When Alex Garland first worked with Ray Mendoza, he was immediately struck by the latter’s precision and intuitive storytelling instincts. At the time, the pair were collaborating on Civil War, Garland’s blistering speculative fiction about, perhaps, the direction things could head in the U.S. Garland wrote and directed that movie, but Mendoza gave the violence in its title a ferocious believability as the military advisor. The way Garland tells it now, Mendoza even had a prominent hand in shaping the movie’s spectacularly kinetic, and chilling, climax wherein rebel forces shoot their way from room to room in the West Wing, culminating in the execution of an unnamed, tyrannical POTUS on the Oval Office floor. “In the editing of that sequence, I just tried to stick as closely as possible to what Ray had created with those soldiers in terms of the rhythms of it, and the strange silences or explosions of movement—the staccato quality of it,” Garland says while chatting alongside Mendoza with Den of Geek ahead of the release of their next film together, this time as co-directors: Warfare. “I actually sent that sequence to Ray, before it was locked, to say, ‘Do you think this is correct? Have we got it right in the edit?’” Garland continues. “And I remember he said, ‘No, you’ve left too long a gap between these two events. That gap should be shorter.” Garland, a perfectionist filmmaker on projects like Ex Machina and Annihilation, was impressed by Mendoza’s attention to the minute details. He was also impressed by Mendoza himself, a veteran who served as an American Navy SEAL for more than 16 years. So the ever-inquisitive storyteller asked if Mendoza had a personal experience in his time on SEAL Team 5 that could make for a cinematic experience. “Would you be interested in telling an account of real combat that lasted, let’s say, 90 minutes or 100 minutes?” Garland inquired at the time. “We would not take any liberties with anything inside that window. We could have no time compressions, no conflated characters or omitted characters. We would just try to recreate reality as closely as possible.” The answer, of course, was that Mendoza had several, and one in particular he’d been hoping to make for about a decade. He had Ramadi, and one of the grisliest firefights during the Iraq War, which occurred on a bloody morning in November 2006. “I have [long wanted to make this],” Mendoza says, “but I didn’t think it was going to be this big.” Introduced to filmmaking on 2012’s Act of Valor (2012), Mendoza has worked steadily in the movie industry for nearly 15 years, including as an advisor on films like The Outpost (2019), Jurassic World (2015), and Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor (2013). It was also with Berg that Mendoza previously attempted to tell the story of Warfare via the 2017 History Channel series they produced, The Warfighters. “It was initially going to be maybe a 30-minute recreation,” Mendoza explains. “If we were to get a second season, this story was going to be one of them that I told.” That didn’t work out, but for a veteran who knows all too well what it is like to compartmentalize his experiences during a war—and after it—Mendoza muses it was probably for the best. “I think it’s a mechanism for being able to function in a combat zone,” Mendoza says of his ability to close experiences, and memories, off. “You can’t really dwell on that stuff because you’ll become non-functional in an environment where you’re doing that every day. So it’s a survival mechanism, to push it down, compartmentalize it. But then when you get out, that’s how you think you’re supposed to do everything, because it works for you.” Mendoza speculates this common tool among veterans might be why relationships can struggle, or jobs can fall away. “You learn quickly that it doesn’t function in regular society. You have to communicate, you can’t just explode in anger because someone upsets you or disagrees with you.” But ever since he and Berg came close to telling Warfare’s story, Mendoza knew he would have to break down the walls he’d built around some memories. He would have to return to Ramadi. “Leading up to this, I was hyper-aware of what these feelings might do,” says Mendoza. “I think had I tried to do this movie 10 years ago, it wouldn’t have happened. I don’t think I would have been able to emotionally, physically do this. It took years of being able to process and be able to talk, of finding the vocabulary to describe these things without going into depression or isolating myself.” Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! It also allowed Mendoza to educate himself on the filmmaking craft, refining a skillset he believed necessary to bear what he called a “responsibility.” And the most remarkable thing about Warfare is he got not only himself, but most his surviving SEAL comrades who were in Ramadi that day to open up and recount their own memories to Garland and himself, providing a treasure trove of details that would immerse viewers into a 95-minute war film wherein you are buried into the dirt and debris of an Iraqi house that SEALs have commandeered while being surrounded by invisible enemy insurgents. And then the fire rages. Intriguingly, despite the meticulous research Mendoza and Garland pursued, they were adamant about not saying their movie is “based on a true story.” Even in the film’s opening insert cards of text, viewers are told the film is derived from “the memories” of the young men who were there. “We just felt it