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The Guardian
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Boot camp, matching tattoos and mutual head-shaving: Kit Connor, Will Poulter and Michael Gandolfini on making Warfare
Five actors and one director are seated around a table in a London hotel room, when there is a knock at the door. The room service attendant enters, bearing a tray of dainty glasses filled with a custard-coloured tipple. It's not even noon, but cut these people some slack: they've been through something traumatic. Ray Mendoza, the 45-year-old Iraq war veteran turned film-maker, has just co-directed Warfare, which restages in distressing, claustrophobic visuals and concussive sound the terrifying ordeal he underwent in November 2006 as part of a group of US Navy Seals who were trapped, along with two Iraqi scouts and two marines, under fire from al-Qaida forces in a crumbling apartment building in Ramadi, 70 miles (110km) west of Baghdad. Mendoza and his fellow soldiers had to care for their wounded comrades, after an improvised explosive device blew up the armoured vehicle that was trying to facilitate their escape, all the while holding off their attackers and hanging tight for a second batch of rescuers. Now, he and Alex Garland, who became close when Mendoza was an adviser on Garland's explosive thriller Civil War, have recreated that experience. Just as Stanley Kubrick brought the Vietnam war to an east London gasworks for Full Metal Jacket, Garland and Mendoza's crew built an exact replica of the Ramadi street on an airfield in Buckinghamshire for Warfare. The actors still look mildly shell-shocked from the production, which was preceded by a three-and-a-half-week bootcamp, led by Mendoza. Three of them are Britons, kitted out today in sober black or grey suits. At 35, Cosmo Jarvis, the grizzled hero of last year's Shōgun, is the elder statesman of the cast members present; opposite him is Will Poulter, 32, who has form with harrowing movie experiences, having starred in The Revenant, Detroit and Midsommar; and next to Poulter is Kit Connor, the Heartstopper heart-throb, 21, and with a face as soft as bubble bath. Michael Gandolfini, 25, who played the young Tony Soprano, the character immortalised by his late father, James, in The Many Saints of Newark, is dressed, like Mendoza, in a mushroom-coloured sweatshirt. The most dapper of the group, in an emerald green shirt and chocolate-brown corduroy suit, is 23-year-old D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, the Canadian star of Taika Waititi's Reservation Dogs. He says little today, scowling handsomely as though smiling is taxed. And the beverage? Something bracing that harks back to those wild nights letting off steam after long days at boot camp? Not quite. 'Ginger shots,' says Connor cheerfully. They all down theirs except Mendoza, whose drink sits untouched in front of him for the next hour. It was his idea to make the film. But why tell this story among all the others he must have at his disposal? 'It's true there are others that resonate,' he says. 'The battle of Falluja. Haditha Dam. I could go on. The difference with this one, though, is Elliott Miller.' Miller, played in the film by Jarvis, is a close friend of Mendoza, and was severely wounded that day in Ramadi. 'He still does not remember what happened. When he first woke up in hospital, he wanted us to tell him everything. The more we explained, the more questions he had. It seemed we could never solve the issue of him lacking that core memory.' As Mendoza began working in the film industry – early jobs included adviser roles on Lone Survivor and Jurassic World – he realised that he had the opportunity to show Miller what they had all gone through together, rather than simply telling him. 'I felt I was ready. I felt it was time.' What was Miller's response when he revealed his plan? 'This is a direct quote: 'Fuck yeah!'' The film was pieced together from the memories of those who were there. 'There was a simple rule that if it happened, it went in, and if it didn't, it was out,' says Gandolfini. 'Our function was more to recreate. What was most fundamental was, um, the pursuit of truth.' Chuckles ripple around the table. It quickly becomes clear that Gandolfini has uttered today's booby-trapped phrase: say 'the pursuit of truth' and you earn the gentle mockery of your cast-mates. 'There should be some sort of prize,' smiles Poulter. 'Or punishment.' It's understandable that they might need such distractions to keep themselves interested. There is laughter again, for instance, when Woon-A-Tai's answer to one of my questions begins: 'I don't know if anyone said this already, because I kinda zoned out a little bit back there, but ….' After all, they have been asked umpteen times about what boot camp was like, and how they shaved one another's heads as a bonding exercise, and how they all got matching tattoos once filming was over. The words 'Call on me', taken from the Eric Prydz banger heard in Warfare's opening scene, were intended to convey in ink the sense of brotherhood instilled in them by the making of the movie. Gandolfini describes the atmosphere on set: 'There was a roaming camera so it was filmed much more as a play. Everyone was 100% on, all the time.' Poulter jumps in: 'Typically in film-making, you're finding what's most entertaining. The MO here was completely different. We were making sure we were aligned with the memories of the gentlemen who experienced this.' Didn't that inhibit their choices as actors? 