A serial killer meta-documentary was on the loose this week during the 59th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) in the Czech Republic. British filmmaker Charlie Shackleton brought his true crime meta-documentary Zodiac Killer Project, which world premiered at Sundance, to the picturesque spa two and entertained the audience during Q&As following screenings.
”Few hold such fascination for mystery aficionados as the elusive murderer known as the Zodiac. When British director Charlie Shackleton failed to secure the rights to a book written by a former traffic policeman convinced of the killer’s identity, he decided to make a film about a film that never got made,” explains the synopsis on the KVIFF website. The fest also highlights a “generous voice-over” and notes that the film “deviates from the true crime genre for the very way in which it rejects self-centered respectability.”
During a Q&A following one of the Karlovy Vary screenings, Shackleton was asked about that “generous voice-over” and how he scripted it. “It’s very flattering that you think any of that could have been scripted,” he said with a smile. “It was very much improvised.”
He also shared: “We recorded 10 hours over the course of that day in that booth that you see me in in the film and then cut it down to something slightly more manageable.”
Given the popularity of true crime docs on big streaming services, such as Netflix and Amazon, Shackleton was asked if any of the sector giants had tried to buy Zodiac Killer Project or if they felt the film was poking too much fun at the genre and its conventions. The filmmaker recalled that ahead of its world premiere at Sundance this year, the film’s sales team got flooded with ticket requests. “They had a certain number, like 50 tickets, that they could give to various distributors,” he explained, adding that he was told that “we’ve never had such demand” as “Netflix wants 30 tickets, Amazon wants 30 tickets, Hulu wants 30 tickets. We don’t have enough tickets to give them.”
But the sales executive also shared a word of caution with Shackleton. “He said: ‘Don’t get me wrong, none of them are ever going to buy the movie. They’re not interested in the movie. They just want to know what’s in it’,” the director recalled.
And that was indeed how things played out. “They all turned up at our world premiere,” the creative told the Karlovy Vary crowd. “We had 100 people from all of the streaming platforms, and you could hear the noises from the different areas of the room when clips [from their respective true doc projects] came up because they were all trying to sound like they weren’t bothered. They were all trying to sound like they saw the funny side. So the Netflix people would be laughing the most at the stuff that was Netflix content, because they wanted to seem like they had a sense of humor about it.”
And indeed, no acquisition offers materialized. “The next day, obviously they all passed on the movie, which we knew was very much going to be the case,” Shackleton said in conclusion. “But they had seen it, and they smiled politely.”