Iraq Combat Gets ‘Forensic Recreation’ Treatment as A24 Provides ‘Economy and Freedom’ to Alex Garland, Ray Mendoza for ‘Warfare’

variety.com:

Naman Ramachandran A harrowing 2006 Navy SEAL mission in Ramadi, Iraq, comes to brutally authentic life in “Warfare,” the latest collaboration between “Civil War” director Alex Garland and military veteran Ray Mendoza.

At Tuesday’s U.K. premiere, the filmmakers revealed how their refusal to moralize about combat emerged from a shared commitment to truth-telling in a medium often prone to seduction.

The project emerged from Garland and Mendoza’s previous collaboration on “Civil War,” where Mendoza served as military advisor.

During that production, Garland was struck by the authenticity Mendoza brought to a scene where soldiers navigate a corridor toward the Oval Office. “It had a kind of electricity attached to it,” Garland explained during the pre-screening Q&A. “What I could see floating out was some truth, some reality about how these guys function.” This observation sparked the idea for “Warfare” – expanding beyond “five minutes of fictional combat” to create “90 or 100 minutes of recreation, a sort of forensic recreation, of actual combat,” Garland said.