‘Warfare’ directors talk filmmaking process, capturing combat realism

Nov. 19, 2006 is remembered as hell on earth for Petty Officer Ray Mendoza and members of Naval Special Warfare Task Unit-Ramadi.

That day, Mendoza’s team was ambushed in a coordinated attack — a grenade, an improvised explosive device and a hail of small arms fire — shortly after setting up sniper overwatch in an Iraqi residence. By the time the team was evacuated, an Iraqi Army scout was dead. Two SEALs, including Mendoza’s best friend, Elliot, were severely wounded.

For his actions amid the chaos, Petty Officer Mendoza would be awarded the Silver Star, the third-highest decoration for combat valor. Now, that harrowing day in November 2006 anchors Mendoza’s feature directorial debut, “Warfare,” a film that unfolds in real time and is compiled entirely based on the memory of those who endured it.

To do the story justice, Mendoza enlisted the expertise of Alex Garland (“Ex Machina”), with whom he had collaborated on the 2024 blockbuster “Civil War” as the film’s weapons advisor.

Mendoza and Garland spoke with Military Times about the filmmaking process that followed, and everything that went into creating one of the most realistic depictions of combat ever made.

Read our review of “Warfare” here. Some interview answers have been edited for clarity.

‘Warfare’ is an intimate look at a major event in your life. How did this project come to fruition after all these years?

Ray Mendoza: I’ve pitched it a few times, but in the past it would have meant giving the idea to somebody and trusting them to do it right. I wanted to learn more in this industry, to see one day if it was even feasible to do it. That way, if it failed or succeeded, it’d be on me. So, I was just looking for the right opportunity to do it. Alex helped facilitate that.

Alex Garland: We wanted to take an hour and a half and try to recreate an instance of real combat as accurately as possible. Ray and I had worked together before and discussed whether there was a story he wanted to tell. This one had been on his mind for years.

RM: I would ask myself if I was ready, emotionally, to tell this story and expose myself like that, not knowing if it would be successful or resonate in the community.

So, I called the guys and said, “Hey, I want to do this for Elliot. Would you guys be a part of it?” I would only do it if they signed off. Then there’s trust with Alex, having worked with him on “Civil War.” I’ve worked with a lot of directors, and they have their message they want to put out. In those scenarios I don’t really have a lot of power. I’m an advisor. They can either take my advice or not, but they have their vision, and it’s not necessarily from the perspective of a veteran. But I knew Alex was receptive to that.

How were the creative processes shared between you two as you worked on this project?

RM: When it came to Alex and how we were going to work together — we’ve said this a few times: it takes a village, it’s teamwork. There were things I wanted to focus on — the battle rhythms of a firefight, the lulls, the peaks and valleys. There’s this silence, and then boom, it would just snap and pick back up.

That was my responsibility. And then Alex helped me figure out how we were going to extract those things. I wanted to show certain dynamics where, you know, if you spend enough time with a guy in combat, you don’t even need to say shit to him. I can just look at him, right? Sometimes he’ll smile, and I’ll know where he is mentally. If he’s just got that stare, I’m like, “Alright, I’m going to be the one making decisions on the next move.”

How do we capture that? Because there wasn’t going to be a lot of dialogue. So, Alex’s experience — teaching me what lens to use, how long to hold certain shots and then in the editing room — we really had to put all that together. I had the recipe and all the elements. His piece was helping me show it.

You mentioned minimal dialogue. Even though it was limited, the realism shined. How much teamwork went into that process?

RM: It was written down by Alex, but then we had to demonstrate how to say things — you know, me talking to you versus me talking on a radio or even to a pilot. There are different communication styles, tempos. I had to teach the cast that.

We also had a lot of help from Brian Philpot. He was a JTAC, and he kind of ran a comms course, going through all the verbiage in the script to get that rhythm down. A situation can be chaos, but when you hop on that radio, you have to get that composure, get out what you need to get out, then back to chaos. We put a lot of time into that.

