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| Zodiac Killer Project Photo: Courtesy of Sundance Institute |
Another year, another piece of art pitching a theory about the Zodiac Killer? Not quite. Charlie Shackleton came close. There are people to whom the Sixties-era San Francisco serial killer and puzzle enthusiast is barely familiar, and there are people who, at one point or another, got too close to the still unsolved case and now can’t let it go. Sundance Film Festival award winner Zodiac Killer Project was born among the latter, but became something else.
The film, as originally planned, would have drawn on Lyndon Lafferty’s book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge, an account of the author’s obsession with a particular suspect and the close encounters between them that are chilling to think about if he was right. Just as he was gearing up to start shooting, however, Shackleton’s financing fell through, and when he eventually resurrected the project, it focused not directly on Lafferty’s theory but, instead, on the failed film itself. In deconstructing the visual language of the true crime genre, it points towards the assumptions and errors of thinking that have dogged many an attempt to understand the case. It also takes a troubling look at the ethics of the true crime genre.
“I probably was introduced to the Zodiac Killer by the David Fincher film, which came out when I was about 15 years old, probably the perfect age to become hooked upon a story like that,” Shackleton told me when we met. “And then over the subsequent years, consuming a lot of true crime, that was always the thing that I came back to the most. I suppose it's one of the more totemic unsolved true crime cases. So I'd read easily half a dozen books about the case before I read Lyndon's, but I think that was the first one where the nuances of the angle it offered on what was, to me, by that point, quite a familiar story – it was the first time I felt like I could see a film in it, having long kind of found it odd that there wasn't a definitive Zodiac Killer documentary. I think the pieces clicked together when I read that book and felt how cinematic a lot of its narrative twists and turns were.”
When that project fell apart and he decided to change direction he was, he says, very much starting from scratch.
“I had totally assumed I would just sort of lick my wounds for a month or two and move on and make something entirely different. It was only that I found myself so unable to put it to bed and instead would find myself endlessly retelling scenes from the imagined film to friends, so that at a certain point, I guess, that inability to leave it behind started to feel like an interesting subject. I had assumed I was on the path to not thinking about the Zodiac Killer for a while, but i just thrust straight back into it.”
It's a really good breakdown of the visual language of true crime. Had he thought that through previously, or was it something that he discovered as he took his own planned film apart and worked out what he had been intending to do?
“I hadn't really been probing it while I was still planning to make the film,” he says. “I was aware that I'd be working within a genre and that genre had plenty of tropes and formulas, which, to me, was part of the appeal, because I think that ability to use that sort of visual and narrative shorthand is, to me, what makes working within a genre appealing. You know, you use some of those shortcuts and you exploit some of those familiar images in order hopefully to then get a bit of leeway to do more interesting things within this quite rigid formula. So I knew that was the equation, but I don't think I'd really stopped to give thought to what those tropes were on an individual level, because they're automatic, right?
“I only realised when I stopped and wrote them down, like, how many times I have fallen into these very familiar beats without even realising it, because I spent well over a decade just passively consuming so much true crime that it was almost seared into my retinas and it was clearly underpinning my creative imagination.”
I see something similar in the way that people get hooked on Zodiac theories, I note. To what extent does he think that the language of true crime traps people in certain ways of thinking and stops them from being able to see when maybe something isn't as good a fit as it seems to be?
He muses on that for a moment. “When I've tried to kind of diagnose my own interest in true crime, I think the thing that keeps me coming back to it is the puzzle-like nature of it. There's that sense, even with an unsolved case like the Zodiac Killer, that if you just put the pieces together in the right way, it's all going to click somehow. Even if you rationally know it's probably not. And I think that's a very compelling, dynamic and very satisfying feeling as a viewer and as a filmmaker. But it also absolutely creates blind spots in the way that you analyse information.
“Also, when you're 90% of the way to solving a puzzle, everything you see looks like that final piece. I think the closer you get, the more certain you become. It becomes very difficult to view things in any way objectively. I found this myself. I wanted to give a fair indication of the balance of evidence in the case and what pointed towards Lyndon's suspect and what pointed away from him. But often there was way more evidence than you could possibly fit in a single feature film. And then you start to question what's making those selections for you. Like, you know, there are ten different eyewitness accounts of the Zodiac Killer's height, so why wouldn't I end up picking the one that suggests it could be Lyndon's suspect over any of the others that are all equally reliable?”