'It might in the traditional context,' Poulter says. 'But it empowered us in what we were trying to do. Which was to tell the truth.' Jarvis adds his thoughts: 'Even though it might seem you're existing within the confines of a memory, the memories themselves aren't actually confining. They serve instead as a very clear outline.' 'There was such an attention to detail,' says Connor in confirmation. 'We did two read-throughs that were basically four hours long because we went through everything with a fine-toothed comb.' Woon-A-Tai had it slightly easier, perhaps, since he was playing Mendoza. 'Any small detail, I had Ray there to check,' he says. 'After every take, I asked if I did it right. I studied him and tried to steer away from adding my own two cents.' Mendoza gives an approving nod. Once the attack commences in Warfare, the film becomes a protracted sensory experience akin to watching the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan stretched out to 90 minutes. There is close to no information about who the characters are, and audiences will learn nothing about the war itself, or the enemy, who are described at one point by Miller as 'getting their jihad on'. As gripping and technically accomplished as the film is, there must be anxiety among the A24 marketing team about how to get Warfare seen. Hence the preponderance of red-carpet hijinks and social-media malarkey that is being used to promote it, and the plentiful references online to the film's cast of 'internet boyfriends'. One advertorial in a men's style magazine promotes Warfare via the array of expensive watches worn by the actors off-screen: a watch with its 'slinky stainless steel case' is compared to 'a Navy Seal on a surveillance mission'. There is wordplay around 'ammo' and 'firepower'. The article stops short of describing the timepieces as 'weapons of mass attraction' – but only just. Beyond this hoopla seems to lurk the question: will anyone want to see Warfare more than once? Will anyone want to see it at all? 'I've seen it six times,' says Woon-A-Tai. But there's no way around it: Warfare is a necessarily gruelling experience. I'm interested, then, to know what sort of language the cast members have been using to encourage their friends to see the film. How do they sell a movie that is so intense? 'I've been trying not to say 'intense',' says Poulter. 'Just because everybody says that.' Oops. My bad. 'Someone called it an action movie,' says Jarvis, shaking his head in dismay. 'And yeah, people say 'intense'. I understand why. But I just try to reiterate the clarity of the original objective. Sometimes, films don't even seem to have a direction. Alex and Ray had rules, artistic rules, which informed the process.' He sighs. 'I just want people to witness the film without having to pick words to describe it to them.' But describe it we must. Or else how will audiences know whether to buy a ticket? I put the same question to Woon-A-Tai: how is he selling it? 'I would tell people it's probably one of the most immersive war films that I've ever seen in my life,' he says gravely. 'And honestly, I think that is a pretty good selling-point.' His comrades concur. Gandolfini leans in. 'This movie feels highly necessary,' he says. 'These are human beings. This is something that happened, and that continues to happen. It's interesting when people say, 'It's such an uncomfortable experience, why didn't we get a break?' It's like, what? This is what happened to these guys: they didn't get a break. This is what happens.'' 'And it is happening right now,' says Poulter, furrowing his brow. 'Modern warfare is not obsolete.' Silence weighs heavily in the room. Somebody's chair creaks. Connor stares at his empty shot glass. Then Mendoza sits back from the table. 'These are my closing remarks,' he announces, as if wrapping up a meeting. 'I'm not worried about how the film is received so much as seeing it as a moment in time for me and my friends that's gone. Maybe this will only be special to them. But it's going to resonate with veterans. And there is love between them. It is about love.' He lets that thought hang in the air. 'If you can't watch this movie, if you're trying to put it in a box of, like, 'There are all these wars going on, and what's the context, and what's your opinion on war?'… Well then, I feel bad for you because you're missing something. It's about sacrifices that can only be made through a deep understanding of love. These guys were willing to put their lives on the line and go through hell to save a group of other guys. Maybe you wanna go see what that kind of sacrifice is like, and ask yourself, 'What have I done that's like that?' If you can't see that in this movie then you're doing it through a different lens and … I dunno. I wish you would see it this way. I feel sorry if you can't experience it that way and if you have to put it in some kind of political box.' Mendoza turns his attention to the actors, two or three of whom are now staring solemnly into their laps. 'I'll keep saying it: I'm proud of all you guys,' he tells them, garnering grunts of reciprocation. 'Go on and do great things.' Warfare is in cinemas now.
