Zodiac Killer Project: The great new true-crime doc that takes on … true crime.
SlateAll Charlie Shackleton had to do was give the Sundance Film Festival a 90-second video introducing himself and his documentary Zodiac Killer Project, which premiered at the festival on Monday. The funniest moments in Zodiac Killer Project are when you start describing what the opening credits or some other sequence of the movie you didn’t make would have looked like, and as illustration you start loading in clips of all these other true-crime docs side by side: Here’s the shot of someone carrying a box of files; now the shot of birds on a telephone wire suddenly taking flight. And in fact, it was only getting to the end of making Zodiac Killer Project that someone pointed out that there’s a couple of times in the film where I am talking about a drama series as though it’s just a true-crime documentary series, without stopping to say, “Oh, obviously this is a bit different because it’s a drama,” because it plays exactly the same. “Someone from Netflix was at a pitching forum and had to make a public denial of ‘We don’t just make true crime.’ It felt to me like one of those ‘My “We Don’t Just Make True Crime” T-shirt has a lot of people asking questions already answered by my T-shirt.’ ” You mentioned Netflix earlier, and although you draw on true-crime movies from HBO and FX in the film, Netflix is the only company you explicitly mention in the narration. I remember, a year or two ago, someone from Netflix was at a pitching forum and had to make a public denial of, I think they said, “We don’t just make true crime.” It felt to me like one of those “My ‘We Don’t Just Make True Crime’ T-shirt has a lot of people asking questions already answered by my T-shirt.” If that dents our already unbelievably slim chances of being acquired by a major streaming platform, then I think I’ll have to make my peace with that.
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