Filmmaker Alex Garland wanted to make a different kind of war film. Would it be possible, he wondered, to take 90 minutes of a real incident involving combat and recreate it as faithfully as possible?
He posed that question to former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, who served in Iraq and had in recent years built a second career in filmmaking, advising on sequences like the assault on the White House that ends Garland’s last film, “Civil War.”
Mendoza had a personal experience in mind, from November 2006, when he and a group of Navy SEALs were assigned to surveil a residential area in the Ramadi Province in Iraq. The mission went south when they were discovered and attacked by a grenade through a sniper hole. Then while attempting to extract several wounded soldiers, an I.E.D. exploded. The injuries became even graver.
This incident is recreated with a journalistic rigor unheard of in a Hollywood movie in “Warfare,” opening in theaters nationwide this weekend. There’s no editorializing. No sentimental music. No revealing monologues or flashbacks or newscasts giving context. Everything that the audience sees and hears in the film is something that has come directly from someone who was there, recreated in near real time.
It’s why the film opens not with the standard “based on a true story,” but with a different, more truthful, promise: “This film uses only their memories.”
“If someone’s telling you something as honestly as they can, it has a power. And it’s a power that cinema doesn’t typically exploit,” Garland said. “When Ray told me this story for the first time, I felt quite overwhelmed by many things at once.”
That included an expanded understanding of combat, the nature of soldering and decisions that have to be made. Garland was rapt and felt sure that it would make for compelling cinema. And he and Mendoza got to work reconstructing that day in Ramadi through first-hand accounts of those who were there.
Reconstructing the day
“Warfare” is dedicated to Elliott Miller, a medic and sniper who was one of the severely injured and has no memory of the day. Memory, of course, is imperfect under normal circumstances let alone combat situations from 20 years ago. Mendoza himself was disoriented after the I.E.D. blast and remembers things only in fragments. The reconstruction thus became a group effort.
“It really makes you confront what the relationship is between memory truth and film truth,” Garland said. “It’s particularly interesting when you have two people with a conflicting memory, but they’re both telling the truth. There are gaps where the conflicts are so complex that you have to either omit something because you can’t rely on it sufficiently or you just have to chose one version.”
There was, Garland said, a “Rashomon” version you could make of “Warfare” but “we did the ‘Rashomon’ bit before we shot it.”
Teaching the actors how to be SEALs
The film was made inexpensively, on sets constructed in a suburb north of London on a former WWII airfield that’s now a film and television studio. Mendoza worked closely with the young cast of bright young Hollywood stars, including D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (who plays Mendoza), Will Poulter, Charles Melton, Kit Connor, Noah Centineo and Cosmo Jarvis. The actors underwent a three-week training based on a SEAL program designed to prepare soldiers for moments of intense stress and fatigue. Mendoza would also give the guys playing the leaders impossible tasks and timelines that he knew they would fail, then critique and drill them for it.
“They all thought I hated them,” Mendoza said. “But it was just to apply that pressure. It’s exposing them to elements and principles and putting them in a situation where they will fail and be forced to rely on each other.”
The memory rule was strict, too, meaning no studio notes or suggested additions from anyone who wasn’t there. It extended even to something that might seem like a quirky stylistic choice: Opening the film with the men bouncing up and down to Swedish DJ Eric Prydz’s club ready anthem “Call on Me” and the silly music video set in an aerobics class. It was a video they really had on a thumb drive, one of the few entertainment options available. Charles Melton’s character would put it on before they went out.
“It kind of became a ritual,” Mendoza said. “We were just silly. And it was a way for me to show, I think, how young we were.”
For Garland, the film in a way demystifies the idea of Navy SEALs as supermen, presenting them instead as young men.
“Well-trained, but subject to concussion, stress, confusion, just the physical difficulty of pulling on a bit of equipment as things are intense and oppressive around you,” he said.
And, similar to the discourse around “Civil War,” what “Warfare” is not is a political statement or commentary on Iraq.
“Why does reality need something bolted on alongside it?” Garland said. “If everything has an agenda, where’s the discussion? Where is the discussion if everybody is planting flags? As we can see in our lived life for the last few years, it doesn’t lead to discussion, it just leads to encampment. And I don’t want to participate in that.”
Bringing it back to reality
The experience was therapeutic for Mendoza, who often avoids war films simply because they so often get it embarrassingly wrong.
“I wish I could give this to every servicemember,” Mendoza said.
For a film that eschews so many war film cliches, “Warfare” actually ends with something quite common for films based on true stories: A series of photos of the real people involved, from the service members to the Iraqi family whose house was overtaken. Some even show them on set, with Garland and Mendoza and the actors near their real-life counterparts. Many faces are blurred for security reasons.
Garland knows that this, in some ways, breaks the spell of what audiences have just experienced. But it’s an intentional gesture.
“I wanted to end with a reminder that these were actors, this was a construction, there were blue screens, there were prosthetics, but there were also real people and this is what they looked like,” Garland said. “It’s a complicated thing. It’s a common device. I think it just simply felt odd not doing it. There was also to me something true about saying this is a reconstruction but it was reconstructed by these men.”
