The take was too perfect. Ray Mendoza, the first-time director of Warfare, was watching D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai drag the limp, unconscious body of Cosmo Jarvis away from the wreckage of a massive explosion. Smoke, gunfire, screaming everywhere. And then there was the noise erupting from Woon-A-Tai as he struggled to pull Jarvis to safety — exactly how Mendoza remembered it from when he was a Navy SEAL, dragging the limp, unconscious body of Elliot Miller away from the wreckage of a massive explosion. 

“Elliot’s a heavy guy,” Mendoza tells Rolling Stone in an interview with his co-director, Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Civil War). “He’s a power lifter-type. I remember describing to him in the hospital just how heavy he was and how scared I was, and I thought we were going to die in the street, because I couldn’t drag him fast enough, and I wish I would have done more squats, and I wish I would have trained harder.”

Miller was also on the Warfare set that day, watching the scene unfold with Mendoza. “It got emotional,” Mendoza says. “I called cut. I had to walk off the set. Emotions that I think I balled up for a really long time just came out. It was a therapeutic thing that I think Elliot and I… maybe that was the only way it could have happened. To finally slay that demon and experience it with Elliot. It was a special, therapeutic, special moment.” 

Warfare, released last week, is a real-time recreation of an operation that occurred in Ramadi, Iraq, in November 2006, when the province was a hotbed of fighting between U.S. forces and insurgent Sunni resistance. It begins with a SEAL team breaking into and commandeering an Iraqi family’s home for a surveillance mission; they soon realize they’re next to an insurgent house, and a grenade dropped through a sniper hole wounds two soldiers, including Miller (played by Jarvis). As the team prepares to evacuate, an IED goes off, killing two Iraqi scouts and severely injuring Miller and another soldier, Sam (played by Joseph Quinn). The rest of the film is a visceral, violent barrage as the SEALs wait for another team to come to their aid, try to care for Miller and Sam, exchange gunfire with the insurgents, prepare for a second evacuation, and occasionally keep tabs on the angry, petrified family they’ve thrust into this hell. 

This is a story Mendoza has wanted to tell for a long time, in large part to give Miller — who can’t exactly recall what happened — a visual representation of that day. In Garland, he found an eager collaborator. The two met and struck up a relationship on the set of Garland’s Civil War, with Mendoza brought in to consult on and choreograph the film’s battle sequences. For Warfare, they aimed to construct a film based entirely on the memories of those who were there, particularly Mendoza and the other SEALs portrayed in the film (along with Woon-A-Tai, Jarvis, and Quinn, the large ensemble cast boasts Will Poulter, Kit Connor, and Charles Melton).

This makes Warfare a unique kind of war movie — a “discretely experimental” one, Garland says. It eschews traditional storytelling rules, like the three-act structure or intimate character details, in favor of depicting a “subjective reality” (Garland’s words). It finds narrative thrust and character arcs in the real sequence of events, ultimately focusing more on — as the title suggests — the intricacies of combat and the immediate emotional and human responses to it. 

“There wasn’t really a model we could turn to about whether the principle here would work,” Garland says. “The question was, what are the devices of cinema that need to be excluded from this in order to be honest? What is the process by which you get close to truth? What is truth? Is it what police would do in trying to unpick a crime scene and understand a precise sequence of events? Or, is it closer to memory and a subjective state? I think we were more interested in those subjective states. And past that, it was an act of faith.”

In a wide-ranging conversation with Rolling Stone, Mendoza and Garland spoke about war movies and other depictions of the Iraq War on film; grappling with memory and truth; presenting such chaotic, brutal events as neutrally as possible, as well as the responsibility they felt to get it right. 

“The responsibility stopped being about audiences or budget or anything,” Garland says. “It was the lived experience and incredible honesty — it’s almost generosity, I’m not sure what the right word is — of Ray, his colleagues, and whoever we spoke to. It all became about responsibility to that. There was something bigger at stake.” 

What kind of relationship do you have with war movies?

Ray Mendoza: I grew up watching Commando, Predator. Maybe it had some influence on me joining the military. I always had a fascination with the military. I knew I was going to serve, and maybe those movies had something to do with it. It wasn’t just movies, but military stuff, I was just attracted to as a kid. 

As a soldier, and since leaving the service, do you find yourself relating to these films in different ways, or critiquing them? 

RM: Absolutely. I catch myself being so critical, like, “Look at the way he’s holding that gun.” Even my friends are like, “Can you just shut up and let us watch the movie?” And I can’t. They definitely brush over the tactics. And I don’t know if people need to understand tactics, unless it’s critical to a story point. But as I get older, I start to crave more information when I watch movies. 

Mendoza (left) and Garland on set A24

Alex, what about you? Are there any particular war movies that are formative for you?