was the truest statement we could make,” Garland says. “What are we really working with? We had a handful of photographs and aside from that, it was memories.” Garland obviously had a little more, too, with the filmmakers obsessively attempting to recreate every detail they could find about that Iraqi home and battle, right down to even showing a photograph of the abode before the Warfare title card descends on it like a cloud. Yet in his quest for painstaking accuracy, Garland also wished to acknowledge the slippery nature of memory. Says the co-director: “One has to understand and embrace that memory is a subjective state. It’s imperfect, sometimes it’s in conflict with other people’s memories, and if we said this is a true story, it would actually have been disingenuous. In a film that was attempting to be as truthful as possible, that would have suddenly become an untruthful statement, strangely.” The filmmaker likens it to how two men can have memories of standing by someone else during a heated exchange of gunfire, but not remember who the other soldier was. That tunnel vision creates a riddle that Garland and Mendoza must solve by comparing interviews and notes. Sometimes though, two men can truthfully assert they both did the same action at the same moment. Neither is lying, but the literal fog of war and memory points to the elusive nature of the greater, allegedly objective truth. Be that as it may, bold choices made on Warfare intentionally cause it stand apart from its genre. For instance, unlike almost any other film made about the Iraq War, audiences never see the insurgents during the pitched battle. The only point-of-view and deaths that occur are the Americans trapped in a chokehold. “It was a COIN mission, which is a counterinsurgency,” Mendoza explains, “so there’s an insurgency and oftentimes, they’re not a uniformed enemy. They dress just like civilians. So it’s hard to differentiate. It just makes those decisions even more difficult, those shoot or no shoot scenarios, especially during the day when you don’t see muzzle flash.” For Garland, it was also about deprogramming himself from how war movies have taught audiences to understand the nature of violence. “One of the things that Ray and I and everybody who worked on this film was trying to do was to move away from the lessons that cinema has created in approaching the genre of a war movie,” Garland considers. “They create devices, and the device might be music, it might be soaring strings… but it’s also often to do with the line of sight of the enemy. It is a convention in gunfights that both sides are clearly seeing each other, because that’s helpful to cinema in some respects. But it’s not necessarily what gunfights are like. If both sides could clearly see each other, someone would get shot a lot quicker. The way these guys are trained and the way they operate, you can’t just stand there shooting at them. You will get shot.” The dedication to capturing the tension, and sometimes abject horror, of the day with an often clinical disposition makes the recent online backlash against the movie—virtually all of it from social media users who have not seen the movie—curious. Sight unseen, there are many who have attempted to dismiss Mendoza and Garland’s efforts by virtue of the film being an American perspective of the Iraq War. To which Garland has a blunt response. “Look, if you haven’t seen it, wait a beat. If you are minded to watch it, watch it and then have an opinion. This film is not propaganda. In some senses, it is exactly the opposite of propaganda. It is simply trying to say this happened. And you’re an adult, so make your own inferences from that.” The filmmaker, who’s been in the industry since seeing his first novel, The Beach, was adapted into a 2000 film by Danny Boyle, even muses it reflects how media has changed in the 21st century. “In the old days, studios were the self-appointed gatekeepers of what audiences could or could not understand,” Garland recalls. “And the phrase that often was used in relation to that was ‘dumbing down.’ Now that gatekeeping role seems to have migrated away from the studios to other places, and other people are attempting to be the gatekeepers.” Likening modern social media discourse to the times when executives would argue that filmmakers put too much faith in audiences’ sophistication, Garland adds, “Now that gatekeeper position has shifted elsewhere as a consequence of the nature of the way media has changed, I suspect, but the arguments and the issues remain the same. Ray and I were attempting to be truthful. There is a value in that. Somebody could say, you’re not truthful. That would be a legitimate position to take, but I don’t think it’s a legitimate position to say there is a requirement on you that you make your position clear. That I just disagree with.” There are deep, trenchant lessons about the Iraq War to be found in Warfare, but Garland doesn’t feel an obligation to spell them out. “I have probably learned more over the process of making this film than any other film I’ve ever been involved in,” Garland says. “Are those lessons signposted? No, because I don’t want to be infantilized. I assume that other people don’t want to be infantilized.” The hope is to experience a war movie that eschews the bombast and adrenaline high of the fictionalized Civil War. Instead this seeks to throw you into the muck, leaving you after the chaos is over to draw your own conclusions over what happened. Warfare opens in cinemas on April 11.