Warfare: Alex Garland & Ray Mendoza discuss brotherhood in their immersive war movie

As a writer and director, Alex Garland is used to inviting audiences into his distinct worlds, ranging from a zombie apocalypse (28 Days Later) and dystopian United States (Civil War) to a post-nuclear wasteland (Dredd) and an alien-infested environment (Annihilation). For his new war film, Garland entered a world that belonged to a former soldier, Ray Mendoza. The result was Warfare, an immersive new war film from writer-directors Garland and Mendoza. The film’s ensemble features D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai as Mendoza, with Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Joseph Quinn, Noah Centineo, and Charles Melton.

Warfare follows a group of Navy SEALs on a surveillance mission in Ramadi in 2006. The team takes control of a multi-level house in insurgent territory and hunkers down. The mission goes horribly wrong, and the SEALs are ambushed from all sides as they must fight to stay alive. The movie is based on the memories of Mendoza and those who survived the mission. Told in real time, Warfare is visceral, loud, and relentless, a thriller that never eases up in its depiction of battle.

In an interview with Digital Trends, Garland and Mendoza discuss the meaning of brotherhood, the movie’s distinct use of sound, and how they implemented long takes while filming.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Digital Trends: I wanted to start with one word — brotherhood. I feel like it gets thrown around a lot, sometimes to the point where it loses its true meaning. Ray, as someone who has served with the group, what does brotherhood mean to you?

Ray Mendoza: It’s putting the brother, the relationship, and the team before yourself. It’s a very sacrificial group, right? There are different types of brothers. You can do it in sports; you can do it in anything. If you’re going to say brother, it means you’re putting that thing before yourself. You need to do what’s best for the team and not yourself. So that’s what it means to me.

Alex, after making this movie, how have you looked at brotherhood differently?

Alex Garland: There’s nothing I could add to what Ray just said. I think for me, a lot of this film was not really about what I thought or what I felt. It was about what Ray thought and felt. So my inclination is to say, “That’s interesting,” and try to understand it as best as possible.

As a filmmaker, you’re used to inviting audiences into your worlds with the scripts you write and the movies you direct. You’re transporting people into a specific setting. For this movie, you’re being invited into someone else’s world. Did your approach change as a writer and director?

Garland: It really is an extension of what I just said. My job on this film was to just listen as carefully as I could to what Ray was saying. After that, listen to other voices, other people who were involved in this thing, and fold their experience into it, too. It wasn’t interpretive. It wasn’t that Ray was saying anything that I needed to get at or unpack what was underneath it. It was all being stated. It made me realize that often the problem with listening is actually just not listening. It’s more to do with you than it is to do with what the other person is saying and their failure to communicate it. Ray was communicating everything perfectly. … It was almost zen in some respects.

Ray, you said this is not only an immersive experience of warfare, but it’s a bridge of communication to talking about the subject of combat. When did you start to realize that you can communicate your ideas for a movie to tell a true story?

Mendoza: I’ve always realized that it was possible. Some directors or filmmakers choose not to use it as a voice, or maybe they want to focus on something different. I wanted to focus on a specific thing. Some directors don’t focus on that. They focus on other things. I’ve always done that on every movie I’ve worked on in some way. I build these things for directors or stunt coordinators, but I don’t get to choose what they shoot. I don’t get to choose what they edit, and sometimes, they gloss over the things.

Some of it is just ignorance, or just not knowing. They don’t know what to focus on, but it’s always there for them. Some people just don’t see it. He [Garland] was actually the first one to see it on Civil War. And I think that’s what separates them from other directors. It’s always been there for them. They just didn’t see it.

How did it feel stepping behind the camera to direct and write?

Mendoza: It was a breath of fresh air. It’s like starving for five days and someone throwing a piece of flesh in front of you. I just consumed it as fast as I could possibly consume it. It was just like, “Finally. Let’s f—— run. Yeah, we’re going to f—— run on this thing.” And we did.

One of the biggest things that stands out is how sound makes this movie so immersive. The gunfire, the screaming from the soldiers, the silence in the aftermath of an explosion — sound is its own terrifying character. What were your conversations with the sound designers and the mixers?

Garland: Well, I’m going to say that the conversations are broader than that. It’s not me in communication. It’s always at the very least me and Ray, or it’s Ray. The sound design team — I know them very well. I’ve worked with them for a long time. They also worked on Civil War. I’ve never not worked with them. They did the same thing, which was to listen carefully. Look, sometimes you get something wrong, and it gets redirected and reshaped.

