Why “Warfare” directors wanted to make the movie for one of the real people who lived it

Earlier this year, audiences saw filmmaker Alex Garland's vision for a possible future of America. Next year, he’s diving into the past to recreate a real war from recent history.

Despite the title, Garland’s Civil War played more like an American road trip movie that followed a group of journalists making their way to Washington, D.C. for one last interview with an embattled and unnamed president (Nick Offerman). As they reach the capital, the film climaxes with an action-packed assault on the White House. But Garland’s new film Warfare — which he co-wrote and co-directed it with Ray Mendoza, an Iraq War veteran who was a key advisor on the filming of that Civil War climax — is more like if that sequence was blown out into an entire movie.

Related: Inside Civil War, Alex Garland's provocative take on what a second American conflict could look like

“There was a particular section towards the end of Civil War in a corridor where we shot it and edited it to be in real-time. So I approached Ray and asked if he had a story or true-life event that he would be interested in telling in real-time," Garland tells Entertainment Weekly in a joint Zoom conversation with Mendoza. "We started talking about this film, which is something that Ray, unbeknownst to me, had been wanting to make for a long, long time. My role then was just to facilitate Ray telling this story that he already wanted to tell.”

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For Mendoza, Warfare is personal. He lived it, during his time in the U.S. military in the Iraq War. The movie is a roughly 90-minute real-time recreation of a real battle that Mendoza and his comrades fought while stationed there. He has long wanted to recreate this day on screen for the benefit of one of his fellow soldiers — though it will also have the added effect of transporting viewers into the midst of the fray. 

“The story is not solely about me. I was one of the guys there, and some of it is being told from my perspective initially, but one of the guys named Elliot got severely wounded upon extraction,” Mendoza tells EW. “He’s had some [traumatic brain injury] issues and extremely bad damage to his extremities. He’s in a wheelchair and he doesn't recall what happened. We’ve tried to write it out for him in literary form, but even that's really confusing. I think he understood what happened, but for us who were there and remember it, we have visual memories of it. He's lacking that, and I've always wanted to do that for him. I felt it would be easier for him to watch something than to read 12 individuals’ differing perspectives on it.”

Like many war films before it, Warfare boasts a cast stacked with young male talent, including Charles Melton, Joseph Quinn, Kit Connor, Will Poulter, and Noah Centineo. D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai plays Mendoza, while Cosmo Jarvis portrays Elliot.

Related: Civil War stars break down that terrifying Jesse Plemons scene

Mendoza has previous experience working with actors on set, advising performers on military action scenes like that of Civil War. But for Warfare, he had the added pressure of staying true to reality.

“There aren’t huge character arcs that I had to monitor, but I still had to track and be respectful to what each guy did that day and make sure I don’t mix them up,” Mendoza says. “Kit Connor, for example, plays the young new guy in the story. So I interviewed these [real] guys and talked about, ‘How did you feel? What were you thinking?’ Even some of the regrets that we have from that day. I have to track all that and make sure the performer is also understanding and conveying it.”

While Mendoza worked with actors and to maintain the film’s overall vision of the real-time approach, Garland focused more on the technical aspects of Warfare’s filmmaking.

“It uses the traditional grammar of cinema: closeups, mids, wides, push-ins, shots wrapping around actors,” Garland says. “It is a continuous action... so it's not shooting everything in one take, but it is real-time. It opened up the possibility, in a strange way, to stage something almost as if it's theater.”

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