‘Atropia’ BTS
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There’s a scene in Hailey Gates’ feature directorial debut, Atropia, where Fayruz (Alia Shawkat), an actress working in a mock military village, admits she’s jealous of the dishes she washes. It’s a moment that neatly sets the tone for the unlikely love story that unfolds between her and US soldier Abu Dice (Callum Turner). This is no conventional romcom – there are intimate scenes in a porta-potty, and the dishes aren’t the only things that get washed. Nor does it resemble the longing typically found in the war romance genre. Though set in 2006, against the backdrop of the Iraq War, everything around the couple is simulated.
Atropia is a film about a very real, fake place. It’s the name of the fictional nation created by the US military for training exercises, where soldiers role-play the people and scenarios they might encounter in war. In the film – and, at one point, in real life – this “24/7 warfare simulation” is designed to resemble Iraq. Yet while researching the site for a potential documentary, Gates came across job listings seeking Russian-speaking role players instead. That contradiction prompted a pivot. Abandoning the documentary format, she reworked the project into a sharp satire of the US military-industrial – and entertainment – complex, writing the role of Fayruz specifically for Shawkat. (Her father, Tony, who is from Baghdad, also appears briefly in the film.)
When watching Atropia, you get the distinct feeling of it being a type of purgatory, filled with people with lots of different aspirations. You follow Fayruz trying to “make it” in Hollywood, while other actors are working towards a green card, and US soldiers attempt to prepare themselves for something they can never really prepare for. It feels deeply evident that most of these aspirations won’t come to fruition. It’s a distinctly American dystopian backdrop. Even in working with some of the younger actors in the film, Gates said they had to sit them down and explain what living in the early 2000s, after 9/11, felt like.
With a cast list that includes Chloë Sevigny and Channing Tatum, Atropia is filled with absurd and hilarious moments. But it’s also embedded with this underlying sense of the ‘forever wars’: there will be another Fayruz next year, who might be called Masha, until it’s someone (and somewhere) else that America goes to war with. The doors never close, the cycle never stops, and the military muscle is always flexed.
Atropia won the US Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, but at the New York premiere on December 8, Gates said that everyone (except Vertical) was “scared” to distribute the film. Ahead, we spoke with Gates about writing a comedic, romantic, anti-war film.
What made you want to create that film about the ‘forever wars’?
Hailey Gates: I was looking at Vietnam anti-war movies a lot, and I think all of the great directors from that era made an anti-war film. Growing up during the Iraq War, I felt there was a little bit of cultural amnesia about that time because the films that came out of that era were often made in cahoots with the government. I wanted to make an offering to that genre that gestured at a pattern in the American military industrial complex. So that was the impetus.
Do you see it as an anti-war film?
Hailey Gates: I don’t really like to be taught a lesson in a film. I like to come to a conclusion on my own. I wanted to make sure the movie was presenting the idea of Atropia, perhaps some people walk away thinking Atropia is a good idea. It’s not up to me to say. But I definitely consider it an anti-war film, disguised as a romantic comedy.
Do you remember when you first heard about these simulated military towns?
Hailey Gates: I grew up in California, so they were on the sides of the highways. You could see little bits of them driving to San Diego or inland. I really wanted to make a show where I auditioned for parts in different, strange environments. I initially thought I would try to get a job working on the base as a reporter, because they sometimes hire real journalists to play the fake journalists on the base. I thought that would be my entry point, but nobody wanted to make the show, but I became so obsessed with it. I just kept trying to make something about.
When was that? How many years have you been deep in this?
Hailey Gates: That was 2017.
Wasn’t it meant to be a documentary?
Hailey Gates: Yes! I spent a lot of time talking to people who worked on the base in various different jobs, role players and military personnel, and then I visited as many of the bases as would let me at the time. They are very generous about showing you around, but are very controlled about what you see. So the kind of access that I was looking for and the things I wanted to capture were not amenable to us shooting. So I felt like the scenario was so horrific and hilarious in its sort of ghoolishness that I think it lent itself well to comedy.
I consider it an anti-war film, disguised as a romantic comedy
Were all of the bases you visited in California?
Hailey Gates: I’ve only been to ones in California. The ones in California are, because of their proximity to Hollywood, more robust in their stagings, because they have access to Hollywood set builders. The thing that’s strange about Southern California is that there’s a big community of Calvian Christians who were able to emigrate to America during the Gulf War. There’s a huge Iraqi community in El Cajon in San Diego that they call Little Baghdad. There’s this confluence of all of these things: the military, the Iraqi community and Hollywood that all seem to come together in a perfect storm down there.
