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Hailey Gates Goes Full Silly With Atropia
“Every single day we went to set we were like, ‘Can you believe people are letting us do this?’”
That mix between political satire and off-kilter romance sits at the heart of Atropia, a film that Gates first set out to make as a documentary about the changeover in these fake towns from the Middle East to Russia, landing eventually in a fictional 2006 — three years into the Iraq War. The upside to fictionalizing what is an outrageous story unto itself is, as Gates tells it, “you can make a lot more jokes.” Atropia is, in turn, a joke-dense spoof, one of Sundance’s funniest films, skewering the military-industrial complex, method acting, and rom-coms all in one. “I wanted her clothes to feel like she was stealing from a community-theater wardrobe,” she said of Fayruz’s haphazard style and thought Abu Dice’s tendency to use his sunglasses as a headband was “really tender.” The most gifted fashion choices are saved for Chloë Sevigny sitting beside Tim Heidecker as military talking heads who never bother to stand up from their chairs.
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