrumental for us in portraying it with thoughtfulness and truthfulness.

Rahul: Dustin Hoffman's Harry is one of those characters who could easily become sentimental, but the performance stays warm without ever turning soft. He feels affectionate, cantankerous, and quietly wounded. What was the process of shaping Harry on the page, and then seeing Hoffman bring that voice to life?

Daniel: Harry Horowitz is sort of an amalgamation of my uncles, my grandfathers, men that I've known in my life who have been mentors to me, who are wonderful but grumpy and cantankerous but warm, and have the multitudes of the old grumpy Jewish man trope that is very near and dear to me in my heart.

Roher's work across both fiction and documentary returns again and again to the idea of mentorship: the wisdom held by those who came before and the tender, complicated relationship between teacher and student. Harry and Niki carry that dynamic with such specificity that you sense it is not invented but remembered. The warmth between them does not feel performed. It feels like something Roher knows.

Rahul: One of my favorite thematic parallels in the film is how the piano tuning sequences and the safe cracking sequences are filmed with equal reverence, both treated as craft, almost sacred labor. Was that connection always baked into the script? And do you see Tuner as a film about obsession as much as it is about crime?

Daniel: It was always baked into the script and the central conceit of the movie that piano tuning and cracking safes are similar in a lot of ways. When I identified that parallel, the film was born. And yes, I think Tuner is a film about obsession and perfection, and understanding that perfection is not really a thing that exists in the world and the organic state of nature is chaos. That was really interesting for me and that's what I was exploring through Ruthie's character, through Niki, through Dustin. It's all about creating harmony out of chaos, and that to me is the central motif of the movie.

Rahul: You have a documentary filmmaker's eye for process. The film lingers on procedure in a way that feels tactile, almost like watching someone build something with their hands. Did your documentary background influence how you shot the heist elements, especially the mechanics of the safe work?

Daniel: My documentary instincts inspire every single element of the film, every single thing that I do. It's more of a worldview and approach. When you make documentaries, you want to go with the flow and you understand intrinsically that God is the director and you're just trying to capture what's in front of you. That's how I approach filmmaking. Nothing can go wrong; there are just problems to solve and making the best out of whatever the cinema gods hand to you, and that's very much a documentary perspective.

That answer is refreshing precisely because it refuses the usual anxiety around control. Roher is not interested in mastering the frame; he is interested in serving what is inside it. It is the same instinct that makes the procedural sequences in Tuner feel tactile rather than mechanical. He films a safecracker the way a documentarian films a craftsman: with attention, patience, and genuine curiosity about how things work.

Rahul: Havana Rose Liu brings a sharpness and emotional steadiness to Ruthie that gives the film real grounding. The romance never becomes a distraction, it becomes a mirror. What did you want Ruthie to represent in Niki's life beyond simply love interest energy?

Daniel: What Ruthie represents in Niki's life is a mirror to what his life could have been. There's something very profound about losing something. Your personhood is completely different because you were a piano player, then you can't play piano anymore, and it's like: who are you? What's left? And then you fall in love with someone who is the person you wanted to be, which is a very challenging dichotomy. It really forces Niki to look in the mirror and come to terms with who he is. Can he love this woman without feeling intense jealousy over her life, while mourning the life he had and figuring out who he wants to be? Those are all the questions being invoked in that relationship, and they were really interesting and exciting to me.

Rahul: You mentioned at Sundance dedicating the screening to Rob and Michelle Reiner, and spoke about his advice to create something people want to watch. When you look at Tuner now, do you feel like this film was your way of testing that advice in a completely new genre space?

Daniel: Rob never got to see the movie. That's something that I'm sad about. The time I got to spend with Rob and Michelle was probably mostly quite insignificant and small in their lives, but very, very big and meaningful for me. He's someone who I have so much respect for, and I love his work so much. I wanted to make something that heeded his advice, that people would want to watch, that's not like homework filmmaking and seemed more like fun, an engaging watch, and that's really how I approached making the movie.

Rahul: As you were finding your voice as a filmmaker, which writers and directors shaped your taste the most early on, and what is it about their work that still influences how you approach storytelling today?

Daniel: I love Soderbergh for his unpretentiousness, for his ability to bounce between scale and genre and not get pigeonholed into any one kind of film. I love Linklater for the laidback, easy backbeat of his movies. I love Scorsese for his musicality and the way he uses needle drops. I love Tarantino for his style. I love Spielberg for his heart and emotionality. I mean, those are kind of like a corny five, but it's true, those are the guys I really like.

Rahul: After working with Dustin Hoffman, what is one moment from set, or one piece of advice he shared, that you know you will be carrying with you for a long time?

Daniel: Something that Dustin told me that I'll be taking with me for the rest of my life is taking your laps for experimentation. Once you and the actor are happy with what you got, the opportunity of a take is to try and to fail and to succeed and to be goofy. It's up to the actor to have the courage to make a fool of themselves, and it's up to the director to have the foresight and vision to ensure their actors will never be made fools of. That's what I try to carry forward on the film I'm doing now. Once we get the scene, I'll jump in heeding Dustin's words and say: now we play. Let's try to go big. Let's try and come up with something that doesn't seem like an obvious choice. To me that's very cool and fun and exciting, and sometimes gives you some unexpected, really cool moments.

Roher describes his documentary philosophy as this: nothing can go wrong, there are just problems to solve. It is the kind of thing that sounds like a mantra until you realize it is actually a structural position. It means the world is not something to control but something to read. And reading it well, finding the signal inside the noise, is the whole job.

Tuner is a film built on that philosophy. Niki does not overcome his condition. He does not cure it or transcend it. He learns to work within it, to let what most people experience as limitation become the very thing that sets him apart. The film finds its form the same way its protagonist finds a safe combination: not by force, but by absolute attention.

What makes this conversation linger is how consistent Roher's instincts are across every answer. Get out of the actor's way. Trust the editor. Let the cinema gods hand you what they hand you. Build the parallel first and the story will follow. These are not production anecdotes. They are a coherent way of seeing, one that runs from his documentary roots straight through to his narrative debut without a single interruption.

Dustin Hoffman's advice about taking laps for experimentation, getting the scene then playing, failing, going big, applies equally well to what Roher has done with Tuner itself. He got the scene. And then he played.

Tuner is now in Theaters.