You’ll never watch a true-crime documentary or series quite the same way after Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project, a fascinating exploration of the director walking through his failed attempt to adapt Lyndon E. Lafferty’s book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge into the first major documentary on the unsolved case. Scrutinizing every trope of the true-crime genre in highly entertaining fashion, the Sundance premiere was picked by Music Box Films for a release beginning this Friday, November 21.
I said in my review, “Unlike a project such as Jodorowsky’s Dune, where one is rather devastated it never came to light, it’s hard to imagine Shackleton’s intended project would’ve actually been all that compelling. This makes his conversational, self-reflexive approach––narration in which he wholly improvises, aside from a few general notes––all the more engaging. He’s not afraid to self-correct when he gets a fact wrong or laugh at something he’s taking a jab at, making one feel like they are in the room with him, captivated to see what trope he’ll tackle next.”
Ahead of the release, I spoke with Shackleton about his outsider perspective, the complex legal complications of the project, editing down his recording sessions, premiering at Sundance alongside Predators and The Perfect Neighbor, injecting humor into the project, the uneasy double life of documentaries, and much more.
The Film Stage: It’s clear you’ve watched many of the true-crime shows you’re discussing. In making the movie, how much did you have to rewatch, and how many new insights were gained from rewatching? Did it change your headspace knowing you were making a movie about the subject?
Charlie Shackleton: It certainly did change my headspace while I was watching true crime while working on the film, because obviously I had one eye on, “Is this a clip that I could potentially use in the movie?” And yet, I realized recently, I’m not sure it actually changed the amount that I was watching. It just put a nice veneer on the experience so I could tell myself, “This is work.” But yeah, as evidenced by the fact that I am currently slogging my way through the Netflix Ed Gein series with absolutely no justifications for doing so [Laughs] yeah, I think actually my intake remained roughly steady.
It feels like most true-crime series and docs center on U.S. crimes, certainly the Zodiac Killer. As someone from the U.K., how do you think your outsider perspective helped shape your film?
Yeah, it’s funny because, obviously, the U.K. is so steeped in American culture and grew up so surrounded by all of this American true-crime stuff that I feel like I’ve known about the Zodiac Killer for as long as I’ve known about anything––and certainly have engaged a lot more with that story than I’ve engaged with, say, Jack the Ripper, even though that happened a couple of miles down the road from where I live. But I think in the film itself, it probably is a useful counterpoint to some extent. Because it’s already a film of contradictory tones where you’re hearing these often quite matter-of-fact, almost kind of glib discussions about very serious things, and I think my being something of an outsider probably accentuates that, not least because the places where all of this happened were quite literally new to me. I’d read about Vallejo 10,000 times in forums and in books and hearing about it on podcasts. And then I rock up in the actual place. And obviously it’s not quite as you imagined it’s going to be.
For the recording sessions you had, how much did you actually record? And what was the editing process like?
So the first rule I set for myself in approaching a film was that I didn’t want to script any of the narration, because it had come from me having these conversations with friends about all the things I’d wanted to do in the movie that I now wasn’t going to be able to see through. So I wanted something of that conversational, spontaneous feel of those conversations. And I knew—because I’m not an actor—that if I scripted them, it was going to sound horribly artificial and stagy. The first recording session we did, it was me in the booth that you see in the film for ten straight hours with maybe an hour’s break for lunch, with notes, where I scrolled down every idea I could remember ever having had in relation to the film. But from those notes, just essentially riffing and trying to stumble through this feature-length film from beginning to end.
So most of the sort of flights of fancy that made their way into the film were just things that organically came up in the course of that recording session. You can hear things occurring to me because they really were. But inevitably, obviously, there had to be a huge amount of editing in terms of taking that enormous recording and making it feel like a coherent hour-and-a-half. And we did go back into the recording studio several times after that when we realized that there were kind of narrative gaps that needed plugging. Which was sort of interesting in and of itself because I was discovering the narrative problems that that other film would have had by describing them and then feeling this film having narrative problems. So we were doing this sort of almost vicarious edit of a film that never existed, just through editing the description of it.
