'Warfare' star and filmmaker on establishing a 'brotherhood' and making a movie based 'only' on memories
The 95-minute film depicts one specific siege in real time. A group of soldiers, played by a cast that includes Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Joseph Quinn, Michael Gandolfini, Kit Connor, D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Noah Centineo and Charles Melton, are surveilling the area surrounding an apartment they took over from an Iraqi family. What they didn't realize is that they were next to an insurgent house, with the SEAL team trying to escape amid attacks.
Mendoza was tasked with not just tapping into his own memories, but reaching out to members from his SEAL team to pull from their memories as well. It also served as a tribute to wounded SEAL member Elliott Miller, played by Jarvis in the film, who has no memory of that day in 2006.
"For probably half of them, it was easy, because I stayed in contact with them for a while. We're close friends. We go baseball games," Mendoza told Yahoo Canada in Toronto. "Some of them already knew that I've always wanted to do this.
"Then there were some of the guys that were still in the community, ... so that's a little harder, ... because they're a little more ... on the defence about, 'Why are you doing it? Why now?' So yes, that part's hard. But if your intent is pure, they'll sniff that out. ... Some of the difficult stuff came [in] retelling the stories and hearing them retell it."
While some of the members of Mendoza's SEAL team were on set during the filming of the movie, Woon-A-Tai was in a unique position, because he plays Mendoza in the film.
"It was a pleasure, honestly," the actor said. "Any microscopic detail that I wanted to accomplish, ... he was there for them."
"Very open, very open on tough subjects, very open on anything. So it was a pleasure. At first it was very nerve-wracking, but then I came to realize that it was the best situation."
For Garland, making a movie based on memories shifted the approach to filmmaking in this circumstance.
"It removes one set of questions, which is, 'Should the scene be in the story or not?' So all of those kinds of questions just disappear," Garland said. "And then it brings another set of questions, which is, normally ... I'd be thinking, 'How do I make this? How do I want it to be?' And in this film you'd be asking, 'How do we make this? How [this person] felt, ... have we heard them properly? And having heard them, are we recreating it properly?'"
"One whole set of questions vanished and another whole set of questions arrived, but it was, I'd say, just a very interesting, powerful, kind of moving exercise to take part in."
But what's also fascinating about the approach to Warfare is that human are unreliable narrators of their memories, and memories can be severely impacted by things we experience. But that's what everyone behind this film committed to working with.
"We've all disagreed with people over a recollection of an incident, ... it's amazing the degrees to which memories can separate out, and we would encounter it constantly," Garland said."It's partly because people have tunnel vision under stress. It's partly because things get emitted under stress, and also the passage of time and concussion, very unusual events to try and pull memories from."
"If somebody experiences something alone, and then years later they try to recount it, what you might get is almost like a sequence of snapshots from them, rather than a flow of action, in some respects. ... I'm sure all of us, when we try to remember our early childhood, we're not quite sure, is this something one of my parents told me happened, or am I actually remembering it? So there's a lot of complicated things, but you embrace it. That's actually what makes the film interesting. ... We're not saying this is exactly what happened. What we're saying is, this is what it felt like. And memories are often connected to what things feel like."
But this is also something Garland and Mendoza establish at the beginning of the film, telling the audience that this is a film based "only" on memories. As Mendoza describes it, they're telling the audience how to watch the film.
"It doesn't say, this film is based off memories, or based on true stories. It says only memories," Garland said. "If you were not there, you didn't have memory, and that meant you weren't allowed to say, 'Hey it would be cool if,' or 'Wouldn't it be interesting if.' That wasn't part of our rule set."
While Warfare has been celebrated for its visceral and undramatized portrayal of war, fans have also really connected to the obvious camaraderie between the cast, including their matching tattoos.
As Woon-A-Tai explained, this "brotherhood" began during their three-and-a-half week bootcamp, designed by Mendoza.
"We started our first night all together as we buzzed all of each other's hair together. ... They put us in a beautiful small town, ... outside of London ... and putting us there, it made a lot of the locals from Britain not want to go back home, and so we spent almost every waking moment together," Woon-A-Tai said. "We spent three-and-a-half weeks ... working, doing a boot camp, to take it even further."
"That was by design. I knew that was going to happen," Mendoza added. "Not only are they just hanging around each other, but really forcing them to fail, forcing them to see what their weaknesses are."
Woon-A-Tai said he really had to push past his limits in the training for this film, from Navy SEAL push-ups to learning how to use a gun. But a core element of the training was also the rule that, "nobody was finished until everybody was finished."
"These small little details, ... subtle stuff, is really what brought our brotherhood together," Woon-A-Tai said.
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