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'Warfare' is based on the true story of a Navy SEAL team that fought in Iraq. The directors made it for a soldier who doesn't remember how he lost a leg.
Murray Close / Stewart Cook / A24 via Getty Images
- A24's new movie "Warfare" is based on the memories of a Navy SEAL team's skirmish in Iraq.
- The film, directed by Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland, recreates the operation to harrowing effect.
- Mendoza said he made the film to show it to an injured comrade, who doesn't remember the incident.
Ray Mendoza, a former US Navy SEAL, joined Hollywood on a specific mission β to recreate a failed military operation during the Iraq War for his comrade, Elliott Miller, who doesn't remember the incident.
In November 2006, Mendoza, a communications officer, and Miller, a sniper and medic, were part of an operation to infiltrate and surveil a neighborhood in Al Qaeda-controlled Ramadi, Iraq, but their team was unaware they'd set up a hideout next to a house full of insurgents.
Once Mendoza's team was discovered, there was a shootout, and their first attempt at evacuation was thwarted by an explosive that severely injured Miller and another SEAL. It took hours for the team to return safely. Due to his injuries, Miller lost a leg and suffered a brain injury that took his ability to speak and memory of the incident.
Mendoza told Business Insider that although he and the other SEALs had recounted the operation to Miller since that day, he wanted to show Miller what happened visually.
"If you don't have a memory of something, it could be often frustrating when everybody else remembers except you. It's only been in the literary form for him," Mendoza said.
Monica Schipper / GA / The Hollywood Reporter via Getty Images
Mendoza's mission is now complete with A24's new movie "Warfare," which is in theaters now. The film marks Mendoza's directorial debut alongside Oscar-nominated director Alex Garland, whom he worked with as the military advisor on his 2024 film "Civil War." Garland was so impressed by Mendoza at the end of working on "Civil War" that he asked Mendoza if they could make a war film based on a true story together.
Mendoza knew immediately that he had to tell Miller's story.
"I was ready not only from an experience standpoint, but I think emotionally being able to start to unpack a lot of these things, speaking with my friends, seeing how they felt about it if they were ready to unpack [it]," Mendoza said.
'Warfare' puts a new spin on the war film genre by basing the movie on peoples' memories
A24
Though "Warfare" is based on real events, many of the details were murky as Mendoza and Garland spoke to people involved and third-party sources to create a timeline to base their movie around.
Because the event occurred almost two decades ago, many peoples' memories weren't exact.
"You have two guys involved in a machine gun fight and both of them say, 'I know someone else was up there with me, but I can't say who it was,'" Garland said. "More complex was when two people both remembered doing something in a first person way. So both said, 'I did this' and neither of them are lying."
By talking to everyone, Garland said he and Mendoza could piece together what happened like a "strange jigsaw puzzle."
Once the timeline was set, Garland and Mendoza said they laid down a "dogma-like" rule not to divert from it while filming except for minor actions not related to the overall plot.
"If an actor said, I'm motivated to do this, and that character didn't do it, then the actor wouldn't be allowed to do it," Garland said. "What you are seeing at all points is a representation of memories of people."
The film's opening scene, in which the SEALS gather to mosh to the music video for Eric Prydz's 2004 song "Call on Me" before heading out into the streets of Ramadi, was real, too.
"We didn't come up with that until maybe halfway through the movie," Mendoza said, adding that it was a good way to emphasize the characters' youthfulness and make it clear when the film is set.
"It was a ritual of ours."
Hollywood's rising stars were cast for their authenticity β not their internet boyfriend status
Murray Close
The "Warfare" cast is stuffed with up-and-coming actors from buzzy movies and TV shows, including "Stranger Things" star Joseph Quinn, "Heartstopper" heartthrob Kit Connor, and Marvel It Boy Will Poulter, among others.
While this may seem intentional, Garland told BI his buzzy cast was an incidental consequence of needing young yet established actors for the film.
"We didn't really have an audition process, so we were typically going to actors that we knew," Garland said. "We had a very tight schedule with very extreme demands on that tight schedule. And so a degree of experience on set, not just in the cast, but really, really heavily demonstrated as well in the crew, was super helpful for getting it done."
"Reservation Dogs" star D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, who plays Mendoza in the movie, said casting young actors contributed to the film's overall authenticity.
"These are very young guys who are on the front lines of wars," Woon-A-Tai said. "A very important thing that audiences take away is how young we all look, how young they really were that day, because we didn't Hollywoodize nothing."
"They were so young to have even been where they are, which is not something that before this I would've ever thought of a Navy SEAL," Cosmo Jarvis, who plays Miller, added.
While the film was specially made for Miller, Jarvis said one of his favorite moments was watching Mendoza come to terms with his own memories when they first walked through the set, which was a perfect recreation of the entire street where the skirmish in Iraq occurred.
"We were watching Ray watch where he was when he was a younger man," Jarvis said. "It was just quite a profound event to be walking down somebody else's memory lane."
Additional reporting by Caralynn Matassa.
"Warfare" is in theaters now.