Alex Garland: I’ve been interested in [Elem Klimov’s] Come and See for a long time, because it may be the most realistic and hard-hitting war movie that exists. I think what’s strange about that is it often uses surrealism as its methodology to tell its story. It’s doing something very real and very powerful via surrealism, which is an interesting thing to consider. Also [Stanley Kubrick’s] Paths of Glory is a brilliant film. On the other end of the scale, I’ve sort of got in trouble with some people before by saying this — maybe the spirit in which I’m saying it just gets misunderstood — but something like Apocalypse Now, which I don’t personally see as an anti-war movie, because it’s too seductive. It has violence, of course, but it is essentially, to me, very seductive, and has a strange, dark romance in it. It doesn’t function in the same way as Come and See. A couple of British film critics got absolutely incensed by me saying that. But it’s just what I personally believe. Apocalypse Now might fit into that Truffaut problem that sometimes is identified with war films, which is that cinema likes to romanticize and seduce. [Ed. note: François Truffaut famously said, “Every film about war ends up being pro-war.”] Those are the kinds of questions that I was turning around in my head when making Civil War, but also this. 

It’s still recent history, but there haven’t been as many Iraq War movies as say, World War II or Vietnam War films. What do you make of the ways that the Iraq War has been portrayed on film?

RM:I think that comes down to who’s telling it. There’s a lot of people who are making films about the Iraq War, and they’re focusing on maybe something that somebody who actually experienced it wouldn’t focus on. Pick a war movie, and there’ll be a message most likely, and it may not necessarily be the one a veteran or somebody who was there would do. A lot of veterans, we talk about movies, and we get upset. It’s equivalent to — not to stir the pot here — but a bit like cultural appropriation. It’s OK for someone who’s never served in the military to make a military movie; but if there’s somebody who wasn’t Black making a movie about slaves, would that person be criticized? Maybe, maybe not; I think they would be. But it’s OK for people who’ve never served, never been in combat, to make movies about combat. That’s fine, I welcome it. I’m sure they have a great story to tell. But when we watch those movies, we often just say, “Yeah, they almost had it, but they didn’t get it right.”

Do you feel what’s missing is more on the technical side, or something more thematic and emotional? 

RM: It’s the emotion of the action. If there’s a two-minute firefight, there’s a lot that goes on. As a leader, you have to make a decision that may or may not put a person’s life in danger. You don’t just magically come up with a decision, there’s a series of things you have to go through. There’s the ability to communicate without talking. And I think that’s what we do well in this film. There’s not a lot of narrative and dialogue, but there’s these looks and these moments, and there’s a lot of subtext there. I just don’t know what [other war movies are] trying to communicate in a firefight. It’s just like, “Oh, cool, guns going off.” But they glaze over it so fast to keep an audience engaged via gunfire, versus keeping an audience engaged on something else.

Tell me about how you thought about character development and worked with the actors to get the performances right. 

RM: Though it wasn’t traditionally structured, it is an event and there is an arc. I had to track those [for the actors]. “This is where you’re starting, pre-grenade. This is you as a leader. This is what your duties are. Those duties and your ability to make those decisions are going to start to decline and we have to map out how that decline is going to work, what you’re going to be able to communicate, and how you’re going to be able to communicate it.” I had to do that for each person. The more you watch it, you’ll start to see those human components of guys stepping up. 

AG: I think some of the work Ray did in terms of tracking those characters, you can intuit some of it maybe the first time. But I imagine the first viewing — which it should be — is a more visceral experience. There are some quite complex layers happening that, speaking for myself, I don’t think I would get on a first viewing. 

Tell me about how Elliot reacted to the whole experience, both being on set and also seeing the final product?

RM: I think it was a relief for him, because it just started to fill all these blank spots that were there. He’s heard about it, he’s read it, but never seen it. The cast took really good care of him, too; they were part of that process. 

AG: It’s hard to overstate how unusual a filmmaking process this was. The strangeness where you have actors doing everything they can to depict the reality of something for the real people who lived it, including Ray and Elliot and several others. It’s not comparable to what these young SEALs and this family went through in this house, but it’s worth just giving a shoutout to how intense and difficult and complicated [it was], and that it involved courage for the actors to do this. For Cosmo to scream and portray what it is like to have your legs damaged in that way while the real person is watching him do that — it’s just crazy. And I think it was particularly acute for the actors, but I’d say it was true of every single person on set. I’ve never been on a set like it. I’m sure I’ll never be on a set like it again. 

How did you think about those moments that aren’t as physically gruesome, but just as upsetting? Like when the soldiers break into the apartment and hold this family at gunpoint, and when the two Iraqi scouts are forced to lead the evacuation attempt, which puts them directly in front of the IED blast. 

AG: It’s a simple answer: The film is attempting to be truthful. So if that’s what happened, that’s what happened. The film has a neutrality about it. It is a group of people attempting to be as honest as they possibly can, and the film just presents it. And you, as an adult, can draw your inferences or conclusions, some of which might relate to what it’s like to be in a home into which people suddenly, uninvited, arrive. Or to be the very, very young man who has to do that thing, and the relationship between those states. 

RM: We were all aware that we were going through people’s homes and they’re going to be petrified, and we had to approach that very sensitively, because we don’t — God forbid, an accident happened, they’re innocent. But that’s how it’s portrayed. Who wouldn’t be frightened of people sneaking into your house? So yes, it’s that simple. The way we go in there and approach it cautiously, we interrupt them while they’re asleep — that’s a scary thing. And it’s portrayed in that way. 

