The British filmmaker and screenwriter Alex Garland, who jumped into prominence with the tight, compact AI thriller “Ex Machina” 11 years ago, met U.S. Navy SEAL and frequent Hollywood military advisor Ray Mendoza on Garland’s most recent project, “Civil War,” released last year.
It was a movie about a divided nation on the brink of hopeless collapse. “Civil War” took some heat from every direction: Too one-sided? Too vague in its ideology? Too blunt? Too subtle? Too nervous about taking sides? The opinions were like a rhetorical firefight.
Still, “Civil War” found a theatrical audience, and Garland appreciated the unvarnished authenticity Mendoza brought to various, crucial scenes of military maneuvers under fire, notably in the climactic battle for the White House.
Their new collaboration is “Warfare,” opening on April 11. It’s a considerable expansion of duties for Mendoza, who co-wrote and co-directed with Garland. It’s Mendoza’s own story, or one of them, anyway: a retelling of a November 2006 firefight that took place in Ramadi, in Iraq’s Anbar Province, between a battalion of U.S. Navy SEALs and Al Qaeda insurgents. “Warfare” takes place in a close approximation of real-time, without the usual load of backstory or heartrending memories of home expressed in screenwriter-y language.
“Warfare,” Garland told me in a joint video interview recently with Mendoza, grew out of a conversation the two men had during “Civil War” post-production. The new movie is the answer to the question Garland asked Mendoza: “What if we were to take an hour and a half of real combat and try to forensically re-create it as simply and accurately as we can?”
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Alex, let’s start with you. “Civil War” and “Warfare” have different aims. Can you lay some of those out for us?
Garland: Sure. So, “Civil War”: fiction. It hardly needs saying, but let’s say it anyway. It’s a fiction film, with an aesthetic that was borrowing as much from documentary work and from news footage as it was from cinema, in some respects, and taking some things from the way those two different mediums are shot. This was in the camera work but also in some of the action. For example, I was (determined) that when people were shot in “Civil War” it wouldn’t look like a movie version of people being shot, where they’re sprung backwards by a cable and there’s a big fountain of blood. It would be more like they just collapsed. Like someone switched the lights out.
So the visual grammar of “Civil War “was quasi-documentary, quasi-authentic. And with a sequence like the soldiers moving down a corridor towards the Oval Office at the end of that film, Ray was choreographing what the soldiers did. My directive was very simple: Just do what you guys would do in real life. Ray had been a Navy SEAL for 17 years, and by that time was experienced in not just the military but with different film sets. From my point of view, I could see how Ray interacted with the actors playing the soldiers. And we edited some of that sequence in such a way that there were no conventional time compressions. So I guess you could say that within “Civil War” we were doing a tiny dry run of one of the elements of “Warfare,” presenting something in almost real-time.
Q: Ray, I wonder how your memories of what happened in real life, and how that was adapted for the film, may have meant finding a way to honor the reality but make certain adjustments for story flow?
Garland: We didn’t make any adjustments for story flow. Sorry to interrupt, but this is central to what we were doing.
Q: None?
Garland: No. That was the rule. I want to be really, really clear about this. If you’re familiar with the Dogme rules followed by some Scandinavian filmmakers 20 years ago or thereabouts, this was our Dogme rule: We were not allowed to adjust or invent anything at all. We could only include things that came from first-person accounts.
Now, there is a sort of fuzzy area in that that time is a complicated thing for in someone’s memories, particularly memories under stress. And memory itself is a complicated thing, where time and stress are concerned. We allowed space for the actors to work within. But if you see an event in the film, it will almost certainly have been sourced from testimony. We didn’t expand, invent or “create.” That was our Dogme rule.
Co-writers and co-directors Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland on the set of “Warfare.” (A24)
Q: Ray, was re-processing this experience of what you lived through a cathartic one? Or just very difficult?
Mendoza: I’d say both. But time has been a friend to me. I’ve spent many years talking to friends, talking to therapists and whatnot. My friends have been a huge safety net for me. If there was a perfect time to do something like this film, it was now. Five years ago, I didn’t have the maturity or the understanding of what was going on with physical injuries, emotional injuries. Stuff like that. Five years ago, I don’t think I had the strength or the vocabulary to describe what happened. There had to be trust there, for me to take that leap and go back into some dark areas. Coming off “Civil War,” that trust was there.
Q: I don’t remember the last war film I saw with so few thesis lines about what people are thinking and feeling. Alex, that seems completely intentional.
Garland: I’d call the dialogue situational, yes — focused on what’s happening at that moment. It’s not dealing with how someone’s girlfriend just split up with someone, or that this is someone’s last tour, or telegraphing the idea that someone’s methods are unorthodox but they get results. You know. Whatever bits of character work people usually try to slip into a narrative, what I would try to slip into a narrative, prior to this one. It meant trying to free yourself from lots of the devices of cinema. It sounds a bit zen, but our focus was simple: to unlearn, and just listen to Ray.
The sense of responsibility was huge, because we were dealing with real people, real events, incredible vulnerability and horror and trauma, the trauma that leads to actual PTSD. Ray and I talked again and again (before filming), and I kept saying: “Are you sure you want to do this? You can shut it down at any point, up to the moment we take money from the studio.”
It’s hard to express how much that feeling of responsibility came from the courage Ray was showing, the honesty with which he talked about (what he went through).
Q: Alex, with the reactions in every direction to “Civil War,” I wonder if you felt like you just couldn’t win. Already there’s been some of the same divided opinion on “Warfare.”
Garland: I get the discourse, I just don’t agree with it. It’s a particularly patronizing position. To say it’s crucial (a film) should tell audiences what to think as they’re watching it — that’s just odd for me. It used to be you had to smuggle stuff by the studios, try to trick the studios into letting you treat the audience like adults. It’s different now. It’s a phase, but it’ll pass. Like everything else. Our goal here was a sense of absolute neutrality. And any notion of signposting felt like a mistake.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