I tell him that what fascinates me about the case is that one can follow the collections of evidence people have put together for any one suspect and become utterly convinced it's him, and then one can go and do exactly the same thing with a completely different person.
“Totally, yeah. I mean, it's weird. You read these different theories of the case, and it's almost easy to forget that you're reading about the same crimes because the difference in focus is so distinct and what gets accentuated and what gets elided is totally dependent on what makes the best case against any individual suspect.”
That, I suggest, leads to a danger with true crime: that people can frame innocent people, even just with the way that they shape the visual language in a documentary. He agrees.
“The position I was in making this film is obviously one that didn't require me to confront some of the ethical decisions I would have ultimately had to confront if I've been making the other one. I'm in the fairly privileged position of being able to describe all the ideas I had for the film that never had to actually meet the roadblock of reality and confront me with these ethical calls on whether it's fair to provide evidence that seems to incriminate someone, how much you need to balance that with the evidence that seems to point to their innocence, how that's affected by the fact that if they're no longer alive, there isn't going to be any legal consequence for them. These questions are all incredibly nuanced, and I think that nuance is very easy to lose when you become increasingly convinced that your case is the right one.
“I think the first thought I had for what this film was going to look like was that it inevitably would have to look like the antithesis of a true crime film. I was talking about this unrealisable project and therefore the viewer needed to have the sense of its absence. But obviously there's 10,000 ways you can document absence. So it didn't necessarily set me up in any particular direction.
“The first thing I thought back to was when I had been out to Vallejo in California to scout locations for the true crime film, and I had just turned up in each of these places that you see in Zodiac Killer Project expecting to see a true crime setting as I knew it from watching endless true crime documentaries and reading plenty about Vallejo in accounts of the Zodiac Killer case. So I expected it to be gloomy and mysterious and filled with intrigue, and of course, it's just an ordinary place with thousands of people going about their life. So that became the starting point: what if went to these places and we captured the contrast with the humdrum reality of a place like that compared to its reputation in popular culture?
“What was satisfying to me about working with all of that footage was that it also has an entirely different kind of pace to true crime cinematography. You know, it's so long and languorous and there's often so little happening that I think it does require a different kind of attention that's quite antithetical to that required in true crime, which is obviously about keeping the pace up and moving one thing along to the next. So it really helped me, I think, while I was editing the film to play with that sense of how time passes in a genre like that.”
Might it be interesting to approach true crime in a different way, so that people are thinking more about something or thinking about it differently, using their minds more instead of getting pushed into one way of thinking?
“Yeah,” he says, and then hesitates for a moment. “I mean, it's funny – even to imagine that, my first response is like, if you did that, it sort of wouldn't be true crime anymore.”
Even if it was about crimes, and it was true?
“Well, exactly. Yeah. I guess in my head, they're almost two different things, right? It's like there's stories about crime in any number of mediums or formats, and obviously those go back as long as people have been telling stories about anything. And then there's true crime, which in my head is like this genre with a slightly shorter lineage that fits a certain mould. And so when I imagine the kind of thing you're talking about, it's like, ‘Oh, it doesn't fit.’ It sort of ceases to be true crime. But yeah, I certainly think the loosening of that mould, the end of that especially strict kind of true crime filmmaking, would probably be for everyone's benefit.”
What is he planning to do next?
“I actually don't know at the moment. I'm currently editing for some other filmmakers, which has been something of a relief, to get to things about other people's ideas and not be buried in a rabbit hole of my own, as I make a film about my own unrealised ideas. But, yeah, I think in the new year, I'll go back into my own mind and see what skeletons are lying there.”
And how hard is it now to actually let go of Zodiac properly?
“I feel like I have in one sense, in that I've had a real sense of catharsis, getting to make this film instead and release it into the world and have people respond to it. And yet I know that every time I get a Google alert about the Zodiac Killer, I am hitting that link almost as quickly as humanly possible. I think my innermost interest in the case remains undiminished.”
