Inside ‘Warfare,’ a Star-Studded War Film Unlike Any Other

Over a few harrowing hours in November 2006, 13 American Navy SEALs’ covert mission went traumatically awry. While surveilling the action outside an Iraqi apartment building, the group was unknowingly stationed next to an insurgent house. The location left them vulnerable to imminent attack. They were thrust into instant survival mode, left to navigate a live grenade, rapid gunfire, and an IED explosion. Some faced life-threatening injuries. Others were emotionally paralyzed.

We’ve got decades of evidence to back up what might be expected of a movie that dramatizes these events: the carefully interwoven character backstory, the sentimental glimpses of home, the score tuned up for maximum emotional impact, the cast of red-hot rising stars. A24’s Warfare (in theaters April 11), codirected by Civil War’s Alex Garland and Hollywood military adviser Ray Mendoza, has just such a lineup: The film stars The Bear’s Will Poulter, Heartstopper’s Kit Connor, Strangers Things’ Joseph Quinn, and May December’s Charles Melton. But otherwise, Warfare is not that film. In fact, it’s an exercise in achieving the opposite: total, unfiltered authenticity.

Mendoza was a part of the SEAL mission that inspired the film. He’s spent the 18 years since collecting the overlapping, diverging memories of that day from his brothers in combat. His experience in the military led him to a career in Hollywood about a decade ago, and more recently to Garland’s Civil War, where he helped the director realistically imagine how our own country might finally, fully tear itself apart. “There’s something that my industry routinely does in the way we present combat in cinema. It’s tricksy, and I was interested in what ways there are to get around that tricksy-ness,” Garland says. While making Civil War, he asked Mendoza about collaborating on a project where they’d have a specific goal: Take something that happened to you while you were serving overseas, and make it into a movie without any editorializing.

On the technical side, that meant “stripping out all tools that would be available normally in cinema,” Garland says. Warfare has no score. It has no narrative embellishment; each character is based directly on a SEAL who was actually in that Iraqi apartment, and each story beat is drawn entirely from memory. Which is to say that the film has a wide array of perspectives from people who experienced severe physical and mental trauma. “Even for me, it’s confusing reading 12 guys’ perspective of what happened,” Mendoza says.

Mendoza has wanted to tell this particular story for years. The sniper and medic Elliott Miller (played in the film by Cosmo Jarvis) has no recollection whatsoever of the events it depicts, and Mendoza and his friends have spent more than a decade explaining to him what happened, over and over. “I always felt like, Man, I wish one day I could just make a visual medium for him, even if it was just a low-budget, 30-minute doc on what happened,” Mendoza says. “I have a thorough understanding of what happened.”

Mendoza is played in the film by Emmy nominee D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (Reservation Dogs), one of our focal points in this chaotic, increasingly nightmarish portrait. “This is a traumatic experience in Ray’s life, probably one of the most,” the actor says. “To have this guy who I’m playing behind that camera and watching my every move—and a lot of times, you could say, remembering the same moments that happened—it was a lot of pressure on me to get it right.” When they first met, Woon-A-Tai and Mendoza bonded over their Native American backgrounds. It wasn’t until much later that they discussed Mendoza’s experience of the movie’s events. “He was very stoic [that day],” Woon-A-Tai says. “Once the shit hit the fan, something just switched in him and he went on autopilot. Emotions were kind of wiped out.”

Other primary characters include Connor’s young gunner Tommy, the newbie of the group; Poulter’s Captain Eric, the officer in charge; and Quinn’s Sam, the leading petty officer. We only get to know them through how they talk to one another, and how they react once the situation turns dire; there’s no sense of their lives beyond these apartment walls. Mendoza likens the filmmaking approach to taking a walk through a crowded party. “We’re creating this 360 world for them to just play it out,” he says. “Then we just strategically picked: All right, who are we going to pay attention to now in the room?”

Warfare’s stars—the cast also includes Michael Gandolfini, Finn Bennett, Noah Centineo, and Adain Bradley—began bonding in an intensive three-week training camp based on BUD/S, or Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL. They learned how to hold their guns, how to move under high-pressure situations, how to communicate via radio. But this was all secondary to their emotional education. “The primary thing was finding that natural, organic brotherhood,” Mendoza says. “When you put a group of anybody together and they experience something very difficult and hard and challenging, they have to rely on each other.”

