“Uncut Gems” actress and filmmaker Hailey Gates had her plans for a documentary about military training villages upended by government officials. So she turned the idea into an unconventional love story instead, and “Atropia” was born.
The film, which premiered on Saturday at the Sundance Film Festival, was originally conceived as a documentary about fake Iraqi villages built on U.S. military bases post-9/11.
“I initially wanted to make a documentary about these fake villages that were built on bases in the U.S. after 9/11 to train soldiers before they deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan,” Gates told senior writer Drew Taylor at TheWrap’s Sundance Studio presented by World of Hyatt. “The military was not so keen on the version of the doc that I wanted to make, so we decided to be satire.”
“Atropia” follows an aspiring actress at a military role-playing facility who falls for a soldier cast as an insurgent, their genuine emotions threatening to derail the performance. Shot at a historic movie ranch in Santa Clarita that previously hosted productions like “American Sniper,” the project was based on a short film called “Shako Mak0.”
Star Alia Shawkat, who joined the project early in the development process, saw her real-life pregnancy incorporated into the narrative. “As we were still getting the money, I got pregnant, and that became a part of the story,” Shawkat said. “And Haley’s like, we’re writing it in. So it was just real, like kind of rock and roll, and it all happened within a year of writing it.”
The film’s timing has gained unexpected relevance.
“I wrote this movie in the end of 2022,” Gates said. “I was like, is anybody gonna care about a movie about the Iraq War? Because I was so mad about it, and she was so mad about it, and it just felt important for us to do, but I just didn’t know if it would be relevant or welcomed. And I guess, in a way, it was naive to think that America wouldn’t make this movie relevant again in the time it took for us to edit it.”
Watch the full interview in the embed above.