In 2006 Ramadi, Navy SEAL team Alpha One took control of a multi-story residence, from which communications officer Ray Mendoza (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) used air support to monitor their position while sniper Elliot Miller (Cosmo Jarvis) surveilled the neighborhood market across the street. The team's translators told the different families on different floors of the building to remain silent and in place. Activity in the area increases, leading Erik to assign the translators to guard various parts of the building as Ray communicates their situation to leadership.
And then a grenade is thrown into the room where Elliot is positioned.
That is how the searing film Warfare begins, and it only gets more tense, claustrophobic, and chaotic as it blazes through its 90-minute runtime, introducing us to characters rapid fire (including ones played by the likes of Will Poulter, Kit Connor, Joseph Quinn, Michael Gandolfini, and Charles Melton), and watching them use their training to survive and fight back until aide and reinforcements arrive to extract them.
Filmmaker Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation, and last year’s Civil War) hired the real Mendoza as a military technical expert on Civil War, and Ray expressed interest in collecting the memories of the men he served with in Ramadi to write up one of the most accurate and realistic retellings of modern warfare that I’ve ever experienced. The two ended up co-writing and -directing Warfare, the results of which is one of the best films of the year and one that will rattle you to your core. Read my full review.
The film had its world premiere a few weeks ago at the Music Box Theatre and is now playing in theaters. I had the chance to sit down with Garland and Mendoza to discuss the grueling effort to make Warfare as believable as possible and the reactions of some of the real veterans who fought in this battle had when they visited the faithfully re-created set. Please enjoy our insightful conversation.
Right off the bat, you make it clear that this storytelling is something different. Most movies would just say in a title card “Based on a true story,” but your movie says it uses on the memories of those who went through this. That means something different. What does it mean to you two?
Alex Garland: It’s a really complicated thing, and it has to do with what constitutes truth and how we establish what a true thing is. What Ray and I had to work with on this film were a handful of photos that came to us toward the end of the development and writing process; we did manage to get ahold of some photos. But really, we were dealing with memory and only memory. So the thing was to do it with honesty. Saying this film is only based on their memories is the most honest statement we can make, and it’s a film that’s attempting from start to finish to be as honest as it can be. It has parameters because memory is not like a hard drive; it’s more subjective than that.
So sometimes Ray and I had to do detective work. We would be talking to each other, but then we’d be talking to someone else involved and piecing together a sequence of events and realizing “Hold on a minute, if you were by his left leg at this point, we can assume that the other guy must have been here,” etc, things like that—we would piece it together. But the film’s primary concern is honesty, and to say that it’s a true story would be slightly disingenuous, but to say it’s based only on memory is a true statement.
Ray Mendoza: To piggyback off of that, if you say everything is based on memory, often times on other war films—I worked on Lone Survivor, I loved it, but when you say it’s based on true events, it gives you freedom to take some creative license. Like he was saying, we weren’t there, we have to make do. But with the memory thing, it keeps us accountable and ground to having to stick to a memory, rather than just whipping something up in a screenplay. It can be used in a lot of ways.
You’re using the word memory like it’s a singular memory, but you interviewed a dozen different people, plus your memory. How do you merge those?
AG: Sometimes there would be conflicts, like sometimes memories would be in 180-degree conflict with each other. One person would say they did this, and another person I did that, and again, we’d have to be a bit detective about it and figure it out, or sometimes, there would be one or two other people who would corroborate someone’s versions of accounts. Here’s one of the strange ways memory works: if you see something, you can attribute it to being a first-person action. And in your memory, you see a coffee cup being lifted up and put on the other side of the room. But that could have been somebody else who picked it up. Your memory over time says, “I picked up that coffee cup,” because you have that really clear memory of that image. So it was about feeling our way through the process, quite a gentle process, because we’re dealing with heavy stuff.
I know you two worked together on Civil War. How did you get brought together on that film?
RM: When I work in films, it’s usually through stunts. I started out in stunts, and one of the top stunt coordinators in the industry is Jeff Dashnaw, who I worked with on other shows, and he said, “I’m doing this project, and there’s this scene at the end that I think is right down your alley. I’ll need your help on it.” And I read it and was like “Fuck yes! I would love to do this.” There were some other action pieces there, but that one , I was looking forward to executing with Alex. As you’re building the film and we got to that scene, we started doing meetings, and that’s where we started to interact more and more.
AG: Ray was there in all the pre-production meetings as well. One of my first memories of working with you and understanding the way you think and function was, we were talking about a few beats prior to the White House, and you said we would put mortars up on the roofs, and I was immediately like “Do it. Find the guys, get the mortars, and we’ll shoot it.” So I was always quite tuned into him and keyed into what his opinions were. Ray is an interesting mix because he as a lot of first-hand experience, and you are seeing a small part of that in this film, but he also has a lot of experience on film sets, and the rhythms and limitations of film sets and working practically within those spaces.