Speaking to the other project that never came to be: there is a sense that what you ended up making is potentially more interesting than what could have been a more straightforward film. Did you have that feeling as well? If you talk to any directors or writers or editors of true-crime shows, it feels like they have to be fully 100% aware of embracing these tropes. With your original project, how would you have set it apart?
Yeah, I’ve had countless conversations, before I made the film and since, with fellow documentary filmmakers who’ve worked in true crime, and actually the tone of those conversations is really what inspired the tone of this film. Because inevitably there’s a kind of frank recognition of the genre’s shortcomings, but also a real sincerity about what they were setting out to do or what might be possible within the confines of the genre. And like most of them, I wouldn’t have been pursuing making that film if I didn’t think I could do something interesting with it. And to me, the appeal of working in any genre is that, if creatively utilized, all of those tropes and formulas can actually be a good way to build leverage to do interesting things. You’re building enough audience familiarity that actually then you can really push out in odd directions in the knowledge that people will probably follow you there because they are lulled into a false sense of security.
However, while making this film, it did dawn on me that, of course, that is sort of the thing every true-crime filmmaker says, and maybe we all believe that we’re gonna make the one that rises above and resists the fatal flaws of the genre. So I don’t know if I’m entirely confident now that I could have done that. But certainly that was my hope. So this film, it’s formally about as far away as you can get from true crime. I think that it has real benefits and real costs. I’m really delighted that I’ve made something so idiosyncratic that’s nonetheless getting this great life, where it’s being seen around the world and often in theaters, which is not a privilege most true-crime films get these days. But I’m still aware that that audience, however successful the movie is, is going to be a fraction the size of your average Netflix true-crime series. So there’s still a trade-off.
It was interesting watching this film, Predators, and The Perfect Neighbor all at Sundance this year. Each is taking a different approach to true crime. Do you think there is something air now that we’ve had enough true-crime stories it’s time to reflexively think about them in a different way?
Yeah, I kept thinking throughout the edit of Zodiac Killer Project, “We’ve missed the moment. We’re over the peak, and now true crime is going to just fall into obscurity, and this movie is going to come out and people are going to be like, ‘Why now? This is talking about something that’s already over.’” And obviously that didn’t happen. And I was sort of, not exactly pleased, but certainly reassured by the fact that true crime seemed to become only more saturated as we got into the final leg of finishing the film.
And in fact, my first kind of clue that maybe we weren’t the only people with our fingers on the pulse of that issue was I got hired to be one of the editors on Predators. That was the first job I got after I finished Zodiac Killer Project. And David Osit, the director of that film, and I had countless conversations about why now and whether this thing that felt important to us to be talking about in that cultural moment went beyond us. We were pleased to see that it did when the films both premiered and were well-received, and had the fortunes of those two films and A Perfect Neighbor all being at Sundance and inevitably being discussed as a trio. And that can only be generative to the conversation when you have these three quite different takes, but they are all responding to the same diagnosis of something that’s happening in culture. Obviously, I wish mine was the one that had sold to Netflix for $5 million. [Both laugh] But nonetheless glad to be in the mix.
You’re getting a nice theatrical release, so that is good. I was very happy.
I’m very, very happy. Very happy, I must add, with Music Box Films, who I love. `
Yes, they are great.
They just don’t have $5 million to give me, which is weird. I can’t understand it. I’ve asked several times, and they just refuse to give me $5 million.
Maybe on the back end, we’ll see.
[Laughs]
Talking about your humor, in the movie you are questioning how many people will actually ever watch the movie. Most filmmakers would never admit to wondering about their audience size during their film. What was it like to balance this sense of humor while also ensuring people were staying captivated by the insights you were sharing?
Yeah, it was tricky and it’s never gonna work for everyone. I think there are still some lines that are kind of irritating to some viewers. And then there are probably lines we cut because we thought they’d be too irritating that other viewers would have laughed at. The rule of thumb I tried to have was: I just wanted everything I said in the movie to be something I could imagine saying perfectly sincerely to a friend in a bar. Maybe “sincerely” is the wrong word, because obviously sometimes I’m quite glib and ironic in the film, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be held to every single word I say in the film if it was read back to me by a court stenographer. But I at least wanted it to be a joke I would authentically make.