I would say, though, that where the sound design stems from, in a way, is the approach to the filmmaking. So if you remove all music, the sound design steps forward. It takes prominence in the minds of the viewer and in the experience of the viewer. If you take time compressions out of a film, you will get the same silences that you get in real life. All of this creates an unfamiliar sound landscape for people, which is above and beyond the specifics of an explosion happening, or a jet flying, or things that might be dramatic in that moment. It’s broader, more complex, and more ambient than that. It really comes from trying to do something accurately and in real time.

Then there’s also the gatekeeper of the accuracy, which is Ray saying, “This is what the snap of a bullet sounds like. This is the difference between outgoing and incoming fire. No, don’t add that sub-bass to this thing to make it sound cooler; make it sound truer like this.”

Not everyone gets to cast themselves in a movie. Ray, D’Pharaoh plays you in the movie. After filming, did you two share a moment and talk about what happened? I’m sure it wasn’t easy at times to see it.

Mendoza: No. I had to wear multiple hats. Not only was I training them, but I was also directing them. I wore a lot of hats. With D’Pharaoh, that was a hard one because I was talking about things that I normally don’t talk about. I never really got to talk about what we all went through. It just got so busy. I never really had that dump of what he struggled with and what I struggled with. That’s a good question. I never did, but I think I should. Thanks for reminding me.

You went through a boot camp [with the actors]. Was it much easier to tell everyone else what to do and not really look at your own character in a way? You’re seeing it [the story] through other people’s eyes.

Mendoza: Yeah, I treated them all the same. They’re all equally useless. [smirks] No favorites. There’s a base knowledge that they all needed to use. We’re using real weapons. Safety is the priority. At the end of the day, it’s still a movie. It’s not worth someone getting their face blown off. I had to treat everyone the same. We’re all starting from zero. We’re going to be doing it very fast. We’re going to be tired, and I need everyone to be focused 100%.

For safety, that inherently makes the training stressful. I gave them a lot of autonomy, which I think was important. I wanted them to have ownership of it. Even for some of the rehearsals, we gave some parameters and objectives they had to hit. I created this hierarchy, which both functioned as ownership, but also somewhat blended into the movie. Organically, in the movie, there’s an officer in charge. There’s an assistant officer in charge, and so on and so forth. In the structure and training, I established that as well. I just thought it was important for them to have ownership of it.

Even to the point where the PAs wouldn’t wrangle up the guys, but it was Will and Charles. They were like, “Hey everybody, it’s time to go to set. Finish up, chow. You got five minutes left.” They owned it. The PAs were like, “This is great. I wish every movie was like this. They’re wrangling themselves. It’s great.” They were always on time, early. They were always there supporting each other. They weren’t back at the trailers. They were always there, and that’s because of Will and Charles. Those guys were really enforcing and embodying the team component. I gave them advice and guidance, but they kind of ran with that. It was really great to see.

With the extensive rehearsal process and the blocking of the scenes, I remember reading that you went through these long takes. It’s almost like theater. What were your conversations with the actors about how to treat each take? They can’t just be waiting for a cut. They have to go through this like they’re in a real battle.

Garland: Well, it’s a real-time story. Often in a script, scenes might be half a page or a page and a half and in different locations. In a way, there’s no sense of a 15-minute take because the scene itself is only a minute and a half, so don’t do it. Because this was real time, every time we could string scenes together, we did. It gave us large blocks of time we could work with. Different people would be doing different things in different areas. You might have the snipers looking through a loophole in one room, and then you’ve got Ray [D’Pharoah’s character] and the officer next to him having their conversation. There’s Joe Quinn in another room, and so it goes on.

What this film allowed us to do was to run everything concurrently. Because we had two cameras, we could have one room with the sniper group and a camera with D’Pharoah and Will Poulter in another room. As long as they weren’t catching each other in each other’s viewfinders, then all was good. So we did that a lot, and we would do these very, very long takes and string many scenes together and run them again and again and again.

We started that in the rehearsal process. It varied, but typically in the second half of the day, we would start running scenes. The first half of the day would be training, and the second half of the day would be running scenes. That rhythm was established. It had a very good extra element to it, which meant that the cast did not splinter and return to their trailers. They were essentially required all the time. That reinforced the culture that Ray set up at the start of the training process.

A24 will release Warfare in theaters nationwide on April 11.