Charlie Shackleton started working in documentaries in 2015, the same year the breakout success of “The Jinx” and “Making a Murderer” would change the nonfiction filmmaking landscape.
“I came in at exactly that moment that the true crime genre was having its big resurgence, and over the course of the decade,” said Shackleton on this week’s episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “It’s just become inescapable, not only obviously as a viewer, but working within that world, everything just starts getting molded more and more into the image of true crime.”
For Shackleton, a voracious consumer of true crime, the idea of making one himself never felt like selling out. And when he discovered a forgotten-about book, “The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge,” written by Lyndon E. Lafferty, he thought he had discovered a fresh way into the holy grail of unsolved murder cases. Lafferty, a retired California Highway Patrol officer, believed he had identified the famous serial killer after a fateful encounter at a rest stop in 1971, setting into motion his lifelong, Robert Graysmith-like (the cartoonist turned amateur Zodiac killer hunter, portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal in David Fincher’s “Zodiac”) pursuit to solve the case.
Shackleton was location scouting for his “Silenced Badge” adaptation in Vallejo, California, when word came that Lafferty’s family had changed their minds about optioning him the book. He was devastated, mostly because he had already made the film in his head. It’s something whoever he was drinking a pint with at a pub back home in England was made acutely aware of, as Shackleton would talk them through, beat by beat, how his movie would have worked. What surprised him was how well simply describing the would-be film seemed to work. This eventually gave birth to the “Zodiac Killer Project,” the filmmaker’s reenactment of the film he didn’t get to make.
Using little more than establishing shots of the locations he was planning to use and footage from similar crime shows, Shackleton’s narration guides us through his would-be film, while carefully dancing around the legal minefields of not utilizing Lafferty’s book for information not already in the public domain through other sources.
What is the most surprising aspect of “Zodiac Killer Project” is how Shackleton simply describing the way he intended to use true crime conventions brings his unshot film to life. His explanation of how “evocative b-roll” would be used in a scene, or actually inserting a shot of a man’s boots exiting his vehicle, is shockingly powerful in drawing us into Lafferty’s drama.
“It was fascinating to me that you could so overtly reference [genre conventions], remove all of the art from them, and still sort of have them land to the same level of efficacy,” said Shackleton.
All of which speaks to just how powerful these genre conventions are in manipulating the viewer’s experience. Shackleton is well aware that his film works as a piece of media criticism. It’s that tension between the act of bringing his unshot film to life and the behind-the-scenes look at how the sausage gets made that drives “Zodiac Killer Project” to be such a shockingly entertaining and brisk 90-minute watch.
When Shackleton folds in repetitive examples from the true crime content flooding the popular streaming platforms to show how his film would have worked, he simultaneously lays bare just how formulaic true crime has become in the last decade. But that’s not something the director is willing to label as being all bad.
“That sounds derogatory to say it’s ‘rigidly formulaic,’ and obviously there are real downsides and legitimate criticisms to setting a mold so firmly for dealing with real lives and gruesome deaths,” said Shackleton. “ But I think as a filmmaker, I also see tropes and formulas as a useful thing, a potentially legitimate tool because they are a shorthand. If you use them wisely and hopefully fairly sparingly, they can be a way to buy yourself leverage to do more unexpected things, push out in unexpected directions. The whole appeal of working with a genre to me is exactly that, the power of those images.”
He’s also hesitant to flatter himself that his film is a valuable media literacy tool: “The thing that’s equally striking to me is that I’m not sure that self-consciousness actually stops the effectiveness of any of these techniques. If it did, my movie wouldn’t work at all. The whole premise of the film is that I’m constantly lampshading the techniques I’m using and showing that they work anyway. You can literally have my nasal voice telling you, ‘This scene would feel really dramatic,’ ‘You’re going to feel really tense here,’ and as long as there’s tense music playing over the top of it, you kind of do feel tense.”
Shackleton admits that after weeks in the editing room analyzing and reworking his material, he was surprised how a music cue would still draw him into Lafferty’s POV that a conspiracy was forming to cover up a botched investigation. If that proves true crime is a manipulative abomination of the documentary form, or what makes it addictively entertaining, Shackleton is wary of coming down too hard in either direction. After all, the driving force behind “Zodiac Killer Project” was his heartbreak that he didn’t get to utilize these tools himself.
“I don’t actually necessarily come down that hard one way or the other on a lot of the ethical questions that arise. I tried to do is speak to the contradictory impulses that are part and parcel of working in true crime, because those are the conversations I’d had so many times with other filmmakers who were working in that same world,” said Shackleton. “That occasionally renders itself in this movie as a queasy collision of morbid humor, somber reflection on the reality of the matter at hand, and the absurdities of the filmmaking process. All of that co-exists when you’re working in true crime. And I think it was that feeling that I was trying to capture more than trying to present myself as the person with the ultimate answer on what’s ethical and what’s not in true crime.”
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