‘Idiotka’ Director Nastasya Popov And Stars Anna Baryshnikov And Camila Mendes Unpack Theme Of “Making Your Private Self Public”

Following her executive production work on Prime Video’s Música, in which she also starred along the film’s writer and director Rudy Mancuso, as well as her EP role on the streamer’s romantic comedy Upgraded, in which she starred alongside Archie Renaux and Marisa Tomei, Camila Mendes’ latest double duty project takes place in the world of fashion. Idiotka is an acquisition title out of the 2025 SXSW Film Festival, where it will premiere Wednesday.

“This project came through a mutual friend that I shared with our producing partner, Tess Cohen, a friend that I knew from high school. It’s very random, but awesome. It gripped me,” Mendes told Deadline of the film ahead of its premiere Wednesday. “I called my producing partner right away, Rachel Matthews, and I was like, we gotta do this. She’s like, ‘Babe, I’m with you. I just read the first two pages and I’m in.’ It was so gripping and captivating. [Director] Nastasya’s writing style is so unique that it was an immediate, yes, but I was like, ‘All right, fine. I’ll read the rest of the script just to do my due diligence,’ but I already [knew] I need[ed] to do it.”

Idiotka, directed by Nastasya Popov and starring Anna Baryshnikov, follows spiring fashion designer Margarita (Baryshnikov) who lives at her grandmother’s West Hollywood apartment with her babushka (Galina Jovovich) as well as her father (Mark Ivanir) and brother. Margarita’s already chaotic home situation spirals more when their landlord decides to finally act on their unpaid, months-late rent and serve them an eviction notice. Margarita’s desperate attempt to make some fast cash, as well as a name for herself, by applying to a reality TV fashion show a la Project Runway unexpectedly comes through when a producer on the show Nicol (Mendes) calls Margarita to accept her application and usher her into the wild world of reality television.

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“I was wanting to explore questions of self-exploitation and how much of ourselves we expose as storytellers and artists,” Popov told Deadline ahead of the film’s March 12 premiere at the SXSW Film Festival.

Both Baryshnikov and Mendes, whose character balances a fine line between supporting Margarita in the competition and milking her for good reality TV content, recall wanting to sign onto the project without about two pages into the script.

“The script was super tight and very, very strong, and supported with this amazing sizzle reel that really sold the vision of it. Sometimes you read a great script and everything’s written beautifully, but you don’t really know how the director envisions it, or if they’re capable of executing that. And Nas[tasya] had that all in the bag. So it was just like, ‘Okay, like we have a visionary here.’ She’s got a vision.” Mendes said. “Everything from there just became a matter of developing what was already there. Mainly what drew me to this story was this aspect of making your private self public, and it’s something that I feel like I am constantly at odds with this thirst for being relatable, and everyone wants a piece of you. Everyone wants to know what your personal life is like, and you’re always having to walk that line and decide what you’re comfortable sharing and what feels like too much. That theme was something that I really wanted to develop through the reality show and through Nicol’s dynamic with Margarita. That was my contribution to it as a producer.”

Popov wrote her first draft in 2021 after she had moved home to Los Angeles from New York into a similar intergenerational household to her main character’s with her parents, grandmother, sister and boyfriend.

“It was really funny, claustrophobic, chaotic energy that inspired me to start writing this. I was working on it for a while, and I have been working with my producing partner, Tess Cohen since we met in college, and she read early drafts, and she really helped me develop it for a few years,” Popov said. “Then Anna Baryshnikov, our lovely star, read a draft a year in, and she really sparked to the story. Then we spent another year developing it from there. And then we shot a sizzle in the apartment where I was living, very scrappy. The aim of that was to really solidify the aesthetic of the project and try to help us get funding. From there, more drafts. At that point, the reality TV threatdof the story really clicked. I think we found the tone of the movie while we were shooting the sizzle. After the sizzle was made, really, things started snowballing.”

Mendes made sure to emphasize that the “scrappy” sizzle, which featured Jovovich as Margarita’s grandmother, was “really well done” and what “really pulled [her] in aside from the script.”

Baryshnikov found the Russian-American family experience very personal in addition to the originality of the story, particular the vernacular of some of the characters.

“There was a whole version of this film that was a quiet family film that was very beautiful, but then Nastasya had this other very acerbic, interesting sense of humor, and this world of LA and how fabulous and also shallow it can be,” Baryshnikov added. “And those two things, living side by side, to me, was a very specific thing to our generation of how it feels to explore your own identity in these spaces where you’re asked to do it in this very boiled down, simple way, when actually your lived experience is very complex. I found that to be really just exquisitely captured in the script.”

After talking with Popov back and forth for a year, Baryshnikov was very eager for the role, expressing a “tiny bit” of annoyance at having to still read for it, but deeply respecting Popov’s protection of her work.

“I think it’s easy when you’re making your first film to have a scarcity mindset, and she was so passionate about making the film that she wanted to make,” Baryshnikov said. “I was just desperate to do it.”

Over a pot of Russian black tea, Baryshnikov reread for Popov, and the rest is history, but one of several guest stars was actually attached to the project before Baryshnikov was — Owen Thiele, who plays the host of the reality fashion competition, Slay, Serve Survive.

“I grew up in Los Angeles. So I was lucky to know someone like Owen Thiele from growing up. I had seen him in Theater Camp, and thought he was just hilarious,” Popov said. “So I actually wrote the host role with him in mind.”

Celebrity judges on the competition series are played by Benito Skinner, Julia Fox and Saweetie.

“With the judges, it was really a collective effort. Cami was friends with Benny so we reached out to him. He also is such a creative and storyteller himself, so I think he loved the the tone, and then with Julia Fox, it was also just great kismet and synchronicity that she happened to be in town promoting Down the Drain, which we love her writing so much, and her manager read the script, and he also really liked the vibe. We showed up and got copies of her book and got it signed by her. And she said ‘Yeah, I like the script. It’s so meta. And is also just an incredible collaborator.”

Baryshnikov recalled taking a photo of producer Tess Cohen and Popov ahead of Fox’s reading.

“They told me that they hung around until the end to talk to her. Sometimes there’s this idea that it all, everything happens through agents,” the actress said. “And something that I just thought was so incredible about this project was that we were physically chasing some people down. And Julia, I think, really responded to that.”

Popov agreed with that summarization of the “spirit of this film” which she described as “banging down doors.” She revealed that she has handed people physical letters at film festivals and cards, and she stressed that Fox embodied the “real recognize real” mentality.

“Saweetie, the final judge — we were a few days out from shooting and just were lucky enough that another mutual friend happened to be her manager and helped us reach out,” Popov said. “So keep networking, and people will help you down the line.”

It all comes back to the tension of the dynamic between Margarita and Nicol for the plot because things heat up on the reality competition show as they so often do.

“Camila really mined the nuance in Nicole’s character. I think it’s easy to stereotype reality TV and make it caricature-y, but I think it’s much more interesting to watch a great producer who is also maybe a bit of aa massive manipulator,” Popov described the arc that develops between the pair.

“We wanted to walk that line of, she’s being manipulative in some ways, but in other ways, she’s also helping Margarita open up and not be ashamed of who she is,” Mendes finished Popov’s thought. “There’s personal gain to be had with Nicole, but also it benefits Margarita as well.”

Baryshnikov agreed looking at it from her character and contestant’s perspective.

“I spoke to some people who’ve been on unscripted shows, and that seems very true to the experience that on the one hand, it’s the only person who understands what you’re going through,” she said. “And on the other, they have an agenda to make good television. ‘What do you put yourself through in the name of truth?’”

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