When writer-director Sarah Adina Smith (AFI Fest Audience Award Winner “The Midnight Swim”) was writing her new film, “Buster’s Mal Heart,” she just assumed she would film in Colorado.

“Colorado is where I’m from and where I assumed I would have the most resources to make the movie,” Smith told Indiewire in a recent interview. “We scouted there, but Quentin Tarantino was shooting “The Hateful Eight” and using up the state’s entire tax incentive. Also it didn’t quite have that spirit that I was looking for. I love Colorado and it’s an incredibly interesting place, but there’s something about Montana that has a little bit more of the spiritual quest-type atmosphere I needed for this film.”

The film is a surreal mystery starring Rami Malek (“Mr. Robot”) as an eccentric mountain man on the run from authorities who survives the winter by breaking into empty vacation homes. He’s haunted by a recurring dream of being lost at sea only to discover that the dream is real: He is one man in two bodies. “It’s an existential journey and we felt like Montana is the place where people go to seek solitude and confront nature and their maker,” explained Smith.

“Both plot-wise and structurally what Sarah has done with this movie is find a way to talk about things like free will, God’s will, what it is to be a man, what it is to be a husband and father and how you fight to find a place in the world with all these forces at play,” added producer Travis Steven (Jodorowsky’s Dune).

“When you are doing a movie about one person’s emotional journey, it’s really nice to have that set against the most epic backdrop possible. This movie is Rami Malek in several different incarnations and to see Montana behind him in scene after scene