An idea came to director Alex Garland on the set of his thought-provoking action extravaganza “Civil War.” Soon, the idea consumed him.
He was watching military advisor Ray Mendoza during a scene when our intrepid band of journalists finally infiltrate the White House. Garland had already been impressed with Mendoza – “seeing how much he understood about the way film sets work but crucially, how well he worked with actors and performers,” Garland told TheWrap. In that sequence in particular, his knowledge and precision extended to the editing process. “Something that came out of cutting it in a certain kind of way, which was to not have any time compressions,” Garland said. Instead, Garland wanted to “show the strange staccato rhythms of the sequence that Ray had created, with people who were themselves experienced with combat.”
Soon, the sequence took on a new shape – “silences, explosions of action, explosions of movement, explosions of violence and then reconfiguring themselves and slowing down and speeding up.” Garland found himself fascinated by the sequence, the way it ebbed and flowed. “I’m not sure people detected it necessarily when watching the film, but it has an interesting relationship with reality,” Garland said. The filmmaker behind “Ex Machina” and “Annihilation” said that he’d been interested in what “accurate presentations of combat would look like, removing certain kinds of cinematic devices and conceits.”
As Garland toiled away on the White House scene, he sent it to Mendoza for notes. He asked what – if anything – they were getting wrong, editorially, with the sequence. Mendoza gave notes and Garland adjusted the edit. At the end of the process, Garland proposed something to Mendoza. He asked, “Are you interested in taking an hour-and-a-half of combat and attempting, as faithfully as possible, to recreate it on film?” Garland laid out rules: they couldn’t substantially compress or expand the timeline and everything in it would be “allied to reality in one way or another, really by a first-hand account, of someone’s memory of something,” Garland said.
Thankfully, there was a story Mendoza wanted to tell. “We walked through it and we discussed how we might go about doing this and, really, we never stopped working together on the film,” Garland said. Garland and Mendoza sat together, compiling Mendoza’s memories, structuring the film and then going out to other people who were there, and compiling their memories into the script as well. “Until eventually we stood on a pretty extraordinary film set, almost like a location, and we were suddenly shooting,” Garland said, still sounding somewhat amazed.
The resulting film, “Warfare,” out this week from A24, is an extraordinary combat film – a you-are-there account of an operation in the Middle East that goes horribly sideways, leaving its young soldiers (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai stands in for Mendoza, alongside Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor, Joseph Quinn, Charles Melton and more) to fight their ways out of a truly compromised situation. The movie is stripped of virtually any artifice. There’s no music. No politics. No commentary. Just a siege, unfolding in real time, embroidered only by dust and blood and screams of agony.
Mendoza said that Garland had an extreme amount of knowledge when it came to filmmaking, which Mendoza would rely on when trying to dramatize moments that actually happened. There are moments, for instance, when Mendoza blacked out. “And there’s things that are missing – how do we convey that?” Mendoza said. “I have some ideas, but not nearly as many as he has.”
Mendoza occasionally found himself attempting to “explain things that are unexplainable,” especially when it came to the emotions of his experience. “Especially when it comes to combat and trauma, it can become pretty complex,” Mendoza said. These were things that changed his life and changed “the lens and how I view life.” “Dealing with those, reliving those, a lot of sensory recall stuff, it was hard,” Mendoza said. Still, he said he was surrounded by people who understood what he and Garland were attempting. “From all departments, all the crew, all the cast, when everyone knows that vision and we’re all working in concert to achieve an objective, it makes it easier,” Mendoza said.
In terms of divvying up responsibilities on set, Garland said that it is sometimes perceived that directors are issuing instructions, when in reality they’re answering questions. “People are saying, ‘What is this person feeling at this moment?’ Or, ‘Is this the right color curtain or is that the right color curtain?’ And it’s being in control of tone and it’s answering those questions in a clear way where possible,” Garland said. On the set of “Warfare,” Garland said, Mendoza often found himself dealing with the performers, along with the production design – “the reality of it.” “I don’t want to take anything away from production designers. They did some fantastic research and some very thoughtful, very careful, very considerate work, but I did not have the answers to those questions,” Garland said.
If an actor had a question, Garland said, it was pointless to ask him because he wasn’t there. “Ray was there,” Garland said. Garland said he worried more about the camera and “more technical stuff.” The photos that often get circulated of an actor having an earnest conversation with an actor? “That was Ray,” Garland said.
Mendoza said that shooting the movie was hard. There’s a moment when Woon-A-Tai is dragging Jarvis up the driveway. The actual person who Jarvis is portraying, Elliot Miller, was on the set. But he didn’t remember any of this happening. “I wanted to walk him through everything in detail. It was just right – the amount of smoke, the sound, the look, the scream, the struggle that he was having, the grunts that he was making,” Mendoza said. The real Miller started getting emotional. “It triggered these 20 years of trying to figure out how to coexist with his memory,” Mendoza said. Miller had to leave set. Mendoza also started to get emotional. And Garland had to take over for the rest of the day. This was one of many instances when memory and emotion and pain overwhelmed.
Still, Mendoza was heartened by all the support he felt from the cast and crew. “It takes trust to be that exposed with what you’re feeling. And I probably couldn’t have done it otherwise,” Mendoza said.
Garland said that the movie shot for 25 days, in sequence. That is incredibly quick, especially for a movie this technically complex. “For much of the shoot, aside from Ray, there were other people who’d been involved in this incident, who were coming and either observing or making their own contributions of their memories of a particular moment,” Garland said. “It’s a film shot in sequence on a very accurate recreation of physical space with the real people very close by.” Garland said it was hard to articulate “how intense, how strange, how often moving and complex that was to live through a kind of slow-motion recreation with the real people contributing. I’ve never been on a film set with an atmosphere like that.” More simply, Garland said, it was just really hard work.
“Everybody wanted to get this right. For Ray and the other guys that were there. Everybody went above and beyond. It was a highly unusual environment,” Garland said.
After all was said and done, Garland said, “Warfare” was “an absolutely wonderful experience.” Still, Garland stresses, what made it wonderful was Ray. “This was an extraordinary thing to have done with an extraordinary person,” Garland said. And he’s right – it is extraordinary. In a career filled with exceptional achievements, “Warfare” still feels special.
Not that it’s enough for Garland to back off his semi-retirement from directing, something he’s threatened for years but seems to be serious about. “My job at the moment is writing,” Garland said. He’s written two new “28 Days Later” movies – “28 Years Later,” directed by his frequent collaborator Danny Boyle (out this summer); and a sequel “28 Days Later: The Bone Temple,” from Nia DaCosta (out early next year). A third film is also planned, to once again be directed by Boyle.
But will Garland direct again, either by himself or with another director?
“I’ve always seen myself as a writer, so I do find writing very interesting. And I’ve been working as a director for a while now, and it was very rewarding to work in collaboration with Ray,” Garland said. “There’s also something quite interesting now, having learned some things about directing, about giving that up, and seeing what somebody else does with material, I see it differently. I perceived it one way, and now I perceive it another, and I have enjoyed it.”
“Warfare” opens exclusively in theaters on Friday.
