Ever wondered what war is like? This film goes where you don’t want to

Alex Garland isn’t afraid to make movies that are uncomfortable to watch – from the 28 Days Later zombie franchise (which he writes), to the geek-fetish sexual politics of Ex Machina, to the misogyny critique of Men, to the US-in-meltdown scenario of Civil War, he’s taken delight in making audiences squirm for decades.

But in his latest outing, which he developed and co-directed with US military veteran Ray Mendoza, the English writer-director who first came to prominence as author of The Beach (1996) is taking the cinema of discomfort to the limit, with a real-time depiction of a battle from the Iraq War that is absolutely relentless in its intensity.

Why, I ask him, do you delight in putting us through it so?

“Making a film is a privilege, and every time you do it you may not get another chance,” he says. “And I feel why pull a punch when you have that moment, when you have that chance. That seems like exactly the wrong moment to pull a punch.”

Warfare pulls precisely zero punches. It never explains why this squad of US Navy SEALs is in Ramadi in 2006. It doesn’t explain why they choose to set up in a particular house, effectively taking its civilian occupants hostage for the duration. It doesn’t explain the political, religious or ideological motivation of the armed men who surround the building in the early hours and set about attacking the Americans, and nor does it address the rights and wrongs of the Americans being there in the first place.

It simply drops them – and us – in it, to experience the disorienting hell of battle in real time, in a narrative drawn from the recollections of those who really were there, Mendoza among them (he is played in the movie by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai from the TV series Reservation Dogs).

“Part of the way this film functions is that we don’t make a judgment in the presentation of the facts,” says Garland. “Those are the terms on which this film works, that was the rule we set ourselves.”

Warfare is in part, he says, a response to the dissatisfaction he felt after “a lifetime of watching films and seeing the way war has been represented in cinema. Civil War was attempting to show violence in a more documentary way, a less sensationalised way, but this is an extension of that.”

He met Mendoza – who has been working as a military consultant in Hollywood for about 15 years – on that film, and was impressed by the way he helped stage the climactic assault on the White House. When it was all done, he says, “I contacted Ray and asked him, ‘Do you have a story you want to tell?’ And Ray did have a story he wanted to tell. And from that point, the two of us just worked extremely closely putting it together.”

Charles Melton (centre) as Jake, one of the SEALs caught under heavy fire in Warfare.Credit: A24

Mendoza had been thinking about telling his story for years, not just as a way of illustrating what war is like to those who have never experienced it, but also as a way of showing what happened on that particular day for those who had been there but couldn’t remember it.

Chief among them was sniper Elliot Miller, played in the movie by Cosmo Jarvis (the English rapper whose acting career is soaring with roles in Shogun, Inside and Alto Knights). Dreadfully injured when an IED explodes outside the building, the real Elliot has little memory of what occurred.

“Ever since he woke up for the first time, he’s had questions, from the big ones of ‘what happened’ to the little ones of what it looked like, what colour things were, etc, etc,” says Mendoza.

There were plenty of first-person accounts recorded in the navy’s official after-incident reports, but the big picture was difficult to grasp. So for Mendoza, piecing it all together was a way of offering some sort of clarity and closure to his friend.

As it happened, making the film wasn’t therapeutic just for Miller, but for Mendoza too.

“There’s some very powerful emotional moments [in the movie] that triggered some stuff that’s been down in there for a really long time,” Mendoza says. “And Elliot being there on set, and walking him through everything, and answering his questions, I think that’s probably the only way I could tackle this thing.

Ray Mendoza, left, and Alex Garland on the set of Warfare, the Iraq War film they co-wrote and co-directed.Credit: A24

“Had I done this movie 10 years ago, or attempted to do it, I don’t think I would have been emotionally prepared,” he continues. “I don’t think I would even understand my emotions or have the vocabulary to describe what I had to describe to Alex in order to help me bring this to life.”

In rendering the experience of warfare truthfully, disorientation was a crucial tool, says Garland.

“In that opening half hour where viewers gradually realise, ‘hang on, this is real time, and I’m not being given certain kinds of information about characters, or who the protagonist/hero is that I am normally given within a narrative’, [they hopefully begin to] sort of dissociate themselves from the way they expect narratives to unfold.

“We had to remove the grammar of ‘war movies’,” he says. “And hopefully the audience will as well.”

Given the steadfast commitment to telling it as it was (or at least as its participants remember it), it seems at first glance rather odd that the movie was shot entirely on a disused military airfield in Britain. But Garland insists it made perfect sense.

Will Poulter as the commander who suffers a hugely disorienting bout of concussion.Credit: A24

“Well, you know, the sky is the sky,” he says. “Everything in this place [the film’s version of Ramadi] was built. I didn’t want to drive around the various countries that double for the Middle East, some of which are in the Middle East, trying to find a street that looked ‘pretty much right’.

“I really, really wanted us to be able to build the same street and the same house. When you walked into that house, the staircase was in the right place. When you looked out of the window, you were seeing the right kind of thing.”

It also meant he could work with crew he knew well and could trust, so that the focus could be entirely on fidelity to Mendoza’s vision, his version of events.

And how does Mendoza feel about the final film?

“It doesn’t hit all the wickets, it doesn’t give all the answers for every veteran,” he says. “It’s a voice, not THE voice. But I think it’s a step in the right direction.

“Oftentimes veterans watch films and we’re like, ‘yeah, it doesn’t feel that way. We don’t talk like that.’ And we feel misrepresented,” he adds. “If you want to start to understand something of what war may feel or sound like, this is a good place to start. I think we’re setting a standard.”

In Civil War, Garland made a movie that steadfastly refused to take a clear position on the state of modern American politics; if it had a point of view it was that of the dispassionate observers of the press whose role is merely to document conflict, not pass judgment on it. Yet the “failure” to pick sides was perceived in some quarters as tantamount to offering support for one side or the other (the film functioned as a kind of Rohrschach test, in which people of every political persuasion seemed to discern something different).

Surely, then, there will be those who discern that Warfare’s “failure” to condemn American military adventurism, or al-Qaeda terrorism, or the use of drones, or the cavalier treatment of civilians, including women and children, similarly amounts to taking a position.

If so, Alex Garland, what do you have to say to that?

“Honestly, they should grow the f--- up,” he says. “I won’t unpack that any more. I think I’m good with that statement.”

Warfare is in cinemas from April 17.