British filmmaker Charlie Shackleton has made a habit of digging into the cracks, between genres, expectations, and the institutional frameworks of nonfiction film itself.
His latest work, Zodiac Killer Project, takes aim at a genre that has become both a cultural obsession and a commercial juggernaut: true crime. But rather than follow the expected beats of mystery, revelation, and resolution, Shackleton does something far more subversive: he narrates the story of a film that never came to be.
Originally conceived as a straight documentary adaptation of a true crime book, Zodiac Killer Project evolved into a meta-essay about the failure of that very project, the industrial commodification of violence, and the quietly corrosive appeal of “background viewing.” With no talking heads, no re-enactments, and a visual language that hovers between static observation and desktop archaeology, Shackleton invites the viewer into a ghost story of sorts, not just about a killer who was never caught, but about the specter of genre itself.
Speaking with Screen Anarchy, Shackleton reflects on the collapse of his original project, the moral ambiguities of true crime, the industry's addiction to the “three Cs”, and why the aesthetics of boredom may be the most radical gesture left in nonfiction cinema.
Screen Anarchy: You’ve said you originally started with a public conversation, a kind of internal documentary you couldn’t make. What made you believe those conversations could be thematic in themselves?
Charlie Shackleton: Over time, I think I just gained more confidence in the idea that it doesn’t actually take much to make a movie, really. I used to think, like a lot of emerging filmmakers do, that a film had to be big and weighty to earn its existence. But I’ve realised that even small thoughts or personal preoccupations can warrant exploration as a film, and that’s been a powerful shift for me.
A lot of my work centres on people telling stories that amuse them or that have some kind of personal or family resonance. These stories often seem inconsequential on the surface, but they end up carrying unexpected weight, sometimes without us even intending it.
So when the true crime documentary I’d been working on fell apart, I found myself recounting the story, how I’d imagined making it, to friends in pubs around London. Even that started to feel like a film. There was something in that frustration, in the unrealised project, that felt cinematic.
Creating a film in a pub, such a British thing.
[Laughs.] It is a very British thing, yeah. I guess everyone has their own equivalent of that space, but for me, it really was: sitting in a booth in a pub in London, drowning my sorrows, trying to convince my friends how good the film would have been.
The story you initially wanted to tell was American-style true crime, but the result still feels very British.
[Laughs.] Thanks. Yeah, funny you mention that. My editing office is actually in Whitechapel, so I look out the window and see Jack the Ripper tours going up and down the street all day.
You’ve described your relationship with genre as complicated. What first drew you to true crime, and what ultimately made you turn away from it?
I don’t even know if I’d call it love-hate, it was more passive, really. Like most people who consume true crime, it was just easy. You open a streaming service and it’s the first thing they show you. It’s background viewing; it just flows into your life.
But as a documentary filmmaker, it became impossible to avoid. It was everywhere in the industry. So when I was trying to figure out how to get something made or how to pitch for funding, it was always: “Is it true crime?”
There was even this running joke in the doc world, you had to have one of the three Cs: celebrity, crime, or cults. That was the only way anything got greenlit.
What do those three Cs say about society or culture more broadly?
The obvious temptation is to psychoanalyse the audience, to ask why people are drawn to the grisly or the macabre. And there’s probably something worth unpacking there. But I think what’s more telling is what it reveals about the industry. For them, it’s just reliable. These kinds of stories are easy to produce and easy to sell.
While working on this film, which includes a lot of clips from other true crime works, I noticed how many of them came from the same few companies. They just churn stuff out for streamers. And interestingly, two of the biggest ones are British, even though what they make feels distinctly American.
They’ve really mastered the formula. They’ve got teams of researchers constantly digging up cases. The model’s so efficient they can produce eight of these series a year. Try making eight original docs on different topics, you’d be doing ten times the work.
It sounds a lot like commodification of true crime.
I wouldn’t say they’re not exploitative, or what I sometimes think of as “emotional porn,” but they’re still compelling. And I do like some of them. People sometimes ask me after seeing the film, “Isn’t there any true crime you do like?” And I’m like, “Yeah, it’s all in the film!”
The clips I used are from things I genuinely watched and enjoyed. That doesn’t mean I don’t have issues with them, and I try to discuss that in the film, but I found those clips stimulating in some way.
When I tried including clips from the really low-rent, tacky, exploitative stuff, it just felt too easy. It’s so obviously morally bankrupt that critiquing it feels redundant. What interested me was the material I, and so many others, actually engaged with, even admired, despite its flaws.
The project originally began as an adaptation of Lafferty’s book. How did losing the rights reshape the film?
It didn’t reshape it, it killed it. Completely. I’ve had projects fall apart before, and usually I try to take comfort in the idea that some part of the idea might survive in a future project. But this was the first time where the failed project became the subject of the next thing I made.
