Charlie Shackleton (CS) is one my favorite creative minds.
Shackleton is a British filmmaker, multimedia artist, and film critic, whose work I’d come across before, but never connected the dots, realizing all these projects I stumbled across and loved were by the same person.
At SXSW 2025, still unaware of Shackleton's name, I caught a late night screening of his latest film, Zodiac Killer Project. It previously debuted and won at Sundance. As a follower of the Zodiac story and fan of Fincher's 2007 film depicting the late 60s crime wave across the San Francisco Bay, I knew I'd be a fan of the doc — but I was not expecting what was screened. It was one of my favorite films I've seen: polarizing, and not for everyone... it was exactly for me and, I believe, you too. Seek it out.
Honest, brutally self-aware and peculiarly funny, Shackleton narrates a film that never was: his scrapped true crime flick about the Zodiac killer. Throughout, Shackleton — in a director’s cut commentary style — reflects upon everything the film could have been while intellectually probing genre tropes and true crime’s ubiquity. It’s a meta reflection on creative grief and a tear down on unoriginality.
I spoke with Shackleton about his work, true crime and his unique creative approach.
01. On Letting Go
MK: Your Zodiac Killer Project emerged from the ashes of a failed film adaptation. Sincere “behind-the-scenes” artistic reflection is so refreshing — yet so rare. It’s a post-mortem of sorts. For me, the film speaks directly to our moment where so many are self-proclaimed creators yet we’re all so uncertain when to keep obsessing, ship or just abandon work.
In this case, you did all of the above.
How has this project changed the way you think about creative disappointment or learning when to let go of inspirations?
CS: It's not the first time I've salvaged something from a failed creative endeavor, because I'm stubborn and I hate letting work go to waste, but this is the first time I've made that failure the subject of the work.
For a long time, that felt like a consolation prize, but with hindsight, the transformation of the film into something about frustration and ambivalence, was the thing that gave it creative energy.
That realization probably won't stop me from getting overly attached to doomed ideas, but it might help me imagine what else they could become.
02. On Inserting Oneself
MK: You place yourself directly in the narrative of Zodiac Killer Project even though it was never meant to be about you.
How vulnerable was this exercise as both a creator and a subject? How’d you feel unexpectedly centering yourself in your own work?
CS: I've narrated other films of mine in the past, but the narration has always been scripted, albeit in a kind of conversational style.
That always felt like a bit of a compromise to me, because what I was trying to capture was the natural rhythms of casual storytelling, and I'm not a good enough actor to pull that off when I'm reading from a script.
So with Zodiac Killer Project, I set myself the challenge of improvising the entire thing, and for all the ums and ers, I do think the result has a lot more life to it.
MK: While watching, I kept asking myself whether the entire narration was off the cuff or scripted because of how entertaining it all was.
CS: What I wasn't prepared for was how strangely vulnerable it would then feel to let the film out into the world.
Even though it's not a particularly personal story — I only talk about my work, not my private life — the film has my personality, so the way people react to it ends up feeling like an assessment of my character, for better and worse.
One review called me “a weedy Brit” and now my friend Emily won't stop saying it.
MK: I respect the vulnerability.
03. On True Crime
MK: You’ve mentioned being careful “not to call out viewers for being attracted to true crime.” I’m curious to hear more of your thoughts on the "guilty pleasure” and “shame” around this genre.
Do you think our consumption habits reveal uncomfortable truths about human nature, or are our entertainment preferences shaped more by how content is sold to us?
CS: I'm not saying there isn't an interesting conversation to be had about people's attraction to true crime, and its effect on our culture... It's more that I resent that being the entire conversation around true crime.
It gives the industry an excuse to say, well, we're just keeping up with demand. Whereas I think it's just as likely that people are watching a lot of true crime because of the endless supply.
These things are relatively cheap to produce, inherently sensational, and so formula-driven that you can basically churn them out indefinitely.
So when people sit down and load up a streamer, there's a good chance that's what they find.
MK: True crime remains literally a content factory, which doesn't seem to be slowing down, both exploiting and illuminating tragedy.
CS: Throughout the production of Zodiac Killer Project, I kept saying, we've missed the moment: true crime is at saturation point and it's going to tail off before we finish the movie.
But it just kept growing and growing.
What's interesting, and quite canny, is that the genre has successfully consumed its own critique. Every true crime show now has a section about the ethics of true crime, or a reflexive gesture back to the audience and their motivations.
I think that's helped the industry divert attention away from its own responsibilities, and extend the shelf life of true crime considerably.
04. On Media Feedback Loops
MK: For me, Zodiac Killer Project perfectly mirrors our current media landscape. A perfect reflection or recursion feedback loop of our media.
What’s your take on how we increasingly consume content about content, reaction videos, commentary tracks, and behind-the-scenes material?
CS: I used to work as a film critic, so my position on this is probably influenced by that perspective, but I think all art is inherently metatextual.
Every film is in dialogue with countless others, even if that relationship is not as explicit as it is in my movie, or on TikTok, or whatever.
At Sundance, there were two other movies — Predators and The Perfect Neighbor — that were also implicitly about true crime, and all three were often discussed in relation to one another.
I think that kind of comparative thinking can only be generative.
06. On Paint Drying
MK: I have to bring up Paint Drying. To protest again film censorship in the U.K. and the British Board of Film Classification's (BBFC) processes, you crowd-funded a film called Paint Drying.
As you put it on the Kickstarter to fund the film:
Each certificate costs around £1,000 for a feature film of average length. For many independent filmmakers, such a large upfront can prove prohibitively expensive.
Luckily, there’s a flipside to all of this: while filmmakers are required to pay the BBFC to certify their work, the BBFC are also required to sit through whatever we pay them to watch.
That’s why I’m Kickstarting a BBFC certificate for my new film Paint Drying — a single, unbroken shot of white paint drying on a brick wall. All the money raised by this campaign (minus Kickstarter's fees) will be put towards the cost of the certificate, so the final length of the film will be determined by how much money is raised here.
With +650 backers, you raised over $7,000.
Paint Drying’s run time came to 10 hours and 7 minutes.
But what I love most about this story is that now on the Letterboxd page for Paint Drying, people are using the page as an open journal for any and everything you can imagine.
Paint Drying offered a blank canvas, revealing a desire for expression in the most unexpected places.
What do you make of this?
CS: I'd actually not read many of them until recently, when I was asked to speak about the phenomenon at a film festival.
I spent an afternoon reading through a bunch and it was completely overwhelming.
The wild extremes of emotion that manifest there are dizzying, but actually the ones that hit me hardest were the quieter entries about people feeling off course, or uncertain, or stuck in a rut.
I joke about being annoyed that a dumb prank from ten years ago is the thing I'm best known for, but the truth is it's an incredible honor to have inadvertently brought that space into existence.