Creating the real fake world of “Atropia”

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts…

The first lines in the famous monologue in Shakespeare’s As You Like It are a great way to think about Atropia: a “real fake place” the U.S. military created using Hollywood magic and a Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning satire.

American soldiers awaiting deployment are sent to live on movie sets staged as hyper-realistic villages for three weeks of live play training 24/7. (Well, almost 24/7: game play stops if anyone crosses paths with an endangered desert tortoise.)

There’s baby-powder-packed IEDs—no, seriously—exploding alongside animatronic villagers and actors playing the roles of innocent Atropians and enemy insurgents. As characters in Atropia remind each other, they’re “giv[ing] soldiers their worst day here so it doesn’t happen over there. This is how we save lives.”

Atropia is a little-known bit of Americana that actress and director Hailey Gates grew up with in L.A. Gates interviewed role players and military personnel for years in the hopes of making a documentary. She even toured some of the mock villages herself before the Department of Defense put a kibosh on it.

Undeterred, Gates used her research to make a short brand film for Miu Miu called Shako Mako in 2018. The short was produced by Lana Kim and Jett Steiger of Ways & Means, an L.A.-based creative studio with a long history of collaborating with creatives and brands on award-winning ad campaigns. (Disclosure: Dropbox is one of Ways & Means’ clients.)

Years later, when friend and director Luca Guadagnino encouraged Gates to write a script in four weeks, Shako Mako became Atropia. Now a satire focused on the off-kilter romance between role-player-aspiring actress Fayruz (Alia Shawkat) and Iraqi war vet turned Atropian insurgent "Abu Dice" (Callum Turner), Gates asked Kim and Steiger to read the new feature-length script.

“Right after we finished reading it, we’re like, ‘We have to do this,’” Kim says.

And they would have to do it quickly, what with a looming SAG strike and an expecting actress adding pressure to their deadline.

Thankfully, the team had a system in place that could rely on to get production up and running quickly and seamlessly.

“Dropbox truly was a game changer,” Kim says. “We were shooting out on a ranch with very little service—[having] offline files on Dropbox plus being able to be in sync once I had service [was a dream],” Kim says.

It also came in handy in post-production, says Steiger.

“After COVID, our teams are so distributed. [Sometimes] you come together, sit in the screening room, watch things, and make notes, but largely everyone is in different places. Tools like Dropbox allowed that to be way easier.”

Fresh off Atropia’s premiere, and in between bites of frozen pizza, the pair spoke to Dropbox about what it took to recreate one of the American military’s formerly best-kept secrets.

Were either of you familiar with the world of Atropia before the project?
Lana Kim: The first time we learned about Atropia being a real place was when we were working on the short film with Hailey. It was like such a shock to realize that these places really do exist and that the world that Hailey has built in Atropia isn't that far off.

Jett Steiger: Yeah. I mean, Hailey really did her research. It’s spot on. When the announcement for the film came out, there was a Reddit thread about soldiers who have done this. They started posting and calling out things like, "Oh, I hope they talk about the desert tortoise!" and other things that are really in the movie. They were making the same jokes that are in the movie!

How did you find your version of Atropia?
Kim: We have these things called “movie ranches” out in California. There's one that has a standing set called “Third World Village,” which is not, you know, the greatest name for a set. But you'll be watching a movie or a TV show that takes place in the Middle East, and you're like, “Oh, they shot that there.”

Steiger: It turns up all the time. Like, we shot it in a way where you're seeing the edges of the set and the flats and stuff. But it's in American Sniper. It's in Navy SEALs TV shows. It's all over the place.

What was it like turning the short into a feature?
Kim: One of the challenges was trying to close financing but have enough time to prep the project in time to actually wrap the project before the SAG strike went into effect. And we had a pregnant actress who only got more pregnant as time went by. So with all of that, production has to come together quickly. It’s extremely collaborative and requires a lot of people to have access to the same things and have updated info. Having an organized production is the only way to do it and actually have a smooth shoot. We were literally on Las Vegas Boulevard on our last day of the shoot and wrapped at 11:52 p.m.—just eight minutes before the strike.

What did you find yourself doing the most in the process of making the film?
Steiger: Delivering movies to a distributor is definitely the least sexy part of the whole filmmaking process. So what we do is we create this perfectly structured folder tree in Dropbox that is shared with all of the different departments who need to contribute materials to it and it becomes our checklist for making sure we have everything that we need. It makes it really easy for the lawyers to drag in all of the fully executed agreements, and for the AD team and the line producer to drag in all of the completed call sheets and production reports and music contracts.

Kim: That’s at the tail end. On the front end, there’s a folder tree that had everything we needed to close financing. We have producers everywhere—there's Jett and I in LA, Naima Abed in London, and Emilie Georges in Paris—and from all three cities, we could easily see what was missing and what was still outstanding.

Ok, last question. What’s your favorite fact about Atropia that you love to tell people now?
Steiger: My favorite is that they have a deal with a well-known candle company to make all of the scents that get pumped into the simulation. They make all kinds of gross scents like gunpowder and burning flesh. I think it’s pretty funny this company makes that stuff alongside their potpourri and scented candles.

Kim: Mine would probably be the animatronics. The animatronics in the film are the real animatronics that were used at one of these training facilities. But I think honestly people discovering that these training facilities even exist is mind blowing.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.