Once the cast learned, we would just walk around like, “Hey, describe that street or that building. Talk this person onto a location.” Philpot would be listening and critiquing what they were saying and how they were saying it. A lot went into it.

The work showed in the cast’s delivery. How did they do with training, whether it be with dialogue or tactical elements?

RM: They were all sponges. You can’t replicate combat, but it was an intense crash course in weapons handling and safety. Even with these blanks, you can still hurt someone pretty bad. So, weapons safety was the priority.

I also had to identify who could shoot. If I had three months, I could teach everyone to shoot, but it’s tough in this time frame. It’s like the military — not everyone is good at everything. I just wanted to focus on this culture, create natural stress to get the brotherhood component. That’s just a matter of exposure.

If you’re patrolling at night and you’ve been around someone long enough you can tell who someone is just by the way they walk. You can almost predict what they’re going to do just based off their body posture. I wanted the actors to have that, so they spent a ton of time together. Some of the movements in the film — it’s because of that time together, all the practice patrols and being around each other.

How much time did the crew spend together?

RM: Training was three weeks, but then there’s five weeks of filming. But they spent every day together. It wasn’t like, “Oh, that’s a wrap, let me go back to my house.”

It sounds like a miniature deployment. Did you let them shower?

RM: Honestly I wish they would have fucking showered more. (Laughs)

But out of that, that brotherhood did take hold. I told them at the beginning to cherish that moment. “You’re gonna come out of this, and you’re gonna experience something that a lot of people don’t get to experience unless you join — and you’re getting paid to do this shit. This is fucking fun.”

I gave them a lot of autonomy, too. The weapon stuff is kind of easy. I can get someone from A to Z really fast. The goal was really more of, “I want you guys to really get to know each other, because you’re going to see your friend get his fucking legs blown off.” It’s immersive, and I think that paid dividends for us.

Even with that team dynamic, the moment the first casualty occurs in the film you see that no two guys react the same way to crisis. How much did your personal experience play into those details?

RM: All of it. In this particular scenario, you have to factor in outside variables like being concussed. Someone can be an awesome operator, a fucking machine, but then something like how close a grenade or claymore blast was can spiral you. Or maybe it’s being that close to death and surviving — it can startle you.

In this incident there’s an IED that goes off. So some didn’t ever get to recover during this fight. You just keep going deeper and deeper and deeper into that spiral. Within that team component, everyone wants to carry their own weight. When somebody can’t, that’s a scary feeling.

For me, it was dealing with black outs. One minute I’m here, the next minute I’m at that door. I remember walking up to the door at the end of the firefight and guys are giving me my gear back and they hand me three magazines. I was like, “When the fuck did I empty three magazines?”

I had been in a bunch of gun fights prior to that, but it was just that blast shock. Your brain’s like, “Alright, I’m taking over. You’ve done this a million times. I’m at the helm now.” And you start getting these gaps in your memory.

I really wanted to highlight that vulnerability and how, despite wanting to respond, sometimes your body’s like, “Nope, I just can’t do it right now.”

And then losing our Iraqi scouts, our medic was down, our LPO (lead petty officer) was down. At that point I think guys felt for the first time, like, if [the insurgents] wanted, they could bum-rush our building. We may kill a few, but we’re probably done. We were just combat ineffective at that point.

Depicting the fight in real time conveys that spiral vividly. How did you accumulate enough detail to compile an accurate 95-minute story?

AG: The whole process really is me listening to accumulate as much information as possible, which began with Ray. I spent a week with him, where he just downloaded everything he could and I made notes and listened.

And then we started to add to that with other people. There were gaps and blind spots, but slowly they’d get filled as we talked to more people. Sometimes memories would collide or contradict. That’s the nature of memory, because people develop tunnel vision in those moments. But slowly, all the missing elements seemed to get closed off.

The last missing element that was super confusing was that we had managed to get hold of some photos of this building taken shortly after this incident had happened. The photos were from Iraqis, not from the military. And there were some confusing pieces in the photos that became a good illustration of the way memory works.