So things started warmly enough. “It felt like a little frat boy house,” says Woon-A-Wai. Bulking was a priority for many. “The gentleman I represent, he’s a lot bigger and a lot stronger than me, needless to say, so I had to try and match his physicality as best I could,” Poulter says. “Which just involved a lot of eating.” Woon-A-Tai felt this to an even more extreme degree. “I’m a very slim kid, and I had to catch up to these other fucking great actors over here looking like Victoria’s Secret male models,” he says. “These guys, they know how to bulk up, they know what to eat, and that was a struggle for me.”

Nicknames followed in the spirit of the actual SEALs, merging their characters’ personas with their own. Woon-A-Tai was given a few monikers that he keeps to himself. Melton was called “Top,” after his father’s surfing nickname. “I don’t know if it’s because I was like the one reminding people about laundry and when food was ready, but I got called Daddy,” Poulter says with a laugh. “That was quite funny.” But then came the real, draining physical work: “We were all pushed further than any of us have been before, both physically and mentally.”

When it came to shooting, Garland and Mendoza favored long, visceral takes. They thought of each sequence like a mini-play, asking the actors to find a kind of realism while hitting precise marks. Garland could lean only on Mendoza and his colleagues’ memory to inform the production’s parameters.

“Eyewitnesses to events can disagree, and what seem like huge, immovable facts turn out to be quite fluid and subjective,” Garland says. “You are trying as hard as you can to be forensic and truthful, but you’re moving through this subjective space of memory.” Mendoza especially felt the weight of accuracy, of appropriately representing such a painful, personal moment for so many of his friends. “Some scenes were definitely triggering—even just a certain smell or a certain sound would pull on an emotional string,” Mendoza says. “It was definitely an emotional crusher for me at times.”

Midway through Warfare, events take a turn for the worse—some of the actors are suddenly playing people in critical condition, and it’s hard for viewers to get their bearings amid all the smoke, blood, and screaming. “It took a lot out of us,” Woon-A-Tai says. Poulter describes it as an experience where the fictional lines felt more blurred than is typical for an actor. “By the time we went through the three-week boot camp, I felt like I knew all of these guys for my entire life—so watching Joe Quinn in his state, watching Cosmo Jarvis in his physical state, the response isn’t something you really have to manufacture that much,” Poulter says. “It feels very, very real.”

Warfare’s conceit means that the audiences’ viewpoint remains intentionally narrow from beginning to end. You’ll hear references to “jihadists” and insurgents going after the main characters. You’ll see only glimpses of the terrorized Iraqi family whose home has been taken over, left to hide as it faces total destruction. Past depictions of the Iraq War, even those pitched explicitly as anti-war, have been criticized for their American-centric perspectives, and Warfare only leans in more along those lines. Did the filmmakers consider this as they developed the movie?

“It’s a completely legitimate question, and the answer to it goes to the reliance on memory,” Garland says. “The conclusion I would draw, having spoken to these people, is that the person you are talking to is someone who is remembering a moment where they had an intense tunnel vision…. It would come down to our refusal to get into editorializing. If this film has power, that is where the power is derived from, I think.”

When Poulter was first pitched Warfare, he hesitated. “The only thing that dampened my excitement learning that it was a war film—only because I didn’t know what the agenda was, that it wouldn’t necessarily follow suit as far as how war has been depicted previously. I should have known better,” he says. “Alex described an intention that was characterized by wanting to achieve absolute authenticity, create something that felt entirely objective—a sort of unfictionalized, realistic recreation of what happened that day.”

Indeed, if nothing else, Warfare feels real. This was certainly the case for the young cast—how the project required them to forge deep bonds that they hope carry them through the rest of their careers.

The film opens on a joyous note, of the SEALs watching the sexy music video for Eric Prydz’s “Call on Me.” This, like everything else in Warfare, was drawn from memory. As production approached its end, several of the actors got matching “Call on Me” tattoos to commemorate the experience—and also make a promise to each other. “Symbolizing that we can call on each other, really—it sounds a little corny and cheesy, but it’s referencing a few different things,” Woon-A-Tai says. “It goes pretty deep. We can call on each other, no matter after this project, anytime. We’re very close to each other and we’ll be there for each other.”