BBC News
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Warfare review: A combat epic that 'does what film does best'
Alex Garland explored the slide into fractious factionalism in Civil War. Now he turns his gaze towards the ferocity of combat in new film Warfare, which stars Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis and Charles Melton. Joseph Quinn's excruciating howls of pain go on and on, and on and on in Warfare, continuing long after most films would have moved forward. The relentlessness of those cries, with his leg one bloody open wound, defines what is so unique and effective about this real-time 90-minute immersion into an actual US mission in Iraq. Alex Garland, the writer and director of Civil War, and Ray Mendoza, a veteran who was its military advisor, have co-directed a bold marvel of a film. Together, Garland's virtuosity and Mendoza's first-hand experience create a masterful technical achievement that is, more important, emotionally harrowing. Warfare feels even more visceral because it arrives when actual wars are raging, from Israel and Gaza to Ukraine, giving the film more immediacy than it might have had even just five years ago. Civil War extrapolated from today's politically divided world into a near-future where combat tears across the US. The film's marketing, somewhat disingenuously, claimed it was apolitical, but that was only true in the sense that this dire warning didn't endorse specific political parties. Warfare is more truly apolitical, focusing on the nature of war itself by way of one that happens to be in Iraq. Mendoza was part of the 2006 mission the film depicts, an operation that was not major or particularly notable, just a cog in the war machine. Minutes into the film, a group of US Navy Seals – played by first-rate actors including Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Charles Melton, Kit Connor and D'Pharoah Woon-A-Tai – creep into an Iraqi town to do surveillance ahead of ground troops arriving the next day. They take over a house, dragging its residents out of bed and smashing through a wall between two apartments, and soon spot al-Qaeda jihadists gathering across the street. Tension builds, but nothing prepares us for the shattering sound or the bloody impact when a grenade is lobbed into their window. Let's not exaggerate that immersive element. Sitting in a cinema doesn't come close to the reality of combat, but Warfare does what film does best, recreating the feelings of fear and simple will to live when you are trapped, a sitting target for armed men doing their best to kill you. Garland and Mendoza's rigorous approach to the screenplay makes this film more docudrama than fiction. They relied entirely on the accounts of the men who were part of the mission, cross-checking to account for faulty memories. They invented no plot twists, and drop us into the action without any backstory about the characters. The dialogue is restricted to the military shorthand the Seals would have used, with no time for the jokey banter most war movies indulge in. That sounds dry, but every actor makes it work, partly because they have faces that hold the screen. Woon-A-Tai (Reservation Dogs) is a central character, playing Mendoza himself, a communications officer relaying by radio the team's locations and information back to home base. Woon-A-Tai captures the intensity of the job. If he fails, it all goes wrong. The film doesn't explain its military jargon, but it's easy enough to grasp that when he radios for a "casevac" it means a casualty evacuation for the wounded. Poulter plays the officer in charge of the group, and has one of the few memorable lines. When help is nearby and he can't pinpoint his exact location, he tells them: "Look for the blood and the smoke. We're there." Quinn is a standout even before his character's injuries, conveying a fear and sense of danger not far from the surface. But the effectiveness of the real-time approach is felt most strongly after he is wounded, and his inescapable cries continue in the background even as the others strategise how to move him and Jarvis's severely wounded character out when US tanks arrive. As Civil War demonstrated, Garland is an expert at creating intense action scenes. When the Seals attempt to leave, another grenade explodes on the street. Sound becomes muffled. The screen fills with smoke so that it feels like night. When the smoke clears, there are wounded men and a severed leg on the ground. In real-life news reports, the most graphic videos usually come with warnings that the images might be disturbing, but Garland and Mendoza don't let us look away. Warfare is in a line of films about divisive conflicts, from Vietnam (Apocalypse Now) to Iraq (The Hurt Locker), that have focused on the soldiers rather than the politics. But no war film is entirely detached from its setting, and Garland and Mendoza acknowledge that in a significant way. The Iraqi civilians don't get much time on screen, but the impact of those scenes is enormous. As a father, mother and their two small children cower together in the corner of a bedroom, the Americans' reassurances that they won't be hurt seem hollow. These people are civilians held at gunpoint as their home is destroyed around them simply because it is in a convenient location for surveillance. They are both specific to Iraq and stand-ins for innocent victims of wars everywhere. Apolitical though Warfare is, with its blood-soaked scenes and brutal sounds, it seems to question the wisdom of settling any conflict, even or especially one about global power and politics, with the kind of violence this film draws us into so intimately. ★★★★★ -- If you liked this story sign up for The Essential List newsletter, a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week. For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X, and Instagram
