“Thwarted Ambitions” | Charlie Shackleton, Zodiac Killer Project
The true crime genre’s ubiquity is driven by people’s endless fascination, disgust, and — bizarrely — search for comfort in genre conventions that still have the ability to generate complex emotions despite their predictability and familiarity.
Having tried and failed to make a documentary about the infamous Zodiac Killer, filmmaker Charlie Shackleton walks the viewer through what his film would have been like and why, using Bay Area landscapes, reenactments, film and TV clips, and voice-over. In this wholly original, self-aware cinematic work, a filmmaker chews over what might have been and playfully probes the inner workings of a genre at saturation point.
Zodiac Killer Project screens May 7, at 9:30 p.m., at the Music Box Theatre, as part of the Chicago Critics Film Festival. Ahead of that, Shackleton graciously took the time to answer this year’s CCFF filmmaker questionnaire. Below, his individual responses.
How did you first become interested in filmmaking? What was your path toward directing your first film?
I was a teenage movie blogger! I started a weird little film blog when I was 16, which luckily happened to coincide with the very brief window in which people actually wanted to read such things. By the time I left school, I'd amassed a small but loyal readership, and was making just enough money from banner ads (and freelancing wherever would take me) that I could pay my rent. When I started making films a few years later, it was really as an extension of that criticism, and most of my films to date have been—in one way or another—about filmmaking itself.
What inspired you to make the film you're bringing to the festival?
A few years ago, I tried to make a true crime documentary about the Zodiac Killer, but the project fell apart when I failed to secure the rights to the book it was due to be based on. As I wrestled with that disappointment, I found myself telling anyone who would listen how the doc would have played out, describing lengthy sequences beat by beat. Eventually, it occurred to me that those thwarted ambitions might themselves be a good subject for a film, and that finding an outlet for them might finally allow me to get the unrealised project out of my system, and at the same time, explore the strange, inescapable allure of true crime.
Tell us about a film that you consider a guiding influence (whether it has informed your overarching vision as a filmmaker, directly informed the title you're bringing to the festival, or both).
Zodiac Killer Project contains lots of shots of empty spaces—the locations for my abandoned true crime doc, devoid of any of the action that would have unfolded there—so in developing the film's visual language, I was thinking a lot about filmmakers who work with landscapes, like James Benning, Masao Adachi, Deborah Stratman, William E. Jones, Babette Mangolte, Jenni Olson and especially John Smith, whose sense of humour has always appealed to me. His film The Black Tower is probably the biggest single influence on Zodiac Killer Project.
Tell us about a location that's held significance to the film you're bringing to the festival: a setting where filming took place, a geographic area that provided a source of inspiration, or another type of space that comes to mind for you in thinking about the film. What made this place so special?
The film was almost entirely shot in Vallejo, California, where the Zodiac Killer's crimes were centered, and my multiple visits there really helped crystallise my thinking about true crime and its limited perspective on the world. One of the received wisdoms of the genre is that the places where these sorts of crimes happen are forever marked by them—that it's impossible to walk the streets without thinking of what took place there decades earlier. In reality, Vallejo is a sprawling, complicated place that means all kinds of different things to all kinds of different people, most of whom couldn't care less about the Zodiac Killer. That is, until another true crime production pulls into town and dredges all the grisly details up again.
The theatrical experience brings us together to celebrate artistic experience and expand our horizons as human beings. Tell us about a memorable theatrical experience from your life.
The Prince Charles Cinema in London used to do £1 tickets every Friday, so typically about half the audience would just be there for the shelter and central heating. I went one Friday afternoon when I was about 15 to see Mulholland Drive for the first time, and watching all two and a half hours of that surrounded by people sleeping in their seats was one of the strangest, most spell-binding filmgoing experiences of my life. It's also the first time I remember having an erection in a cinema.