Q&A WITH CHARLIE SHACKLETON

Q. There’s a critical edge to Zodiac Killer Project’s engagement with true crime. Can you speak to your relationship to the genre and how it evolved over the course of making this film?

A. The way I think about true crime has always been, more or less, passive. As a viewer, and certainly as a filmmaker working in documentary for the last 10 years, true crime has become increasingly unavoidable. My relationship to it has been one of simultaneous muddled enjoyment and criticism.

The tone of Zodiac Killer Project felt like a natural outgrowth of that weird tonal mess. I never even thought of it as a piece of genre criticism until it was done. It was just that those criticisms were impossible to avoid in discussing how the genre works and how you might tell a story within it.

Q. Your previous short films engage with narratives that involve conspiracies and coincidences, as does your latest work. What draws you to these sorts of stories as a filmmaker?

A. If I try to draw a line through my career, one of the things that’s been most present has been an interest in how people tell stories, especially ones they’ve retold many times. It’s always been really interesting for me to dig into how a story gets codified through repetition. With stories that people have told before, you get a sense of how they’re responding to an audience and how they’re honing their own experiences into a pre-ordained shape that they imagine that the listener wants to hear.

Conspiracy theories are that logic taken to an extreme. You’re crafting a story as well as you possibly can to bring people into an alternate universe with you. True crime is a similar convention, because you’re marshalling information from the real world into a really specific shape to try and make a more persuasive story than someone else.

The other thing that all of these things have in common is they’re like puzzles. That, to me, is what makes them satisfying to engage with. It’s the same part of my brain that’s tickled by doing a crossword or solving a Rubik’s Cube. You feel a disparate mass of information is slowly coming together and will eventually make perfect sense.

Q. Your choice to shoot Zodiac Killer Project on 16mm and structure it as a series of static long shots recalls the work of landscape filmmakers such as James Benning and Masao Adachi, who were themselves investigating crimes. What were some of your influences when it came to making this film?

A. I love all of those landscape filmmakers: Benning, Masao Adachi, Jenni Olsen. But it’s funny — in a sense, I think the thrust of this film is slightly antithetical to the landscape theory of Masao.

One thing that is so striking to me about the contemporary true crime genre is how hard it has to work to superimpose its prescriptive set of meanings onto the environments in which it sets its stories. What struck me when I went to Vallejo, where we shot the film, was how little impact our story seemed to have left. For all of the stories I had read about the long shadow of the Zodiac Killer case and how fifty years of unresolved trauma were supposedly hanging like a dark cloud over the community — you go there and it’s just a normal place full of normal people living complicated lives.

I wanted to capture the absence of resonance, and then play with how much I could force a resonance into those spaces. Landscape cinematography — particularly the kind of humdrum, almost ironic landscape cinematography that my cinematographer, Xenia Patricia, and I landed on — felt like a good way to do that.

Q. What’s the last film you saw and loved?

A. A Want in Her. It’s an Irish documentary, and a portrait of the filmmaker Myrid Carten’s relationship with her mother.

It’s her first feature and it takes all these wild swings that, if I read them on paper, I would’ve been deeply skeptical about. But in practice, they cohere into this incredible, alchemic force. I found it a completely emotionally overwhelming watch, but also formally dazzling.

Q. What’s the first movie that ever scared you?

A. Matilda. It was the second film I ever saw at the cinema. The first was Toy Story. I was so completely enchanted with it that I fell in love with cinema.

Then, the next film I saw was Matilda. I vividly remember the scene where Mrs. Trunchbull is coming down the staircase into the basement swinging a ball-and-chain around. I was so terrified that not only did I have to leave the cinema, but I swore I would never go back to the cinema. I actually didn’t for several years. I almost abandoned the art form entirely because of the sheer terror of 1996’s Matilda.

Q. What are you obsessed with right now?

A. Fred Allen, the comedian. I listened to the critic Will Sloan talking about him on a podcast and started listening to all these old Fred Allen broadcasts. They’re amazing!

Q. What’s a project you’d like to make someday, however impossible it might seem now?

A. I was so obsessed with this as a teenager, and for anyone obsessed with him, this is like the holy grail: the tapes that supposedly exist of Harmony Korine’s abandoned project Fight Harm. I’d like to do a bit of archival recovery as a way to tap into this very specific cultural moment, which has always intrigued me.

Q. What image would you like to end this interview with?

A. The first image that came into my head was one we shot for the Zodiac Killer Project, but couldn’t find a place for. It’s of a beautiful, inexplicable pink building in an empty lot in Vallejo, California. There was no narrative rhyme or reason for shooting it, let alone including it in the final cut. But we did capture it, and now this seems like a beautiful place for it to finally see the light of day.