WhenAlex Garlandfirst worked with Ray Mendoza, he was immediately struck by the latters precision and intuitive storytelling instincts.
Have we got it right in the edit?
And I remember he said, No, youve left too long a gap between these two events.
That gap should be shorter.
Garland, a perfectionist filmmaker on projects likeEx MachinaandAnnihilation, was impressed by Mendozas attention to the minute details.
Garland inquired at the time.
We would not take any liberties with anything inside that window.
We could have no time compressions, no conflated characters or omitted characters.
We would just have a go at recreate reality as closely as possible.
It was initially going to be maybe a 30-minute recreation, Mendoza explains.
So its a survival mechanism, to push it down, compartmentalize it.
Mendoza speculates this common tool among veterans might be why relationships can struggle, or jobs can fall away.
You learn quickly that it doesnt function in regular society.
You have to communicate, you cant just explode in anger because someone upsets you or disagrees with you.
He would have to return to Ramadi.
Leading up to this, I was hyper-aware of what these feelings might do, says Mendoza.
I think had I tried to do this movie 10 years ago, it wouldnt have happened.
I dont think I would have been able to emotionally, physically do this.
And then the fire rages.
We just felt it was the truest statement we could make, Garland says.
What are we really working with?
We had a handful of photographs and aside from that, it was memories.
Yet in his quest for painstaking accuracy, Garland also wished to acknowledge the slippery nature of memory.
Says the co-director: One has to understand and embrace that memory is a subjective state.
That tunnel vision creates a riddle that Garland and Mendoza must solve by comparing interviews and notes.
Sometimes though, two men can truthfully assert they both did the same action at the same moment.
Be that as it may, bold choices made onWarfareintentionally cause it stand apart from its genre.
The only point-of-view and deaths that occur are the Americans trapped in a chokehold.
They dress just like civilians.
So its hard to differentiate.
But its not necessarily what gunfights are like.
If both sides could clearly see each other, someone would get shot a lot quicker.
You will get shot.
To which Garland has a blunt response.
Look, if you havent seen it, wait a beat.
If you are minded to watch it, watch it and then have an opinion.
This film is not propaganda.
In some senses, it is exactly the opposite of propaganda.
It is simply trying to say this happened.
And youre an adult, so make your own inferences from that.
And the phrase that often was used in relation to that was dumbing down.
Ray and I were attempting to be truthful.
There is a value in that.
Somebody could say, youre not truthful.
That I just disagree with.
Are those lessons signposted?
No, because I dont want to be infantilized.
I assume that other people dont want to be infantilized.
The hope is to experience a war movie that eschews the bombast and adrenaline high of the fictionalizedCivil War.
Warfare opens in cinemas on April 11.
