Alia Shawkat, the finest comedienne of our time. I call her “the surgeon.” She is so precise, she can make a joke with her eyelid.

We had a snake wrangler on Atropia named Tuesday. There were snakes everywhere. We have no snakes in the film — her job was to make sure the sets were clear of snakes. On the first day of shooting we saw a hawk flying with a snake in its mouth, someone said it was a good omen… That it meant victory of the divine over evil.

Nothing short of an honor to have Eric K. Yue as our eyes. The first day of the shoot I got a speeding ticket on the way to work. And every day after that, Eric and I drove together to and from set. It was an Important time to talk shit and map out our day and to make sure I drove slower. EKY is precious cargo.

We shot the majority of the film on a movie ranch. There was something romantic about pulling up to the ranch to everyday, like we were making a pre-code film or something.

The fake town we shot in, they called “third world exterior” on the website. It was built around the same time as the fake villages on the military bases and served as a set for movies like American Sniper. When we scouted, they were confused by us, because we wanted to look at all the backsides of things, all the unfinished parts, where the seams come undone. No one ever shoots it for fake.

We shot the film in 19 days. Everyone thought it was impossible. There was a moment I was trying to mend a scheduling hiccup and Callum put his arm on me and said, “Hey, you know Agnès Varda made her first film at 33 too.” And I thought god that was such a nice thing to say. Then I went home and googled it and he had lied straight to my face, she was 27. He said, “I just knew that’s what you wanted to hear.” It made me laugh so hard, it’s a gift to work with people that know how to take the piss out of you in just the right way.

I wrote the part of the Mayor for Alia’s father Tony Shawkat. She was nervous to act with him. But he runs a night club in palm desert so I knew being the mayor of a fake town would be child's play for him. They are so beautiful in the film together. On set he told me that if you draw a line from Los Angeles east to west around the Earth, you will hit Baghdad. They lie at almost the exact same latitude.

I absolutely adore these gents. Most of them were born after 9/11 so we had a little hang before we shot to talk about the “war on terror” and what 2006 felt like. There was an eerie naiveté to that era that I wanted them to capture. A time when people didn’t know how to be on camera or that the internet was forever. The iPhone was coming and they had no idea.

The great Ben Khan, in the foreground, who ran our tight ship. He never says to me “time is money.” He says “time is love.” The guy in the truck is nice too.

I still cannot believe that they are in this movie. Or that they can both do THIS.

Alia’s partner, Phil Burgers, is one of my favorite clowns on the planet. He appears in the film in a pivotal scene. On the days he wasn’t working he liked to come visit her on set. But he would first go to the costume department and dress up in a new disguise each day and wait around until Alia noticed it was him, sometimes it was hours before she recognized him.

The great Sal Lopez at the mouth of the fake cave, he is so elegant. Sal was in Full Metal Jacket when he was 33. He played character called “T.H.E Rock” and scrawled on his helmet it said "I’m hard."

The brilliant Priscilla Garita as Gloria.

On Atropia we all had to exercise new and strange muscles. So much of filmmaking is trying to protect the audience from the artifice. But in this case everyone had to let go of that feeling, the props had look exactly like what they are “props.”

There was a real bird who build a nest in a fake electrical box which was part of the set in the fake town. It became a daily ritual for us to check on her and the eggs. Finally, in the last week of shooting they hatched! If you listen close there are birds chirping all over the film.

The joy of working with the genius photographer Sinna Nasseri is that he has a nose for the unbelievable, an eye for the absurd. He understood the assignment completely and we are thus blessed with portraits like this.

Zahra Alzubaidi is our guardian angel. I have know her since we made the short shako mako which she helped out on. She starred in the Brian de Palma film Redacted — an important film, way ahead of its time. When I asked her if she would consider being in Atropia she told me she had quit acting. But she came out of retirement for us and boy, are we lucky to have her.

All of the bootleg DVD’s have titles of films Callum Turner was in. I don’t think he knows this.

I love small parts and I love small actors. I often play small parts in things so it’s meaningful to me when people come in for a day to give themselves over to your strange world. I had found a video early on in my research of a thanksgiving celebration that happened in one of the fake villages on the base where the visiting families had to dress “authentically” so as not to disturb the simulation. Lola Kirk is a riot in this scene.

A Sinna special.