Behind the Scenes: Warfare

IBC

Extended takes, 360-degree sets and military authenticity reinforces the fog of war recreated from the memories of real life US soldiers

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Playing out like a transcript from found footage, Warfare sets out to provide an authentic understanding of being in a combat environment under intense pressure.

Like writer-director Alex Garland’s previous film Civil War, this is another eye-witness account of battle this time delivered in an ultra-realistic, forensically accurate manner. Conceived and co-directed by former Navy SEAL and Civil War stunt coordinator Ray Mendoza and based on a mission gone wrong incident that Mendoza participated in during the Iraq war, the film dispenses with romanticisation in its depiction of what it feels like to be under fire.

“Reality doesn’t let people off the hook; when things are tough, there isn’t a dissolve or a cut or some music to cheer you up,” says Garland of his approach to making the movie. “You remain in that state until circumstances relieve you from pressure or the moment, and that’s what Warfare does — it adheres to reality, not the reassurances of cinema.”

Based on memories of the event in 2006 from surviving soldiers, the sparse story unfolds minute by minute in chronological order breaking some of the formula of conventional war movies. Like Sam Mendes’ faux single shot Dunkirk, Garland’s film is almost realtime and uses extended takes ranging from five and ten minutes to upwards of 15 minutes for the final evacuation scene. There is no room for introspection as the soldier’s mission rapidly turns south from surveillance into survival.

 “Long extended takes allowed us to float through spaces where people are doing things concurrently — we could pick up realistic details you cannot script,” says Garland. “The actors were doing 12-minute take after 12-minute take, and wound up yawning, flexing, or scratching the back of their heads.

“What we captured was a sort of semi-reality — something that belongs to reality but exists within the film and gives off the quality of reality.”

This is cinematographer Dave Thompson’s first feature film although he is a seasoned Steadicam/ A cam operator who operated for Garland on Civil War. He has previously collaborated with DPs such as Robert Richardson, and Dante Spinotti and alongside Francis Lawrence on the Hunger Games franchise. For Warfare, Thompson operated handheld alongside A camera Barney Coates using the DJI Ronin 4D camera system used to photograph Civil War.

“We had to be careful how the light was in close-ups, how colour was used, to not start what I would personally call mythologizing,” Garland explained to Newcity Film. “The language of the movement of the camera, the language of the lenses, was all accented away from the trickery of cinema.”

Bovington bootcamp

Aside from a brief male-bonding prologue in the barracks and some late-night drone shots, the movie plays out in and around an apartment building where the SEALs are fired on by Al Qaeda.

Much as Stanley Kubrick doubled the London docks for war torn Vietnam in Full Metal Jacket, so Garland reconstructed a detailed section of Iraqi city Ramadi in the UK. They mapped out the main apartment building inside a north London warehouse using tape on the floor and room dividers to delineate walls. This hangar became a rehearsal space where the actors could practice manoeuvres in gear while production designers Mark Digby and Michelle Day, who worked with Garland on Ex Machina and Annihilation, constructed the Warfare set at Bovington Airfield Studios in Hemel Hempstead.

Digby and Day constructed 12 buildings in a streetscape organised around three distinct points, allowing the camera operators to film in almost 360-degrees. They used as few set extensions as possible to widen the expanse, situating the street in a distinctive T-shape.  

“In most directions you could point a camera and use whatever was in the frame without having to rely on bluescreens to extend the set,” says Garland.

The recreated streetscape included an urban residential neighbourhood of low-slung, two-story apartment buildings with concrete facades surrounding a marketplace where Al Qaeda operatives circulate in the movie. In addition to the veteran’s memories, the designers drew on Google Maps, and firsthand accounts of other non-American military sources, plus photographs of the actual house directly after the action had taken place. This provided details for sniper holes, bloodstains, even the colour of the curtains. SFX constructed fake pillars outside the apartment building which are destroyed by an IED explosion outside.

A military communications director was on hand during production to help actors relay radio information with accuracy. The cast delivered dialogue over actual radio lines while realistic ambient sound effects of airplanes flying, dogs barking and people milling around were pumped onto set through the PA system.

After co-writing the film, Garland says his duties became more technical and logistical, with Mendoza taking charge of directing the actors’ performance by way of a three-week bootcamp based on BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL), designed to prepare SEALs to perform under intense levels of stress and fatigue.

This included a crash course in communications training and military terminology that taught the cast to speak with brevity, efficiency, and clarity.  Mendoza and Tim Chappel, a former British Army Royal Green Jacket, also taught the actors weapons training, progressing from holding weapons and firing blanks on a shooting range to practicing room clearances with blind ammunition.

Near total recall

Mendoza, who is played in the movie by Reservation Dogs star D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai, worked as a military advisor and stunt choreographer after retiring from the Navy on movies including Jurassic World and Emancipation.

He designed the battle scenes on Civil War, including the climactic assault on the White House and it was this sequence that inspired Garland to see how far he could push the visceral immersion of being trapped, fighting, inside a building.

After Civil War wrapped in 2023, Garland and Mendoza worked together for a week in Los Angeles. Garland transcribed while Mendoza recounted the Ramadi operation. They conducted a series of interviews with the SEAL team, building out key memories and incidents until the transcript took the shape of a screenplay. Other characters were also interviewed, with their memories of the operation depicted as they were remembered.

“We were not inventing people or reordering events here,” says Garland. “When you look through the timeline of what the SEALs were saying happened, we had to forensically piece together events — until a point arose when we had enough information from multiple sources to decide how we would tell it onscreen.”

Warfare is also a tribute to wounded SEAL Elliott Miller (played by Cosmo Jarvis) who took part in the operation. Miller doesn’t recall what happened that day in 2006 but he and other vets from the conflict were on set reconstructing their collective experience.

“I wanted to track down and collect everybody’s memories and perspective, to create a living document that would give Elliott the ability to see and experience what happened during the operation,” says Mendoza. “Memories come rushing back, sometimes closure and understanding follow. We were young when we fought in Ramadi and didn’t have the tools or the dialogue to talk about these things until 20 years later.”