Billboard Women in Music 2025
A harrowing 2006 Navy SEAL mission in Ramadi, Iraq, comes to brutally authentic life in “Warfare,” the latest collaboration between “Civil War” director Alex Garland and military veteran Ray Mendoza.
At Tuesday’s U.K. premiere, the filmmakers revealed how their refusal to moralize about combat emerged from a shared commitment to truth-telling in a medium often prone to seduction.
The project emerged from Garland and Mendoza’s previous collaboration on “Civil War,” where Mendoza served as military advisor. During that production, Garland was struck by the authenticity Mendoza brought to a scene where soldiers navigate a corridor toward the Oval Office.
“It had a kind of electricity attached to it,” Garland explained during the pre-screening Q&A. “What I could see floating out was some truth, some reality about how these guys function.”
This observation sparked the idea for “Warfare” – expanding beyond “five minutes of fictional combat” to create “90 or 100 minutes of recreation, a sort of forensic recreation, of actual combat,” Garland said.
Mendoza, who survived the actual 2006 operation in Ramadi (about 70 miles west of Baghdad), chose this particular mission partly to benefit a fellow veteran who lost his memory of the event.
“There was one [story] in particular with Elliott Miller, played by Cosmo Jarvis,” Mendoza recounted. “When Elliott woke up, he immediately started asking questions about what happened, and it’s really hard to explain to him… he doesn’t have that core memory.”
After years of trying to convey the experience through maps and written accounts, Mendoza realized film might provide closure.
Both filmmakers praised A24, who produced the film alongside DNA Films, for enabling their uncompromising approach. “A24 [gave] us the economy and the freedom to do what we wanted,” Mendoza noted when explaining why the timing felt right. “Working with Alex, I felt it was right… I think we all decided that it was time and that everything was aligned.”
Garland emphasized the film’s commitment to avoiding editorial judgment. “Everything in the film, more or less, is sourced from a first-person account,” he said. “The film is just attempting to accurately recreate it.”
This approach stands in contrast to contemporary expectations, as Garland noted: “We live in a period where it’s very difficult to make any kind of public statement unless you position yourself in the public statement with what you think in relation to what is happening.”
The director added that this neutral stance allows viewers to “receive this as adults in their own way,” calling the alternative approach, which often comes with an agenda, “infantilizing and irritating, and I don’t want to be part of it.”
Garland also addressed cinema’s relationship with war: “Cinema has a very long history with making war seductive, and it doesn’t always do it intentionally… but broadly, war films are often seductive. That can be fine, that can be very enjoyable. It can be entertaining, but it isn’t always appropriate.”
The film features an ensemble cast, including Charles Melton, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Kit Connor, Joseph Quinn, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, and Michael Gandolfini.
“Warfare” opens April 11 in the U.S. and April 18 in the U.K.
