British director Charlie Shackleton was in Vallejo, California, where at least two of the murders committed by the Zodiac killer took place, when he discovered that a documentary that he planned to make on the subject would not be going ahead. Shackleton had been planning to use The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge, written by California highway patrol officer Lyndon Lafferty, as his source material for a true-crime documentary about the infamous murderer. “I had foolishly gone way beyond what any sensible documentary filmmaker would do while still in development and had structured the film, mapping out so many of the sequences,” he told Deadline. “I couldn’t help kind of sculpting the thing in my mind. Then I happened to be in San Francisco for a screening of another film of mine during that time and so I figured, why not get the ferry over to Vallejo and spend a couple of days locations [scouting].” The estate of Lafferty, who died in 2018, had declined to option the book, which explores Lafferty’s claims as to who the killer is and how he encountered him in 1970, to Shackleton. “I had vague thoughts about making a Zodiac killer documentary, partly because I’d been fascinated by the case since I was a teenager, and partly because it seemed sort of odd to me that there wasn’t a definitive Zodiac killer documentary, but I think until I read that book, I’d never really had a keen sense of what I would do with it, and that story just seemed like such a uniquely idiosyncratic version of this story that I’d heard many times that for the first time, it seemed to kind of come to life for me, and I could picture it,” he said. But Shackleton, who directed Fairuza Balk-narrated teen movie doc Beyond Clueless and BBC horror doc Fear Itself as well as Paint Drying, a ten-hour shot of the title designed to protest the British Board of Film Classification’s rules, decided to turn this into an opportunity to make another kind of film. Zodiac Killer Project, which is distributed by Music Box Films after it acquired it following its Sundance premiere, explores Shackleton’s failure to make a more “traditional” true-crime documentary, and instead explores true crime’s inner workings as he deconstructs the process. “The benefit of working within any genre, including true-crime is that you fit to the mold in certain ways, so that you can subvert the mold in other ways. I genuinely find something very satisfying about taking a trope and making it work, because at their best, they’re incredibly useful shorthand, they buy you a lot of leverage to then kind of venture into slightly more ambitious territory with the audience. So, yeah, it would have been traditional, by my own admission, which was kind of part of the appeal for me. The point of making a true-crime film at all and making something about a specific suspect was to think about the case in a broader sense, and where it fits in society and popular culture. My hope was certainly that, where it counted, it would slightly push against the formula,” he added. Zodiac Killer Project also highlights some of the difficulties of working within the genre. “Even with the upper tier of true-crime films, there is something about the constraints of that form that seem to make these sorts of ethical lapses and narrative contrivances that I discuss in the film almost unavoidable,” he said. Making a documentary about the Zodiac killer also feels like the holy grail of non-fiction challenges thanks to multiple theories as well as an incredibly successful scripted film: David Fincher’s 2007 Jake Gyllenhaal movie Zodiac. “I do think it might be impossible to contain all of the theories within a single film, because not only are there so many of them, but each of them requires quite a different telling of the story,” he added. Shackleton had already finished Zodiac Killer Project when he found out that Netflix had ordered This Is The Zodiac Speaking, which centered on Arthur Leigh Allen, played by John Carroll Lynch, the only Zodiac suspect named by police. “For a second, I thought ‘Oh my God, there’s going to be a definitive documentary and it’s going to completely overshadow this because it’s got all of the heft of Netflix behind it. Then when I found out that it was also focused on the Arthur Leigh Allen theory, like the David Fincher film, I was a little disappointed, as an enthusiast, but I thought that is going to work against it because there’s this totemic Fincher drama film that makes that case better than anyone else could,” Shackleton said. Zodiac Killer Project is beautifully shot by cinematographer Xenia Patricia with long shots of empty car parks, restaurants and other locations, where nothing was happening at all, allowing Shackleton to explain what might have been. He challenged Patricia to “capture the absence of a film”. “One of the things that was striking to me about [Vallejo] was this was a place I had heard so much about and I’d read how haunted the place is by the indelible legacy of this gruesome crime from 60 years ago. I almost expected to get off the ferry, and dark clouds would descend, and I would feel the murderous legacy of the place with every step. And of course, it’s just an ordinary place full of thousands of ordinary people going about their lives. I wanted to capture something of the ironic, everyday quality to see how much we could then play with imposing the tension and the drama of true-crime onto that kind of unlikely blank canvas,” he added. Shackleton narrates the film including some funny moments in the recording booth where he also said that it was “bittersweet” that his other project hadn’t materialized. “That sentiment was obviously very true when I said it in the voiceover booth, and honestly, remained true right up until the completion of the film. It was only once it began playing and I got to actually sit in the room with an audience and hear their response to it, and feel the kind of lived reality of the very different kind of life that this film is going to get to have, that a true-crime film would not, that calculus shifted, and I started to feel this is a good outcome, and I can make my piece with a smaller audience that I get to actually feel connected to,” he said. Has Shackleton got the true-crime monkey off his back? “Once the film premiered, I had noticed that I’d stopped watching true-crime. Not even intentionally, I had just finally reached a point of exhaustion and was no longer reflexively selecting it when I loaded up Netflix or whatever else. However, nearly a year on, I will say it’s maybe creeping back a little bit, and I did find myself watching the Ed Gein Netflix series for pleasure,” he said. Lafferty’s book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up posits the theory that Andrew Todd Walker, an pseudonym, was the killer, not Arthur Leigh Allen, who went to school with Lafferty. But who does Shackleton believe was really the Zodiac killer? “If I had to put money on it, I would probably guess that the Zodiac killer was someone who’s never been identified by any of the theorists,” he concluded. Zodiac Killer Project opened on November 21 at the IFC Center in New York with expansions later this month and next. Elijah Wood is hosting a Q&A screening of the film at the Laemmle Glendale in LA on Tuesday November 25.
https://deadline.com/2025/11/charlie-shackleton-zodiac-killer-project-interview-1236626949/
Charlie Shackleton Wanted To Make A True-Crime Doc But Made ‘Zodiac Killer Project’ Instead