How did your background in States of Undress and previous acting roles prepare you for directing your first feature film?
Hailey Gates: The movie, in a way, is about actors, which is something I’m intimately aware of. I have a real research brain, so for me, it was really thrilling to use that in a different way and call all of these real-world things to infuse into a narrative and find comedy, romance and tragedy within the bounds of the research. It was something maybe I did when I was writing plays, but not on this scale.
What were some of the details you learned about these bases in your research?
Hailey Gates: The animatronics used on the base at Pendleton were built by the kind of preeminent animatronic maker, Garner Holt, who makes animatronics for Disneyland. They did really make families dress up for Thanksgiving when they were visiting people working on the bass so as not to disturb the environment. They had changed all of these villages over from being Iraqian Afghan to Russian-speaking after the fact, and were making up disinformation campaigns that would spread across the base with fake social media networks. That sort of thing.
I know you initially wrote the role and the film for Alia. Can you tell me more about that?
Hailey Gates: We had been friends, and I was thinking about this idea when I got the opportunity to make a short for the Miu Miu Women’s Tales series. I didn’t know that they would let me do it, but they were like, ‘The rules are you get to make whatever you want’. Alia is such a talented actress, and she seldom gets to play an Iraqi. We had long chats about it and made the short, then when it came to making the feature, I said, ‘I’m writing this part for you, what is something you’ve never done that you would like to do?’ She said a romance, which I wasn’t expecting. It was an important challenge for me, and I think I work well when I have boundaries to push against.
What was the process of taking research and making it a love story?
Hailey Gates: It was a tall order, although somebody I spoke to ended up marrying a role player at an Afghan simulation in New Mexico. There was precedent for it. It was about creating romance in a very unromantic environment. I thought a lot about comforts and discomforts, because they can’t shower and don’t have a lot of time alone. I was thinking about the porta-potty as a strange, sacred place where soldiers experience poetry and pleasuring themselves. I asked myself, what would be romantic in those scenarios?
It was shot in 19 days. How was it to build a fake location inspired by another fake location? It’s kind of set building inception.
Hailey Gates: Totally. We were working on this movie ranch and asking to see all the backsides of things, because they’d be shown. It was so funny, I said to everyone when we started making the movie: ‘Everything that has made you good at your job up to this point is completely irrelevant because everything kind of had to look a little bad’. Even when we were developing the baby power suicide vest, which is a real thing that I read about them using, they kept showing me tests, and I’d say, ‘It needs to look worse’.
That’s funny. It’s almost like you get the best of people, and then tell them to make it look bad.
Hailey Gates: When I interviewed them all, I asked about movie disasters of things that went wrong and their careers or things that they did really badly, trying to figure out if we could incorporate them in.
Conversations with distributors were sort of long and tortured. Nobody really had the balls to take the movie
Of course, Alia got pregnant sometime in pre-production. How did you decide to go ahead with shooting and change the story to incorporate this pregnancy?
Hailey Gates: She called me, and I remember I said, ‘Oh my god, congratulations’. Then, I hung up the phone and was like, wait a minute. We thought we were going to be able to hide it, but we didn’t get the money in time to do that. The part was hers. It was always hers. It was thrilling that nobody ever gets to film a pregnant woman in these scenarios, one with libido, wants and desires outside of her body. Also, the encroaching fears that come with that biological feeling.
It also added an element of urgency for her character. And Atropia is ultimately a temporary space for a lot of different aspirations, so how did you want to build that out?
Hailey Gates: Atropia is a space of practice before these impending things, and each character has that on the horizon. It’s kind of like working on a movie. You have these people that you’re so close to, that you’re so in love with, and you’re all working towards this really difficult thing. At the end, you want to be back in that romantic space of making things together that you can’t quite get back to after the set dissolves.
At the screening, you mentioned that everyone was ‘scared’ of distributing this movie. What did you mean by that?
Hailey Gates: We left Sundance having won the festival, and the conversations with distributors were sort of long and tortured. Nobody really had the balls to take the movie on until we met Vertical. It’s such a gift to be able to share this film with people, although I know the movie is not for everyone. I don’t find the politics of it extremely controversial, but I think people have other ideas.
