
“We Wanted To Play with This Line Between Artifice and Reality”: DP Eric Yue on Atropia

Atropia takes place at a military role-playing facility when the real emotions between an actress and a soldier role-playing an insurgent begin to complicate the establishment’s purpose. The film, premiering as part of the U.S. Dramatic Competition, is the feature debut of director Hailey Gates after playing in front of the camera in Twin Peaks: The Return, Challengers and Uncut Gems, among others.
Eric Yue (I Saw the TV Glow, A Thousand and One) served as Atropia‘s cinematographer. Below, Yue discusses navigating the film’s separate levels of reality through lighting and camera technique.
See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here.
Filmmaker: What were your artistic goals on this film, and how did you realize them? How did you want your cinematography to enhance the film’s storytelling and treatment of its characters?
Yue: Atropia is set in a mock village on a military base in California where soldiers train before they deploy. It is set in 2006, so the fictional villages are dressed to look and feel like Iraq and are inhabited by role-players that dress the part of Iraqi civilians. During battles, there are pyrotechnics involved, fake blood, fake limbs, stunts, scents pumped out—the stuff of movies and haunted houses. Hailey and I wanted to find humor in the absurdity and macabre of this environment while also making something truthful and beautiful.
The movie ranch that we filmed in is often used for war films that are set in Afghanistan or Iraq, but we wanted to highlight the other side of the set where no one really shoots. We wanted to play with this line between artifice and reality, showing the wall flats propped up by wood and exposing the set construction. In the film, the characters are often going in and out of playing a character, and the camerawork does as well. We would call it “game mode,” where it feels like a verité style Iraq-war film with snap zooms and a jittery shutter. There is a meta aspect of shooting parts of this film: we were simulating a war film set in a simulated Iraq. We tried to humorously unpack the machine that constructs the spectacle of battle and the image of the enemy.
Filmmaker: Were there any specific influences on your cinematography, whether they be other films, or visual art, of photography, or something else?
Yue: Our main source materials were the archival images and videos from Fort Irwin and others. Hailey was also drawn to the vibrant colors and painterly compositions of The Color of Pomegranates by Sergei Parajanov, and a lot of our initial color palette was influenced by this film. Other references were everything from the documentary Gunner Palace, Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, to name a few. The cinematography was going to play a role, quoting and citing these various genres and images.
Filmmaker: What were the biggest challenges posed by production to those goals?
Yue: It is miraculous this film exists. Our lead, Alia Shawkat, was 8 months pregnant; there was a SAG strike looming; we were in the middle of June Gloom in LA (cloudy month); and we needed a hot sun—and like with most productions, there’s never enough time or money. We were lucky that the stars aligned for us, and we somehow ended up shooting this film in just 19 days with 4 weeks of pre-production.
Filmmaker: What camera did you shoot on? Why did you choose the camera that you did? What lenses did you use?
Yue: We shot this film mainly on Alexa35 with Cooke S4 lenses. The way the camera handles highlights was important because we were shooting with desert light and wanted the environment to feel hot, exposing the sensor the way I would expose film. Some moments were shot on FLIR Thermal Camera, Nightvision, and Canon XL-2 for specific effects.
Filmmaker: Describe your approach to lighting.
Yue: We mainly shot with natural daylight, so scheduling the time of day was part of the approach. Certain shots we wanted to feel like a 1960s film, so we used a 20K Tungsten at high noon to fill in the shadows, creating a kind of flatness. Certain night exteriors were lit with practical sodium vapor and mercury halide units to create a green and orange wash—we really got to play with color contrast when it got dark. Overall, the lighting philosophy was about balancing the artificial and the real—deciding when we should be bright and funny and when we can be more dramatic with our shadows.
Filmmaker: Finally, describe the finishing of the film. How much of your look was “baked in” versus realized in the DI?
Yue: Our colorist, Mikey Rossiter, had made us a LUT to shoot with, which gave us a point of reference for post. We added grain to get some texture and made our highlights hotter than I normally would to get the glowing desert heat. The color grade also played a role—breaking the fourth wall, where the look changes mid-scene going from a more bleach-bypass look to our main look, which Hailey felt worked for the story.
Film Title: Atropia
Camera: Alexa35
Lenses: Cooke S4, Panavision 24-275mm T2.8 Primo Zoom
Lighting: Cinelease
Processing: DIT Isaac Guy
Color Grading: Mikey Rossiter @ Raremedium