As you were talking to everybody and gathering these memories, were you ever worried about people misremembering, or over mythologizing?

AG: Even before going into it, you could be quite sure people would misremember. That’s in the nature of memory. It’s also in the nature of memory, you could say, to mythologize. However, where the SEALs were concerned, there’s a cultural thing within those guys which is to absolutely err on the side of self-deprecation and humility. “I should have done this, I should have done that, but I didn’t, I failed. But this other guy did this incredible thing and he saved all of us.” Quite often, I would have to gently confront someone with an act that they did along the lines of, “Look, you’re not saying you did that, but I’ve got five other people saying you did.” And then they’d go, “Well, OK, yeah, I did do that.” 

There were also many moments where people remembered the same thing differently. Or, nobody remembered something except one guy, and then somebody else, months later, said, “Yeah, I remember that.” It was a bit of detective work. That’s why at the beginning of the film, it says, “This film is based on memory,” and doesn’t say, “This is a true story.” It’s us being as careful as we can, and as honest as we can, with these collective memories that cross-refer to each other, until Ray and I would feel confident this thing happened at this moment. 

We spend pretty much the whole movie with the SEALs, but at the end, post-evacuation, there are a few moments with the family and the opposition fighters in the empty street. Tell me about making that decision to change perspective like that. 

AG: Almost everything in the film is sourced directly from interviews. That’s to say, there will be moments where someone scratches the back of their head, and that’s not sourced from a first person account; that is an actor doing that in the moment. But anything of the sorts of things you just described are sourced from testimony.

So were you able to speak with and find members of the family whose house it was?

AG: We spoke to a large group of people. Not all of them were American military. I think that I have to be elliptical about that, so I’ll just leave it there. I’ll tell you what, one has to be careful. 

Understood. But that’s to say, those shots where the SEALs are no longer in the frame, the people who were there, or their equivalents, may have contributed their memories? 

AG: Yeah, we didn’t invent stuff. Do you know the Dogme films [a movement spearheaded by Danish filmmakers like Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg focused on back-to-basics filmmaking]? You know the principle, shoot with whatever it is — one camera or one light, or whatever. We were a form of a Dogme film, which is that we were not allowed to invent. There is a kind of fuzzy area. I wouldn’t deny that. But we did everything we could to not invent. And then, of course, there is some space left for just the performance of people inhabiting a role or whatever.

Considering you had these other perspectives, were you ever tempted to expand the focus of the story? 

AG: It depends which focus you’d be talking about.

There’s certainly a parallel between the SEALs and the resistance fighters, who are also connected by a kind of brotherhood.

AG: There is, but there’s a complicated thing about that, which is to do with, what forms of truth are you interested in? And one of the things that interested me personally was that when people are involved in combat you don’t necessarily get a clear sight of the people you’re fighting with. You very briefly glimpse them, or don’t see them at all. And that seemed to me a thing that was often missing from cinematic representations of combat. And that was actually something I was quite keen that the film would represent. It was something that, when Ray and I were talking, I’d say, “Well, did you see that person?” And he’d say, “No.” And other soldiers said the same thing. But that seemed to me an interesting thing to represent within the film.

For me, there was a fascinating tension between this very specific, focused story you were telling and the larger context of the Iraq War — why we were there, what purpose it served, all of that. I felt like the film maybe gestured to that at times, but I’m curious if you grappled with that tension at all or tried to engage with it? 

AG: The beauty of presenting a narrative neutrally, as factually as possible, is all the implicit discussions that can flow from that. They don’t need a flag stuck in them. They don’t need an agenda. They are things that flow from the nature of honesty and accuracy. There’s a reliance on audiences to have conversations, consider, and trust that they are sophisticated and adult. So, the inferences you are referring to, that you have taken, I think, are not hurt by being neutral in the presentation of the sequence of events. They are assisted by being neutral. They give you space for that, without preaching to the choir, or being lectured in an oppositional or antagonistic way. And that is to do with a relationship, in this instance, between an event and the people receiving the account of this event. It’s an approach that I happen to believe in. I think that film is a broad church. Journalism is a broad church. All presentations to the public in any form, it’s a broad church. There’s space for lots of different ways of doing things. This is the one we chose to do for this film, and I think it’s the right one for this film.

RM: I mean, most people know why we’re there. I don’t need to explain that in a movie. If you talk to a veteran, or somebody who served, we all know why we were there. I think it’s a waste of time to put that in the movie. If I were to show an opinion on why we were there, you may disagree with it, and then it’s going to be an argument. And I didn’t want that to be a distraction, because I wanted to focus more on the what, not necessarily the why. The why is out there. There’s not a lot on the what. I wanted to focus on that. I wanted an accurate depiction of war. And I can’t do that, I can’t peel that onion back, if I’m focusing on the why. So, if our youth, who are going to be our leaders one day, if they’re going to make a decision to go to war, sometimes maybe that’s necessary — but if you’re going to do that, know that this is what it looks like. And this is just scratching the surface of what it could look like. And there’s ripple effects to those decisions.