A24
Warfare, directed by Ex Machina and Annihilation writer/director Alex Garland and Iraq war Navy SEAL veteran Ray Mendoza, puts the audience right into the thick of battle, creating more of an experience than a story. In order to achieve that, Garland and Mendoza had to get the young A-list cast into battle-ready shape.
Speaking to BroBible ahead of the release of Warfare, hitting theaters on Friday, April 11, co-director Ray Mendoza, a former Navy SEAL and BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training) instructor, detailed how he whipped the cast into shape, both mentally and physically.
Objective #1: Teaching them to shoot
“There wasn’t a day where I thought, ‘Oh, I know this is going to break them. It was quite the opposite. I was very much trying to build them up for something. It’s a very specific process, and I was the BUD/S instructor,” Mendoza explains.
“I was a land warfare instructor, where I taught maneuver warfare and tactics to SEAL teams. So I’m no stranger to teaching people how to work together to achieve an objective. I’ve trained a lot of actors — training them to fire a weapon is the easy part for me. I can get someone from A to Z fairly quickly. But I had to get all of them to be able to shoot accurately. That was the first priority, and it does two things: it lets me know who’s strong at certain things, and who’s weak at others. We were going to be doing some very high-kinetic, very fast, close-proximity firing.”
“Even when I just tell them that—if you’ve never shot a gun before, you’re like, ‘Oh, holy s–.’ That pressure is naturally there. So I use safety, and I use specific words, to convey how serious this is. I need to set that tone right away. Not only are they portraying someone who’s my friend and going through something traumatic, but they’re going to be doing inherently dangerous things. That just sets the tone.”
Objective #2:Turning the cast into a Brotherhood
“The next goal, probably the most important thing second to safety, was Brotherhood. You hear it a lot, it’s thrown around, but what is it? Brotherhood exists in all types of cultures—sports, military, whatever. They were going to create their brotherhood, their own culture, their own thing, whatever that was. And that only comes from forcing them to be together: to train together, work out together, live together.Where we shot helped, because they were isolated. They were forced to learn about each other through training. That was by design. I put them in unwinnable situations. Each person had a job, just like in the military.”
“There was leadership —Will Poulter, Charles Melton, Joseph Quinn. You had your machine gunners, your medic, your comms guys. Each served a purpose. I gave them jobs, then I put them in an unwinnable situation. Something like: ‘You have two downed men. I want you to carry ten five-gallon jugs of water. Maintain 360 security. Start here. End there. You’ve got ten minutes. You have two minutes to leave. Go.'”
“And they never made it. But then they started figuring things out: rotating guys out, carrying stretchers, dealing with dehydration. Some guys weren’t in as good shape. What do you do? Do you leave them behind? Or do you stop? We’d set up scenarios with bad guys moving on them, creating stress. And you could see—once you do that once — it just went to s—. It shows how chaotic even simple tasks become. Even communicating one word became difficult. Everyone was just screaming. So I had to take all that chaos and say, Right now, we’re going to learn to control it. Just because there’s noise and people are screaming doesn’t mean you can’t communicate. I taught them how to communicate—verbally and non-verbally.”
Objective #3: Giving them autonomy in ‘No Win Situations’
“Then there was autonomy. They all had objectives and responsibilities. I gave them space to create their own systems to execute their checklists. When you give someone ownership, they care more. It becomes their idea, their way of doing it. Their way of running a team, staying on time, and carrying that burden of leadership. And they really took ownership.”
“I’m super proud. They were very supportive of each other off-camera. We had guys on comms—rather than a PA or AD reading lines, it was the actual counterpart, the real guy playing the role. He wasn’t on camera, but he was there supporting. If it was a serious scene with Joe [Quinn] or Cosmo [Jarvis] screaming, they would often respond with levity—which is what we really do. It was funny to see these guys take on the same cultural characteristics or idiosyncrasies of a platoon overseas, where you use humor in serious moments. They were very supportive of each other, and it shows on film.”
“They could predict each other’s movements. You only know how to do that if you’ve trained in it or taught others to do it. It becomes instinctual. Like, Taylor always dips his shoulder. I know when he does that, he’s going to move left. That only comes from time and exposure to each other. So kudos to them, and I challenge anyone to try to recreate that.”
Warfare, co-directed with Navy SEAL and Iraq War veteran Ray Mendonza and Ex Machina and Civil War filmmaker Alex Garland, stars D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Joseph Quinn, Kit Connor, Finn Bennett, Taylor John Smith, Michael Gandolfini, Adain Bradley, Noah Centineo, Evan Holtzman, Henry Zaga, and Charles Melton. Check out the official trailer below.