A brotherhood of young warriors … Navy SEALs pumping themselves up for battle, armed to the teeth and trained to perfection. Then, it all goes wrong – the beginning of an agonizingly tense, bloody and chaotic reenactment of a real firefight that took place almost two decades ago in Iraq.
Former Navy SEAL Tay Mendoza was actually there. He wrote and directed (along with Alex Garland) the movie “Warfare,” out this week.
Garland said, “We had one rule, one rule above all other rules, which was nobody who wasn’t there – which, of course, included me – was allowed to introduce anything into the story. The source of all information could only be either Ray or other people that were there.”
I asked, “Were people reluctant to dredge up their memories?”
“No, no, they weren’t,” Mendoza replied. “They definitely wanted to tell the version, especially 20 years later. We never really talked about it at the time. You know, oftentimes you have to push that stuff down just to function in a war zone.”
According to Garland (whose last film was the dystopian “Civil War”), “We took absolutely no intentional dramatic license.”
The action unfolds in real-time. When reinforcements are three minutes out, it actually takes them three minutes of screentime to get there. The dialogue is strictly in military jargon. “As soon as you compromise that rule – you’re not talking in the way they would talk, and we are massaging it for the audience – then what else are we going to change?” said Garland.
Much of the jargon is delivered by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, who plays Mendoza, then the platoon’s radio operator and now a first-time filmmaker. Woon-A-Tai said it was difficult playing the man who was right behind the camera. “One of the hardest things I had to do was really just get it right,” he said.
Like all the other actors, he is young and fit, but that’s not what landed him the role. “I pulled up to the meeting 20 minutes early,” Woon-A-Tai said. “I mean, it landed me this role. I didn’t even have to audition.”
According to Mendoza, the cast was interviewed, not auditioned: “We’re looking for the mindset, the dedication that’s going to be required,” he said. The attitude he was looking for? “Just fire in the gut.”
Garland said, “We did not have time for dramas, prima donnas.”
The actors had to learn to move and shoot like SEALs, but that was the easy part. Because the movie is about a team, the cast had to become a team. “I know how to bring teams together,” Mendoza said, “and that’s to force them to rely on each other.”
He put the cast through a three-week boot camp, including the standard introduction to military service – haircuts. “We do use it as a way of starting from scratch,” he said. “Doesn’t matter what movie you’ve been in, we’re all starting from zero.”
Woon-A-Tai said, “Twenty guys in one hotel in the middle of nowhere. We ate together, we slept together, worked out every single day. … A lot of us got matching tattoos, so, if that gives you an idea of what our brotherhood was like.”
“It’s not fun,” offered Mendoza. “It’s painful, and the guys are starting to yell at each other and getting frustrated.”
After boot camp, the film was shot in just 25 days. During that time, the actors did not leave the set between takes. “They stayed there all day, every day, and everybody was locked into this story, replicating this scene with the people who really lived through that scene standing a few feet away,” said Garland.
Filming stopped the day one veteran of the firefight arrived on set. The movie is dedicated to Elliott Miller, who was gravely wounded that day in 2006. “Having Elliott there changed the dynamic a little bit,” Woon-A-Tai said. “You hear about Elliott. Heard about him a lot. And then you meet him, you know, while you’re filming, it’s a lot of pressure, you know?”
In addition to losing a leg, Miller suffered a traumatic brain injury which wiped out his memory and his power of speech. Communicating through a text-to-speech program, Miller said, “I think that Ray and Alex did a remarkably good job with recreating the story, but as you very well know I don’t remember anything, so they could have made me out to be a real loser. Ha, ha! And please don’t ask me to try and speak just because I’ve got quite the potty mouth, and I don’t want you to have to censor much.”
I asked Miller what he wanted audiences to think about the film. “This movie isn’t just another war movie, but rather it’s a kind of love story,” he replied.
Mendoza expanded: “I think it’s the love we have for each other. When you spend that much time with somebody, where you go out together, you work out together, you train together, you do everything together, there’s just this bond, this understanding of putting the team and everyone else before yourself.”
I asked Mendoza, “That firefight obviously left its scars on Elliott. Did it leave scars on you?”
“Yeah, absolutely,” he replied. “It changed my perspective on life. It rewires your brain to see things differently – and when it’s all done, you kind of have to unwire that again.”
The two men watched together as the actors recreated the moment when Mendoza saved Miller’s life by pulling him out of the line of fire. Mendoza said, “I know you got emotional, and then I got emotional, and I had to walk off set because it was just too, too much.”
There is plenty of valor in this movie, and zero glory. “Is that what you want people to think about combat?” I asked.
“I want them to think that it’s unforgiving,” said Mendoza.
In fact, the firefight dramatized didn’t even make the news at the time. “No, no. There’s thousands of these, thousands,” Mendoza said.
“Just another day in the war?”
“Yep.”
Unlike most movies, “Warfare” had its world premiere before a packed house of veterans at the American Legion in Hollywood. Elliott Miller was one of them.
For the filmmakers, “Warfare” sends a message to those who would decide whether to send their country to war. Mendoza said, “This is like, for me and for most of us, how it feels. And so, just please remember that. And when you do make that decision? This is what you’re sending our kids off to do.”
Story produced by David Rothman. Editor: Joseph Frandino.