This film was your idea, Ray.
RM: Yeah, I’d always wanted to do it. There’s a doc series called The Warfighters and another called Live To Tell, both with History Channel, produced by Peter Berg, and I didn’t get this story on those, but I was hoping to tell that story. That was the reason to do this, and that’s been my motivator to learn more—you need to learn the vocabulary and how film sets work, because I knew one day, I’d need to tell this story in a visual medium. In literary form, it’s difficult—there’s a void there—because you don’t have that image the way I do.
Was writing this down and getting a visual record of these events cathartic for you?
RM: It did. It’s hard to explain, and that’s why film is so great and that’s how powerful film can be, because there is imagery, and you can convey emotions through timing and looks and the speed of the camera. They’re all tools to paint that for people. And as for writing it down, that’s where Alex is crucial. There was a trust there, because these were things I pushed down for a long, long time. There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to explain feelings and you can’t do it, or even understand the feelings and accept them. And when you’re ready to face those demons, I’m very team oriented and I like going through those problems with people that I trust, and that’s where Alex comes in and builds that trust. It feels very therapeutic, because he would ask questions, and I’d have to dig into these emotional compartments that had been shut off for a long time.
As co-creators of this, that’s a different job than you’re used to doing. Was this more of you facilitating Ray’s story, or were you truly co-directors in the traditional sense?
AG: Probably my concept of directing, I’m always having to slightly unpack it. I’ve always seen filmmaking as super-collaborative; I’ve always been anti-auteur. Other people can be auteurs, but just not me. I’m actually interested in working with people. In some respects, it all felt quite natural to me—sometimes I’m working with this person or that person; I’m working with Ray, and what we had was, reductively, Ray had a story he wanted to tell, and I had a way I wanted to tell a story, and the two things just came together. And crucial to how the co-directing works was very simple: these were Ray’s memories. It’s not just Ray’s story because there were other people there in his place, but in some ways, initially Ray was the gatekeeper of the story. So I’m trying to apply a process of how to tell a story onto the desire to tell a story.
We were talking earlier, and you said you had this Dogme-like rules that you two worked under. First of all, I’m so excited someone remembers the Dogme process at all, but what were these rules?
AG: Just as a preface, the key differentiation was, when it came to working with actors, able to inhabit a moment—in casting yes, but particularly on set—this was Ray’s world because he was the possessor of information that these actors needed to know if they wanted to do their job properly. The Dogme rule was really simple: nobody can give a note that wasn’t there. Nobody can invent something. I couldn’t, a studio exec couldn’t, a DOP couldn’t, an actor couldn’t. At no point could an actor say “I feel motivated to do this right now,” because they answer would always be “Yeah, but you didn’t. So just do the thing you’re supposed to do.” That was the rule, and it kept a purity through it.
To go back to your point about “a true story,” I’m jaded now because now when I see “Based on a true story,” my immediate reflexive response is, “I’m about see complete fiction.” That’s my next beat, because what our industry does is conflate character and compresses time, and it removes characters who seem less dramatic and it makes characters do things that they didn’t do to make them more heroic and all that sort of stuff that we bring. And even music is a manipulation in some respect—score is a manipulation of truth, because as we walk down the street, we aren’t surrounded by a soaring string section as we decide whether to cross the traffic light. That was the Dogme rule: absolutely nobody but Ray and other people who were in this place were allowed to say “This is what happened,” or “This is what should happen.” And my job and the job of crew and cast was to execute what we were being told. A large part of my job was just listening—really listening to Ray and the other people.
The more the film goes on, the more impressed I was with the way the actors moved and effortlessly rattle off jargon, half of which I didn’t understand, but you figure it out from the context, usually.
AG: Or you don’t.
That’s true. What kind of training did you put these actors through leading up to filming, because the results are all of there on the screen?
RM: I knew the gun work was going to be the easy part; it was really about building that cohesiveness. In a way, it was like method acting. In a way, I kind of hijacked them to do a kind of method acting. What was more important to me was what they took away from this. I knew they were about to experience something that I was going to be jealous of; I’d gone through it, and that friendship, when you leave a team, is great. It’s the friendship you miss the much. One of my opening speeches was: “When you guys are done with this, you will be depressed and sad that it’s over. What you’re about to go through together is super-important.”
That being said, it was important they experience the brotherhood. The weapons stuff, I can teach that all day. I can get someone from A to Z extremely fast, when it comes to weapons work. But it’s why they move so smooth that matters. When I patrol behind Elliot for seven years of my life, I know what he looks like in the dark, smells like in the dark, I know what his posture is and I know when he’s about to turn left. I know how he’s going to move by the way he dips; and to do that, you have to spend lots of time together.
