Alex Garland & U.S. Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza’s ‘Warfare’ Is “Unflinching”

It seems only right that a crowd of veterans were the first to see Warfare, U.S. Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza’s feature directorial debut, co-written and co-directed with Alex Garland.

On Wednesday night, A24 put on a special screening of the film at the L.A. American Legion Theater, with many of the real men behind the story present among the military community in the audience.

Warfare reunites Garland with Civil War military advisor Mendoza and this film plays out real events in real-time, based on Mendoza and his platoon’s experience on a mission in Iraq in 2006. When things take a very extreme turn, the Platoon must find a way out, with all of their lives hanging in the balance.

During a post-screening Q&A, Garland said of working with the veterans involved: “I’m a civilian and we hear about the military, and people sometimes think they understand, and they don’t. It was an honor, it was a privilege, I learned a lot and I’m very grateful.”

Mendoza said he first began thinking about telling this story when he was still on active duty, but there were many “moving parts” and due to the traumatic nature of the events, it took time and work to put it together. “There was a lot going on with this event and I didn’t understand how to describe it,” he said. “I didn’t understand, I didn’t have the vocabulary or the verbiage to convey it. I had to first understand what was physically going on and then just kind of emotional, spiritually, try to figure out how to communicate.”

Garland added, “It began with Ray and I sitting for a week, and Ray just unloading everything he could remember. And then we spoke to as many people as we could… These guys opened up, never tried to make themselves look good, never tried to self-aggrandize, really dug it into themselves to try and say what really happened and what the truth was.”

Warfare opens with a statement explaining that all events depicted are from memory alone, and both Garland and Mendoza worked with multiple people who’d been there that day to bring as much accuracy as possible.

“Memory is a complicated thing,” Garland said. “It is not like video, it’s not like photographs. It’s hugely affected just by time passing. But it’s also affected by stress, and it’s affected by trauma and it’s affected by concussion. So, there were many, many layers and reasons why memory was complex to work with, but it was also all we had. We had a handful of photos of the building and we had eyewitness accounts, and it began by talking to Ray and then slowly, one by one, we added another person, another person and another person… If for some reason, someone had stuck GoPros all over this house, and this appalling incident had been recorded, it would not be exactly the same as this. There would be discrepancies, that is the nature of memory. We knew that. We knew we couldn’t get it 100%, but what we could be was as faithful as possible to the memories. So that was the way we approached it. That was our forensic approach.”

On set, Mendoza was “an incredible teacher” Garland said. The film is, he added, “Unfiltered and it’s unflinching and it’s just truthful. And that’s him.”

Warfare is dedicated to U.S. Navy SEAL Elliot Miller. Miller himself joined the filmmakers on stage, telling Mendoza: “I would like to say thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you for making this movie and dedicating it to me. I like you a lot, but I’m not a talker.” With Miller were U.S. Navy SEAL Joe Hildebrand, U.S. Army Infantry Jeff Craft and actors Charles Melton and D’Pharoah Woon-a-Tai, who stars as Mendoza.

On screen, Miller is played by Cosmo Jarvis, who is joined in the cast by Noah Centineo (The Recruit), Will Poulter (The Bear, Midsommar), Michael Gandolfini (The Many Saints of Newark), Joseph Quinn (A Quiet Place: Day One), Kit Connor (The Wild Robot) and Finn Bennett (True Detective).

Warfare is set for release in theaters April 11.