Charlie Shackleton attends the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of “Zodiac Killer Project” at the Egyptian Theatre on January 27, 2025, in Park City, UT. (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
By Shelby Shaw
“I just hate waste, so the idea of devoting a lot of time and energy and thought to something and then having nothing exist, is obviously an inevitable part of the filmmaking process, but one I find very frustrating,” says writer-director Charlie Shackleton about working on a project that is forced to be abandoned. “The thing I normally would funnel that [frustration] toward is just boring my friends in the pub by making them listen to me describe unrealized ideas.” Shackleton’s experimental documentary, Zodiac Killer Project, is a personal essay film which details his need to abort working on a movie right before starting on production. The film, planned to be about the notorious serial killer, came to a halt after the rights to use a “tell-all” book — which Shackleton had been consulting for his script — unexpectedly fell through at the last minute. “So I thought, why not bore the world’s friends in the ‘cinematic pub’?” he jokes to the post-premiere audience on January 27.
Premiering in the NEXT section at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, Zodiac Killer Project is constructed almost entirely from 16mm film shots of parking lots, building exteriors, and what most filmmakers would probably consider to be only the necessary “establishing shots” of their scenes. Shackleton’s voiceover gives his first-person report on the movie he was suddenly no longer able to make, yet the story is told with witty humor and a candid, improvised narrative. Interspersed with a dissection of true crime entertainment, Shackleton includes numerous television clips from the genre to illustrate the most cliché of tropes, meaningless B-roll footage that’s seemingly always shown, and overused cinematic devices that add up to the recognizable format we now call “a true crime show.” And all along the way, Shackleton is telling us how this is what he would have done with his own movie. Refreshingly honest about the sometimes deceptive filmmaking process (even with documentary) and the pitfalls of an industry that prioritizes treating creativity as a business, Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project is a much-needed film about pursuing your ideas to fruition — even when the plan must pivot, mutate, and (d)evolve if necessary. Zodiac Killer Project says: just do it. Make the thing. See your project to the end. You will not regret it.
“I’m not a filmmaker who works well with total freedom. I like restrictions and limits and something to push against. So even in the instant of finding out we couldn’t make the [original] documentary, it was agonizing, but there was probably already the glimmer of a thought of, ‘This is like the ultimate restriction: not being able to make the film. At all.’” Shackleton laughs along with the audience at this. The feature-length film is an unrealized idea, realized.
But as much as Zodiac Killer Project plays out as a spoken essay film, it was actually spontaneously ad-libbed by Shackleton in a London recording booth, surrounded by his notes (“every idea I’d ever had for this documentary”) and reference material, while watching the footage that he had shot in California. “[Being unscripted] threw me off in all these unusual, or unexpected — even to me — directions, because you’re sitting there talking for however many hours and you do just remember things or think things up.” The freedom of permitting himself to think out loud, uninterrupted, unlocked a number of insights and connections for Shackleton as he spoke to himself in the recording booth, achieving his desired “conversational” tone for the film, as if he were telling the story to a friend.
“Obviously there’s a lot of conversation about true crime, [there are] a lot of think pieces about true crime, and they’re almost exclusively focused on why the audiences want it,” Shackleton says. “There’s almost no focus on supply and the fact that we’re just making loads of this stuff. … I think the moral hazard, at least on the part of the filmmakers, is pushing any moral inquiry outside. Because the other thing about that focus on ‘why audiences want that’ is that that’s a critique that true crime itself can completely absorb and contain just by having five minutes at the end, where you go like, ‘Why do people want this stuff, eh? Why do you, the viewer, want to watch this? I hope you’re looking inward right now.’” The audience erupts into laughter at Shackleton’s jab at the genre, and those who enjoy it. “To me, that just feels like a complete abdication of our own responsibility. What is it to be a filmmaker going to someone’s grave site to film your little reenactments, and muttering like, ‘Oof, our audiences are really sick’?” The crowd laughs with Shackleton, but maybe they’re also laughing at themselves.