They worked together, ate together, trained together, filmed together, they did everything, and they were able to life each other up when someone was down or someone wasn’t good at something. You’re going to rely on each other, and they learn so much about what to do if a guy was struggling that day. “We’re going to carry the weight.” They can almost predict the movements their friends are going to make.
It feels like it would be necessary, but did you shoot this chronologically?
AG: We shot it entirely in sequence.
Yeah, I don’t see how else you could make it work.
AG: What we did was build…we created a location rather than a set. We built something like nine or 13 buildings—I can’t quite remember. But most of them were facades, but there was one—the house—that you could walk into. We just tried to get it as right as possible, both in sequences of events and the physical space. There was this incredible resource, which was Ray. Films natural tendency is to bullshit, and with Ray, it’s like letting a pit bull off the leash and we said, “Just get it real,” and he’d say, “Well that shouldn’t be there. That’s not right. No, the curtains weren’t the color.” Often, one of the reasons I’m not interested in auteurism is that I think my job is giving space for people to do what they’re really good at. That’s what we tried to do for Ray, to give him the space to get it right.
There are photos during the credits that show you brought some of the real guys to the set. What was like for them to see that place re-created?
RM: That was a shock-and-awe moment; they were blown away. “Holy shit!” Once you started adding in the body parts and phosphorous, the sensory components, plus the sound of the gunfire in tandem with the violence and the speed, that’s when all the sensory recall stars kicking in.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of telling a story without almost no context? Other than that opening scene where the guys are watching that workout video, we never get to see these guys smile.
AG: Well, the context is an example of the bullshit. Ray and I would chat about this. You’d concoct a scene in which two guys are chatting, and one would say, “My girlfriend just left me,” and you do that so that the audience creates an emotional connection to that person. What was the impact of removing all of that and just aiming for a forensic alliance with memory? The effect was purity, so you don’t end up having fuzzy conversations about whether something should be set at dusk or maybe this person saw that thing, and then we create some false bit of dramatic irony. None of that was relevant.
So one of the things that Ray and I and the cast and crew all did together was focus on the exact job at hand. Usually with a film, it’s like 50 percent of your day is just stuff. It felt like like no percent of our day was just stuff. We knew exactly what we were doing and how we would try to achieve it. We knew when we had to let something go, we knew when we had to stay with something until we got it right. It was focus.
RM: I’m a fan of the subtext stuff. I don’t like giving all the answers. There are a lot of SEAL movies where they all have beards and hats, and they look cool. And that isolates veterans and military units. Especially in Iraq, we’re all in it together. We’re typically all doing the same missions or supporting each other in the same missions, so I didn’t want anything that would distract from the experience that we all went through, because when you start making it about SEALs or Green Berets or Rangers or any unit, I just wanted it to be an experience we all can share. I wanted this very neutral posture on it.
I have to applaud your sound design, because where I saw this, we were hearing voices here, bullets hitting over here, and post-IED explosion, sound vanishes for a while. Talk about the importance of your sound mix.
AG: I’d go back to the memory thing. What would happen is, Ray or some of the other guys would describe something. Some of the sound design goes back to very specific work by Ray to do with the difference between incoming rounds and outgoing rounds or voice and so on. With some of the impressionistic things, it would be complicated. Ray would describe something that was like phasing in and out of a state of awareness, and in a way, only realizing that he’d been phased out of a state of awareness at the point he phased out. So you’re not unaware while you’re unaware; you only realize when you come back in the room. Cinematically, there’s a long discussion about how we represent that, what does that look like, what lens should we shoot that on, what proximity does the lens have to the actor’s face?
Sound design, particularly post-IED… here’s a perfect example: it a literal thing. In his description, Ray said, “As I was pulling Elliot back up the driveway, all the noise of radio chatter, I was really aware of it coming in through my headphones.” But he wasn’t aware of it prior to that. Although it’s there the whole time, he’s not aware of it. His memory of it is that it’s not there, so it’s not there until he starts to pull on Elliot, and then we bring it back in. All of it is just trying to match what Ray and the other guys said. There’s a whole other layer to it that have to do with Ray’s first-hand knowledge of the way bullets sound as they fly through the air.
RM: There are a lot of things that happen concurrently as well, so we did these little plays when we filmed it. They were really long takes, and multiple people are doing multiple things and saying multiple things. It’s like going to a party, and all you hear is white noise, but if you wanted to focus on what someone was saying, you’d look at them, and you could read their lips and know what they’re saying. So you can shift, which is kind of what we did. So when all of these guys are in one room, we pick who we want to focus on, but everybody was talking at the same time, and we would choose who we wanted to focus in on. We had a loud speaker system with jet sounds flying by, gun rounds going off, and we’d play those during the takes.
I wish I could be there in the theater tonight just to see the audience’s reaction to the first “Show of Force” to watch everyone jump. Guys, thank you so much. It was a real pleasure meeting you, Ray. Alex, so good to talk to you again.
AG: Thank you so much, Steve.
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