Breaking the formula of conventional war movies, Warfare pulls no punches in its frank and visceral depiction of young men under fire. “Reality doesn’t let people off the hook; when things are tough, there isn’t a dissolve or a cut or some music to cheer you up,” says writer-director Alex Garland of his approach to making the movie. “You remain in that state until circumstances relieve you from pressure or the moment, and that’s what Warfare does — it adheres to reality, not the reassurances of cinema.”
From writer-directors Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza, arriving one year after Civil War, comes an immersive and electrifying new take on the war movie, created from the memories of real-life Navy SEALs, including Mendoza himself, from a dangerous mission in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006.
Warfare takes place in real-time, using extended takes, meticulously constructed sets, and unmatched
realism to capture the fog and chaos of war, and the indelible brotherhood that develops in its wake.
“We made this film,” says Mendoza, a combat veteran who worked with Garland to design the battle sequences in Civil War, “as a reminder to the people who make the decisions to go to war that there are people that will answer that call so that others don’t have to — and usually it’s the youth of America.”
“Warfare breaks with convention and dispenses with romanticization in its depiction of war and what it feels like to be under fire,” says Will Poulter, who plays an Officer in Charge of the operation. “Playing out like a transcript from found footage, the movie gives people a more authentic understanding of being in a combat environment under intense pressure.”
Warfare is also a moving tribute to wounded SEAL Elliott Miller, whose daring evacuation from a Ramadi apartment building forms the heart of Garland and Mendoza’s pulse-pounding story. Miller, along with several other SEALs who took part in the operation, were on set as the movie filmed, reconstructing their collective experience and offering Miller a glimpse of what he could not see on that fateful day.
“This film is not only an immersive experience of warfare, but also a bridge to communication about the subject of combat,” says Mendoza. “Oftentimes a veteran or active military person wants to talk about war, or a loved one wants to understand it, but conveying the confusion of combat or seeing a friend
wounded — those are hard things to talk about.
“Memories come rushing back, sometimes closure and understanding follow,” Mendoza adds. “We were young when we fought in Ramadi and didn’t have the tools or the dialogue to talk about these things until 20 years later.”
The Art Of Collaboration
Two decades after the Ramadi evacuation, and retired from the Navy, Mendoza found himself in another career, working as a Hollywood stunt man specialising in choreographing gunfight sequences in action movies. Through a stunt coordinator, he met writer-director Alex Garland and became a consultant on
Civil War, designing battle scenes, including the assault on the White House that closes the movie.
While doing preliminary blocking on the final sequence, Garland and Mendoza realized how well they worked together.
The collaborators had become friends, and halfway through filming Civil War, Mendoza shared Elliott Miller’s story, which was never far from Mendoza’s mind.
“After I left the Navy and started making movies, I kept returning to Elliott’s story,” says Mendoza, who carried the unconscious SEAL to the rescue tank that ultimately saved his life. “Elliott doesn’t recall what happened that day in 2006, but his fellow SEALs on the mission do. I wanted to track down and collect everybody’s memories and perspectives from the day in question, to create a living document that would give Elliott the ability to see and experience what happened during the operation.”
Crafting The Screenplay
Garland decided to make Mendoza his co-writer and co-director on his follow-up to Civil War — but first they needed a script.
After Civil War wrapped in 2023, Garland and Mendoza sat down together for a week in Los Angeles to break down Elliott’s story. Garland transcribed while Mendoza recounted, minute by minute, the story of the Ramadi operation.
They conducted a series of interviews with Mendoza’s former SEAL team, building out key memories and incidents until the transcript took the shape of a screenplay. Other characters were also interviewed, with their memories of the operation depicted without editorializing as they were recounted to Garland and Mendoza.
The co-writers set rules for themselves not to embellish or dramatise story events for effect — to make
it as true reportage as possible.
“This was an unusual process and not like any other writing job I’ve been involved with before,” says Garland, whose screenplays include 28 Days Later, Ex Machina, and Annihilation, as well as several acclaimed novels.
“This film is specifically not editorialising — it’s not the job of the filmmakers to make those kinds of decisions because it is from the perspective of the people who experienced the memories. If there was a memory of something happening and the memory could be verified, it went into the story. That’s the goal of this movie — to listen to the people who were able to impart their memories and recount their stories.”
A Forensic Approach
Describing the process as a “forensic approach” to storytelling, not unlike investigative work, Mendoza and Garland rebuilt the story from the ground up, embracing authenticity at every turn.
“Everybody’s got a different perspective — certain memories, especially traumatic ones, became conflicted when other people started joining the interviews,” says Mendoza.
“Memories become compartmentalized over time. Stuff these guys had forgotten for 20 years started pouring out, triggering other recollections, which became a rush of information and recall.”
Creative license has been a hallmark of true-life military-themed movies since the dawn of cinema, most notably in the modern age, in studio spectacles like Saving Private Ryan and Dunkirk, which showcase emotionally heightened moments.
The co-writers debated whether they should categorize Warfare as a true story, acknowledging early in the process that memory is imperfect.
“We were not inventing people or reordering events here,” says Garland. “When you look through the timeline of what the SEALs were saying happened, we had to forensically piece together events — until a point arose when we had enough information from multiple sources to decide how we would tell it onscreen.”
Once the script was complete, the pair set about finding the right actors to fill the roles of Mendoza’s brothers in combat.
“We co-wrote and co-directed Warfare, but my duties on this project became more technical and logistical,” says Garland.
“The heart and soul of the story, including working with the actors, became Ray’s job.”
Warfare filmed in a suburb north of London on a former World War II airfield repurposed as a 100-acre film & TV studio. Unfolding in a close approximation of real-time, and aside from a brief male-bonding prologue in the SEAL barracks and some late-night drone shots, the movie plays out in and around the apartment building where the SEALs are fired upon by Al Qaeda operatives.
The Filmmakers
Ray Mendoza joined the Navy in 1997 and served for over 16 years as a Member of SEAL Team 5 and a Land Warfare Training Detachment and BUD/s instructor. Ray was introduced to filmmaking while performing in Act of Valor and went on to serve as a Military Advisor on Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor. Since then he has worked both in front of and behind the camera on multiple projects. He produced the documentary series The Warfighters and The Selection for History® Channel. Ray is especially proud of
The Warfighters for which he employed more than 90 Veterans across multiple military branches on the production. Ray’s vast experiences in entertainment and special operations are the perfect blend to bring authentic stories of our men and women in uniform to the screen. Recently, he was the military advisor on Civil War in which he worked with Alex Garland, which then led to them collaborating on their current film Warfare, which they both wrote and directed.
Alex Garland began his career as a novelist, most famously writing The Beach and The Tesseract. He moved into screenwriting with his debut 28 Days Later, directed by Danny Boyle and produced by DNA Films. Garland made his directorial debut in 2015 with Ex Machina, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award® for Original Screenplay along with a BAFTA award for Outstanding British Film, and
BAFTA’s Outstanding Debut by a British Director. In 2018, Garland released his second film as writer-director, Annihilation, based on the 2014 novel by Jeff VanderMeer. His other screenplays include Sunshine, Never Let Me Go, Dredd, and the video game Enslaved: Odyssey to the West which he co-wrote with Tameem Antoniades in 2010. Garland also executive produced 28 Weeks Later. His original 8-part TV series Devs, for which he is the sole writer and director, was released in 2020 by FX Networks. Men, a psychological horror, and Civil War, a dystopian action thriller, were written and directed by Garland and released by A24 Films. Garland most recently wrote and produced 28 Years Later and wrote and directed Warfare.