That said, the two films now feel totally separate. It’s weird to even think of the current one as a “reshaping” of the original. They’re just not the same thing.
Did you have a full script prepared for the adaptation?
Well, not in the traditional sense. There would’ve been re-enactment sequences, so I suppose those parts would’ve needed a script, but not with dialogue or anything like that. I had everything planned. I’d scouted locations, I had the structure in my head, which, as any filmmaker will tell you, is extremely foolish when you haven’t actually secured the rights.
Was there any backstory behind the rights being denied?
Not really, nothing dramatic. It was quite anticlimactic, actually. They seemed keen right up until they weren’t, and I never got a clear explanation. But that’s how these things go.
The finished film sits in this strange, liminal space between essay film, documentary, critique, even ghost story. And it’s partly a desktop documentary too.
You mean the clips?
Yeah, there are no talking heads, just this collage of found footage.
That part came much later
So how did the editing process unfold? Was there a central narrative you were shaping around?
Essentially, yeah. What’s strange is that I had this entire movie planned in my head, but never actually made it. So by telling the story of that unmade film and cutting that into the shape of a new one, I was kind of testing whether my original structure would’ve worked. And often I found, no, it wouldn’t.
Like, what I imagined as a big second-act reveal? It just didn’t land the way I thought it would. So it was like editing the ghost of a film, realising where I hadn’t stuck close enough to the genre formula to make those story beats work.
It was a bizarre experience. If you look at the editing timeline, it’s just endless blocks of me talking. As many of my Letterboxd critics like to point out, it’s basically a podcast. There’s very little variation in the film’s dynamic, it’s a lot of talking. So the challenge was creating a sense of progression, of movement. That, and keeping it feeling spontaneous.
Even in the editing?
Yeah, completely. The whole idea behind improvising the narration was to make it feel like I’m just chatting to you, right now, genuinely enthused, trying to convey what this unmade film could’ve been.
Because it wasn’t scripted, that energy came through in the voiceover. It was full of stumbles and filler sounds, ums and errs, it didn’t sound polished. But then, after cutting the same line for the ten-thousandth time, you start wondering if you’ve stripped all the spontaneity out of it. It gets blurry. Because in the end, you want it to feel like no effort went into it at all.
Really?
Well, not literally no effort. There are things in the film that are very precise. The camerawork, for instance, it’s all very controlled and beautifully executed. Our cinematographer did an incredible job. But in terms of the overall flow, especially my narration, I think it works best when it just feels like someone walked into a booth and started riffing.
Couldn’t it have just been a podcast, though? As some of your critics have suggested?
[Laughs.] Yeah, I mean, fair enough. But I don’t think so. To me, the narration doesn’t mean much without the way it interacts with the image. The image dares you to switch off, in a way. That’s what a lot of true crime imagery does.
Even though my film looks very different, it plays with the same idea: familiar enough to trigger a reaction, but almost designed to leave no lasting impression. It’s pure visual stimulus. For me, the fun was in playing with that.
Can you hold someone’s attention with a static shot for five minutes, just by zooming in or out, changing almost nothing? It becomes this intricate little puzzle, and I honestly can’t imagine peeling it apart now.
Watching the film, I kept thinking about how constructed it is. But because there’s so much true crime out there, it also felt, at times, like parody.
Totally. And I think that’s inevitable. With any genre, but especially true crime, you can’t really make something in that space without, on some level, commenting on it. You’re working with iconography that’s been used so much that using it at all becomes a form of commentary.
Even the “serious” entries in the genre are a little self-aware. They know they’re operating in a space built on thousands of other shows and films. So yeah, when that tips into parody, I mean, sure, I am poking fun at it. But I also see all of it, the serious and the silly, as part of the same landscape. That kind of meta-textuality is built into true crime now.
But then I keep thinking, so much true crime content is desensitising. These are real people, someone’s daughter, son, or mother, who were actually killed or raped.
Yeah. Exactly. And that’s also why I don’t really think of the film as parody, per se. Because for me, the tone reflects the kinds of conversations I’ve had with people who work in true crime. That’s not to say they don’t care or aren’t sincere.
But they’re also aware of the tropes they’re operating within. They’re often quite amused by them. And they can’t really escape them. All the terminology I use in the film, like “actors” for those stand-in figures you only ever see from behind, comes directly from those conversations. That language is real. So I think there’s always some degree of humour baked in. Maybe you need it to survive working in such a depressing field.
Yeah, it can be heavy.
It really is. And look, I made the most oblique, most distanced kind of true crime film imaginable, and even I found it depressing. After a year in that headspace, especially while watching hours and hours of true crime content to source clips, it really got to me. And that’s without doing the kind of work many true crime filmmakers do: combing through crime scene footage or interviewing recently bereaved families.
