Daniel Roher, fresh off his Academy Award win for the documentary Navalny, returns to the festival circuit with his narrative feature debut, Tuner. Starring Leo Woodall and Dustin Hoffman, the film follows Niki White, a talented piano tuner with a unique auditory condition, who is drawn into the criminal underworld when his skills are used for safe-cracking. It marks a significant stylistic shift for the director, moving from geopolitical non-fiction to a propulsive, character-driven heist thriller centered on identity and sound.
Joining Roher is composer Will Bates, whose previous work includes Immaculate and The Magicians. For Tuner, Bates was tasked with crafting a score that navigates a complex auditory landscape, working alongside Executive Music Producer Marius de Vries and Sound Designer Johnnie Burn. FandomWire caught up with both the director and composer on the red carpet to discuss the transition to fiction and the blurring lines between music and sound design.
Tuner Sundance Interview
Daniel Roher, Robert Ramsey, Lowell Meyer and Will Bates attend the Q&A for Tuner by Daniel Roher, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. © 2026 Sundance Institute | photo by Sam Emenogu.
FandomWire: You have mentioned before that your films are often reactions to previous ones. Navalny obviously had very real, high stakes. Tuner is a thriller, but it is a fictional film. What did you take from making a documentary like Navalny into making this narrative feature?
Daniel Roher: Well, I think that if you look at Navalny and you look at Tuner, you wouldn’t necessarily see a lot of overlap. They are different modes: one is a doc, one is fiction, and different genres. But at the end of the day, they are both quite thrilling. What I hope carries forward from one to the other is just a propulsiveness, an entertainment value, and a fun-to-watch quality.
Even though the first film’s stakes are nothing short of democracy, freedom, and the future of an entire country, and this movie is more understated. It is a guy’s life; it is a drama. I just felt like, together, I wanted to make something that was entertaining and thrilling and fun. Navalny was supposed to be entertaining, thrilling, and fun. When it premiered, it was funny, too. But since he was murdered in prison, it is less fun now, which is a very upsetting reality. But I hope that the filmmaking, the openness, and the way the movie feels transfer over.
Related: Tuner Sundance Review — Crowd-Pleasing Charmer Rises Above Its Cliches
FW: Will, congratulations on the film. You have a huge catalog of films that you have composed for, but for this film, sound is obviously a very important part of the narrative. Is there a particular balance you tried to reach in the score where the music might bleed into being part of the sound design?
Will Bates: Yeah, that is a great question. I feel like I have been lucky enough to live in that place on a lot of the projects that I have worked on, where sound design and music kind of blur and exist in that weird space in between. There is a lot of that in this. Johnnie Burn, the sound designer, did an incredible job taking some of my score and integrating it into the sound of the safe and all of that stuff.
One of the first cues that we worked on is when Niki is first cracking the safe. There is a moment where I am using piano sounds hanging on this destroyed piano that I have in my studio. One of them is totally lobotomized. I am using it as a sound design device as opposed to a musical space. Being able to blend that was an important part of the story because the piano is almost like a sense in this script.
Robert Ramsey, Michael Heimler, Lily Yacoub, Eugene Hernandez, Daniel Roher, Joanne Seller and Teddy Schwarzman attend the premiere of Tuner by Daniel Roher, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. © 2026 Sundance Institute | photo by Sam Emenogu.
FW: How is this film different from your many other projects? What made Tuner stand out to you creatively?
Bates: I think there is a lot of on-camera music where I usually provide a kind of support. This is very different. Daniel wanted the score to be very different from what is being played on camera. It is an hour and forty minutes, and that was really interesting to me. I have never really done something like that before where I had to really pivot away from what is already in there.
Tuner screened at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, which ran January 22-February 2 in Park City and Salt Lake City, UT, and January 30-February 2 online.
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