SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers for Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza‘s “Warfare,” now in theaters.
The key to pulling off “Warfare,” the new war film directed by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza, was to keep it as real as possible based on Mendoza’s — and the rest of his American Navy SEALs crew — memories of a dangerous 2006 mission in Iraq.
That sentiment couldn’t ring more true than during the gruesome and heart-wrenching IED explosion scene, which features a group of soldiers fighting for their lives after an explosion goes off as they head outside their station. To actually create the sounds, the team traveled to the Czech Republic to record the live sounds of gunshots and bullets.
“We had some information from Ray and his memory about how different explosions sound: some of them have a crack, some of them have more of a boom-y impact,” Oscar-winning sound designer Glenn Freemantle tells Variety. “One of the things he talked about was the rush of air with sound. We had to try and get as much power out of that as an explosion. And it’s not just about turning it up, it’s about having all the correct elements in place.”
When the explosion goes off, Garland switches between perspectives as the men are flung onto the ground, struggling to make sense of their surroundings. “Some of them were hearing nothing, some of them experienced tinnitus, some of them were hearing the cracking and popping of their eardrum,” Freemantle says.
While the moment features the film’s loudest boom, between the “show of force” flyover and Joseph Quinn’s gut-wrenching screams, for Freemantle and supervising sound editor Ben Barker, it was also important to capture the eerily quiet moments of anticipation right before everything goes wrong. “Ray says that it was so quiet that you would hear scratches of heads and of pens on notepads,” Freemantle recalls.
To bring the sequence to life, production designer Mark Digby built a 360-degree set on an old airfield at Bovingdon Airfield Studios by using reference images from Google Earth and Ray’s own recollection. This included the outside street, where the explosion first happens, as well as the interior of the house when the wounded soldiers are dragged back into the kitchen while the battalion takes cover.
“The traditional way of doing it would have been to build the exterior of the street as a backlot and then, once we step up to the threshold of the house, go into a studio,” Digby says. “But for the practicality of both the timing and resources and to also allow for realism in the acting, it was very important to render it inside and out as one singular building.”
Since the film was mostly shot in order and all the sets needed to be complete by Day 1, Digby had a quick turnaround to “dress the aftermath of the explosions” with debris and blood when Garland asked for multiple different angles of the same moments.
“The way we did that was to take a mold of our pre-damaged wall, take it away and rebuild that in plaster. We decided that straight after the explosion, we would slick off the good wall and then put back in our damaged wall,” Digby describes. “It was like a lego kit.”
For Oscar-winning prosthetics designer Tristan Versluis, the IED explosion scene was the makeup department’s “key moment.” One of the most brutal instances comes when one of the soldiers, Elliott Miller’s (Cosmo Jarvis), leg gets severely injured in the blast.
In order to create the silicon leg, Versluis and his team completed a digital scan to get a 3D model of the actors before adding in skin textures and details. They also referenced real-life pictures from Elliott’s sustained injuries to then “work backwards.”
“There’s a moment where they have to turn the corner to get into the house and Elliott’s leg snags on the edge of the brick wall,” Versluis says. “The silicon leg had to be broken at the right place and bent at the ankle to look twisted. And then we made a fake body and dragged it around. It was really quite horrible.”
Since Versluis and Digby previously worked together on “Ex Machina” and “Annihilation,” their collaboration with Garland flowed naturally in terms of having to accommodate each other’s needs. For example, Versluis says: “With the prosthetic legs, the actor’s legs were buried under their set so we needed to make sure there was a hole in the set.”
While the crew was used to having Mendoza on set and relying on his experiences, Versluis says that months after shooting, everyone still recalls the “powerful” experience of having Miller visit the set.
“When he came on set and looked around, everyone was on edge and slightly nervous, because it was like, ‘Have we got this right?’ And it was also quite upsetting because it was the first time he’s revisited that moment,” Versluis says. “To have one of the real soldiers come and revisit this horrific day — I’ve never had that experience before. That was once in a lifetime.”