The key one was that at the top of the flight of stairs there was what looked like a wall that had been knocked down. None of the people who were interviewed, including Ray, thought there was one there. It was really puzzling.

That was a bit of documentary evidence meets memory. That was typical of the difficulties of piecing this together. The night before we shot, we finally managed to speak to one individual, who is played by Joe Quinn in the film, and he explained that there was a wall they had to knock down. It was a house that had been turned into two apartments.

In another example, there were two machine gunners on a roof area. Each individual said, “I was there, and someone else was with me. But I can’t tell you who the other person was.” But through getting that same statement from the two, we were able to figure out who those guys were.

It was a lot of cross referencing accounts and a bit of detective work at times. But we were always trying to push towards truth. That’s the fidelity of this film, and why it exists in the way it exists. If we’d invented things, it would have the quality of invention about it.

The business was to listen and for Ray to explain and then tell everyone how to execute what was real, as much as possible. It’s not humanly possible to get it all right. But nothing was allowed to be in the movie that wasn’t verified in some way.

I’ve heard enough discussion about ‘Civil War’ to know cinema goers too often crave agendas versus simply accepting a film for what it is. What would you say to viewers of ‘Warfare’ who might be angling for it to make a statement?

AG: The film doesn’t have any sort of agenda. It’s just showing what happened. Everybody who worked on this film was not allowed to massage or alter anything. We were looking for total honesty, and to Ray’s immense credit and the credit of all those interviewed, they were truthful.

The only time I ever detected something that felt to me like untruth would be people slightly diminishing something about themselves in terms of their own courage. That’s cultural.

What that means is, in this film, you get a warts-and-all account. It is, in effect, neutral. It’s not proselytizing anything. It’s just saying, “This is the sequence of events,” and then it’s up to other people to act like adults and respond to it as they will, without us sticking helpful flags everywhere and saying, “This is what you should feel.”

Everyone wants an agenda. But there doesn’t have to be one in every film. We can just show something and talk about it. We were neutral, because the truth is neutral, and then you can take from that what you want.

Was bringing that truth out in this film — whether it was through instructing the actors or reconnecting with your teammates — a therapeutic experience?

RM: It was. Elliot was my best friend, and so when I saw him — that’s obviously something that lives in my brain forever.

Sometimes to function whenever something catastrophic happens, or even just seeing violence or death, you just push that down. You’re just like, “I have a job to do.” You compartmentalize everything over time.

Even in the case of this firefight, three days later we were all out fucking getting it again. You just don’t even have time to talk about it. You’re just packing more shit onto it. If someone else gets shot, you’re shoving that down, too.

But that monster is going to catch you one day. So, when I was looking at why I was making the movie I really had to ask myself if I was even ready. I called all the boys and told them, “I can’t do this without you guys. This is how I feel about it. What do you think?”

To make that decision and break that shell open — I knew it was going to hit me at some point, and it did. There’s a scene where D’Pharoah [Woon-A-Tai] is dragging Cosmo [Jarvis] up the driveway. We shot it a few times. Elliot was there on set. It was really his first time seeing what happened. We’d only described it to him to that point.

I remember how fucking hard dragging him was. I was like, “We’re both gonna get shot in the fucking face because I can’t drag you fast enough.” He’s a big dude, power lifter, had huge fucking quads and his whole kit on. I had my pack on.

I was halfway up the driveway and thinking, “That’s it.” I was breathing phosphorus in, my fucking lungs were on fire. I just couldn’t do it anymore. D’Pharoah captured it so well.

When Elliot first woke up in the hospital I was telling him about how hard that was. But when he saw it play out on set, he started crying. That just cracked it open for me right there. I called cut, then I ran off set and just cried for 10 minutes.

That needed to come out. I think we both needed to share that moment, as surreal and emotional as it was. That was probably, in a weird way, the only way that could have happened for me to let that go. I’d had a really hard time up to that point.

Read more about the story behind the film here. “Warfare” is now showing in theaters nationwide.