Alex Garland’s Warfare is the least fun you’ll ever have in a cinema

It’s rare when conducting interviews in five-star London hotels that a filmmaker will ask with complete sincerity if anyone’s fired a gun at you. I’m sitting face to face with Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza, the co-directors and co-writers of Warfare, a punishing war movie from A24 that strives for realism, not entertainment. Placing viewers amidst bullets, explosions and the total, utter horror of being present during the Iraq War, the action sequences are substantially more distressing than the climax of Civil War, the duo’s previous collaboration.

Set in Ramadi, mostly on one day in November 2006, Warfare is based on real events – or, as the credits put it, “the memories of those who lived it”, one of whom was Mendoza. A former Navy SEAL for 16 years, Mendoza has been a military advisor on projects ranging from Jurassic World to Civil War, the latter written and directed by Garland. With Warfare, are they attempting to correct inaccuracies from previous depictions of combat?

“I hear people say that the film is accurate,” says Mendoza. “Have you served in the military?”

I shake my head.

“Have you ever been shot at?” says Mendoza.

I shake my head again.

“I’m curious why you think it’s accurate,” says Mendoza. “I ask myself that, when people say, ‘Oh, it’s accurate.’ I’m like, ‘How do you know that it is?’”

I offer to retract my use of the word “accurate”.

“It’s fine,” says Mendoza. “It’s just something I’ve been asking myself.”

“It’s probably, Ray, because we tell them it’s accurate,” says Garland, the 54-year-old British filmmaker behind Ex Machina, Annihilation, Men, and Civil War. “And then they take that on good faith.”

You might think you know what an A24 movie is going to look like. A fashionable cast, a blast of nostalgic pop, a storyline whereby the main theme is revealed to be trauma. Warfare delivers on those fronts, sure – the cast comprises pretty-boy actors, many from Netflix YA romcoms like Heartstopper and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, all of whom are introduced singing along to Eric Prydz’s “Call On Me”, and it’s arguably Trauma: The Movie – but it’s unlike anything else from A24, including Civil War. “A24 gave us total freedom,” says Garland. “It’s very difficult for me to consider making a film where there isn’t final cut.”

A group of American Navy SEALS – they include Joseph Quinn, Will Poulter, Kit Connor, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Noah Centineo, Cosmo Jarvis and Charles Melton – embark on a surveillance mission in Ramadi, which means taking over a distraught Iraqi family’s house. Unbeknownst to the US soldiers, they’re discovered by a nearby insurgent building, which leads to Al Qaeda forces retaliating with guns and grenades. The American characters – it’s told from their POV – need to, somehow, make it out alive, even when a number of them are bleeding profusely, limbs dangling loosely.

Without any score or character backstories, Warfare unfolds in what feels like real time through long takes, never rushing through a shot or turning away when someone’s insides are spilling out. Moreover, there’s hardly any dialogue, unless you count Quinn’s persistent, piercing screaming after his character’s leg is partially blown off. Warfare might be, then, the least fun cinema experience I’ve ever endured, which is what Garland and Mendoza intended. At an IMAX screening held for press, the sound levels were painful.

“It should be loud,” says Garland. “Those guns, if you’re standing near them, they’re fucking loud. It would be irresponsible for us to make this easy.”

“If you’re finding it difficult, I like that you felt that,” says Mendoza. “That’s what I felt in real life.”

Mendoza reveals his motivation for Warfare as being Elliot Miller, a medic and sniper with no memory of the day. On screen, Mendoza and Miller are played by Woon-A-Tai and Jarvis. “I’d try to explain it or draw a map for Elliot, and it’d create more questions,” says Mendoza. “The details in the film come from my desire to recreate it for Elliot and other veterans watching it.”

In terms of co-directing, Garland credits Mendoza for the “authenticity”, while he handled the traditional cinematic grammar. The pair met when Garland hired Mendoza for guidance on the White House takeover in Civil War. Once Garland heard Mendoza describe the day portrayed in Warfare, they set about on a screenplay – each story beat is based upon conversations with Mendoza and his former SEAL team. Whereas Civil War lost some of its power from its fantastical, hypothetical situation (it involves California teaming up with Texas), Warfare reminds you of the real lives that were lost, not just American ones.

Warfare, though, doesn’t go into the politics of why the US are invading Iraq, and Garland himself is keen to avoid the topic in our interview. “There’s a sort of neurotic emphasis on explaining where you stand in regard to anything you put out into the world,” says Garland. “It’s really just to reassure journalists or members of the public of your stupidity or your correctness, depending on where they happen to sit on a spectrum. For me, it’s problematic, because if every single statement comes with an agenda, then it’s very hard to trust anything, in the same way that Fox viewers don’t trust CNN, and CNN viewers don’t trust Fox News. It becomes a whirlpool of distrust.”

“There’s a sort of neurotic emphasis on explaining where you stand in regard to anything you put out into the world... It’s really just to reassure journalists or members of the public of your stupidity or your correctness, depending on where they happen to sit on a spectrum” – Alex Garland

Garland describes the film as adopting a “neutral position”, which he defines as “attempting to be as honest as it can”. He adds, “Personally, I have an expectation that most adults already know something about the Iraq War, and don’t need a whole set of explanations about it. They arrive with some knowledge of the world they live in.”

However, Warfare, as with any piece of art, can’t entirely adopt a “neutral position”. The American soldiers are played by heartthrobs whose anguish is amplified by cinema speakers; in a counterargument, the film ends with Iraqi civilians inspecting the wreckage of their home, as if emphasising them as the victims. Or perhaps it’s none of that at all. After all, Garland wishes for viewers to draw their own conclusions – a philosophy that can feel contradicted slightly by the film’s real ending.

Before the final credits, there’s behind-the-scenes footage of how Warfare was made, as well as side-by-side photographs of the actors and their real-life counterparts, many of whom have their faces blurred. I tell the duo that the montage felt like I was watching a mini-documentary about the film before the film was actually over.

“A few people have expressed a problem with those images,” says Garland. “Film is a subjective thing. Your response is your response. For me, those pictures and film clips were very important: here’s a film which is taking an unusual effort to be accurate about combat. Most films don’t do that. This is genuinely a very unusual film in the landscape of films.”

“But it is not the real combat. It is a recreation. It was on a film set. Nobody was getting their legs blown up. The damaged leg was a prosthetic. The explosion was controlled. It’s like a final piece of honesty, to say that these are actors, but they represent a real person. Everyone you see has a real-world parallel. Some of those guys were on set demonstrating what they did, and how they did it, and it’s like the final true statement we can make at the end of the film.

“Without that, I almost feel like we would have been guilty of stepping out of the room in a state of illusion, that somehow this now was the event. But it’s not the event. It’s a movie.” He pauses. “It’s a well-intentioned movie that’s trying to be as honest as possible. I understand why people misunderstand it. But when I see the way people misunderstand it, I can see their own prejudices.”

But, sometimes, don’t you want to leave a film alone with your own thoughts? “Sometimes you do,” says Garland. “But then what are those thoughts? Can you hold an extra thought on top of that? Listen, it’s subjective. But to me, the absence of those images would be almost disingenuous.”

Warfare is out in UK cinemas on April 18