That’s incredibly heavy material. And, frankly, I don’t think it’s always handled with the care it deserves. People get thrown into the deep end.
When you talk about watching those shows and using their terminology, does that mean you also did some behind-the-scenes research with the companies producing true crime?
Not in any formal research sense. It’s more that, after ten years working in documentary, I know a lot of people who’ve made true crime. Everyone falls into it eventually, because that’s where the money is. It’s how things get made. Even projects that didn’t start as true crime often get nudged, or massaged, into something vaguely true crime-shaped.
Where do you see yourself more broadly within nonfiction filmmaking? Are you more drawn to experimental work, outside the traditional doc form?
Yeah, I feel really excited about nonfiction right now, especially in its more exploratory forms. I feel a strong connection with filmmakers making all kinds of work, most of it leaning toward the experimental. But even “experimental” is a moving target in documentary. What qualifies as experimental today might feel mainstream tomorrow.
You mentioned going to a screening years ago in New York, something that stuck with you?
Yeah, maybe eight years ago, there was a short film program in New York, work by John Wilson and Sophy Romvari.
John Wilson, as in HOW TO WITH JOHN WILSON?
Yeah, but this was long before the TV show. Obviously, once he got the HBO deal, it just exploded, suddenly it’s the most beloved cult hit in the world. It’s incredibly accessible now.
What were you seeing in his early work?
Back then, they were just these strange little experimental shorts he made on no budget. I remember thinking, “This is really interesting, avant-garde work.” Then, years later, the same approach becomes a hit comedy show. What’s fascinating is that the work hasn’t changed, it’s the context that has.
I still wouldn’t call HOW TO fully mainstream, though.
I mean, it’s about as mainstream as documentary gets. He’s a beloved figure now, a character, almost. He’s the HBO-Nathan-Fielder guy.
But it still feels a bit avant-garde, like the old HBO, when they’d back unconventional nonfiction.
HBO used to fund daring documentary work, and I think How To falls squarely in that tradition. But again, what’s interesting isn’t the mainstream/avant-garde binary, it’s that John just kept doing the same thing. He screened his early films at tiny fests for tiny audiences. The work was great, but he wasn’t making a living. Then suddenly, boom, he’s on HBO. I saw him in GQ, standing in a bin in New York. Now he’s a celebrity.
The only thing that changed was how the work was bracketed. That’s something specific to nonfiction, and maybe experimental work more broadly. It can be recontextualised so easily. Made more accessible. Reframed.
And that’s what I find valuable about using comedy. The audience for a film that looks like mine is usually pretty small. But the moment you add humor, give people something to hold onto, you can take them surprisingly far into material they might otherwise avoid.
Your film opens with an unbroken shot of a parking lot.
Exactly! That’s a very avant-garde move. But if there’s a voice talking to you, like a friend, it smooths it out. You forget you’re watching a static shot. You fall into the rhythm. That’s a tool I really rely on.
We were talking about John Wilson, Nathan Fielder, that very American style of documentary. Would you say you’re more influenced by that sensibility, or something more European?
Hmm. I think the filmmakers I feel most indebted to are from an older generation of British documentary, people like Peter Watkins, John Smith...
John Smith? Isn’t he a bit more... commercial?
I wouldn’t say that. That’s not the part of his work I’m especially into. But I do like his funnier films. And that might be the common thread: most nonfiction filmmakers I admire have some kind of comic sensibility. Even Peter Watkins, his films are serious, but the ones I like best have a dry humor to them.
Humor has kind of become the dominant mode for nonfiction, hasn’t it? Through stand-up, satirical news, like LAST WEEK TONIGHT with John Oliver...
Yeah, exactly. Stephen Colbert, too. And sure, that’s nonfiction in a way, it’s journalism via comedy. But I have a much more complicated reaction to that kind of work.
Really?
Yeah. I can’t fully explain it, but I find that stuff more unsettling. Because often, in those shows, humor’s job is to make you feel okay about something that really isn’t okay.
You think so?
Sometimes, yeah. Especially with Last Week Tonight. I used to like that show. And to be fair, it’s been going for so long now that it’s sort of become self-parodic. But I do sometimes feel that the humor ends up undermining the point.
Yes, he does these long, 20-minute segments that go deep into subjects, and that’s great. He’s bringing those ideas to a much wider audience than traditional journalism ever could. So I absolutely think it’s good that it exists.
But when I watch those segments, and I feel the rhythm of the jokes, like, there has to be one every 30 seconds, it gets exhausting. It wears on you. And I think sometimes it doesn’t give the subject matter the care or space it deserves.
Whereas with the filmmakers we were talking about earlier, John Wilson, Peter Watkins, the comedy feels like it’s there to deepen something. It’s not just there to sugar-coat. It’s adding layers, adding complexity.
Cover photo courtesy of Karlovy Vary Film Servis.