The easy thing to do when you’re sitting in a recording booth and you’re kind of playing yourself—it is easy to start to kind of slip into self-parody and start, sort of, exaggerating your own sense of humor for effect. And I think that happened a few times, and yet part of the edit process was catching those moments where I felt either to me or my producers––who know me well––like I wasn’t quite myself. So that started to feel like the best possible barometer.
Charlie Shackleton
You mention in the film how the “bounds of rational behavior are ever-expanding” and moral / legal boundaries being crossed are accepted by viewers as long as justice prevails. What do you think it is about the human psyche that we are able to accept abnormal, even illegal behavior as long as it’s structured in a certain way? Do you think there’s something unique to filmmaking that allows audiences to accept this more?
Yeah, documentary itself has this somewhat uneasy double life as entertainment and, whatever you want to call it, activism or informative, educational material—whatever your frame might be like. There’s this split identity between the form as something that’s for edification and for our entertainment. That’s kind of supercharged in true crime because you’re dealing with matters of life and death. And in the very, very rare cases where these films have “measurable impact,” to use the dreadful documentary-industry word, that impact is huge. It’s someone’s exoneration or someone’s incarceration on the other side of the scale. And it’s kind of no wonder that when that happens, it sort of blots everything else out. Like, the West Memphis Three are free, so who’s talking about some ethical problems that the second film in the Paradise Lost trilogy might have? Other than me. [Laughs]
Understandably, and perhaps appropriately, that kind of just fades into the background. Most true-crime films can’t make a claim that they’ve had such a significant real-world impact, but they certainly still encourage the same terms of interrogation. And when those are the terms, it becomes really easy to defend almost anything because you’re on the side of right. And often that’s quite literally true. There’s certainly true crime where people are going to disagree about whether someone is innocent or guilty. But there’s also true crime where it’s really obvious that the film or the podcast or whatever it might be is on the side of right. And it’s really easy to become numb to any ethical lapse when you feel this real feeling of alignment with the production’s aims.
You mentioned in the film certain legal precautions both with the initial source material and your use of footage from other shows. What was that process like figuring out what you could show and say?
I worked with a lawyer I’ve worked with many times, Sean McTernan. It was actually working with him on this that made me realize he is, at this point, genuinely, maybe my closest collaborator, other than my producers that I’ve worked with my whole career. Because I so often make projects that have these quite complex legal obstacles at their core. It’s quite normal for me to involve Sean from the very first day. And so throughout the production process of Zodiac Killer Project, I was constantly checking in with him and discussing what might be possible and what might not be. I see him as a sort of generative force on the film, even though he’s often telling me, “This is a barrier you can’t cross.” I see that barrier as something productive to push against and something that might throw up another idea that wouldn’t have occurred to me if I had total free rein.
And luckily for me, Sean is also really engaged in that conversation and wants to help me think of new and creative solutions to some of the problems that he’s identifying. So yeah: it was a great process. More than any other project I’ve ever made, this one had myriad legal obstacles in its path—not only the need to avoid copyright infringement of the book, but then working out the exact limits of what we could use from all of the copyrighted films and TV shows, which are all used under fair dealing, which is the U.K. equivalent of fair use. But then even beyond that, defamation and libel, and there were so many things to worry about. And often these laws, certainly in British law, are written quite vaguely. So it’s very rarely, you know, “Here’s the rule. You can do this, but not this. You can use 25 seconds of that, but not 26.” It’s almost always a very subjective, kind of vibes-based process where you’re saying, “Yeah, I think on balance it feels like it’s a bit too much of this. You’ve probably pushed further here.” Luckily, I’ve always seen those conversations as creative ones.
Zodiac Killer Project opens in theaters on Friday, November 21.
The post Zodiac Killer Project Director Charlie Shackleton on Scrutinizing True Crime and the Uneasy Double Life of Documentaries first appeared on The Film Stage.
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