← All Of It with Alison Stewart
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This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Today is Veterans Day, so before anything else, if you've been a member of the armed forces or if you have loved ones who have served, we want to say thank you for your service. And a key part to appreciating veterans is to try to understand the often brutal realities of war. To that end, this hour we have two conversations about films that center around those realities. A little later, we'll hear about the film Armed Only with a Camera, about the life and work of a war zone photojournalist who was killed in the war in Ukraine. But the first film we're going to discuss today is Warfare. It's not a documentary, but it does stick as closely as possible to the memories of a group of Navy SEALs who survived a mission gone disastrously wrong in the midst of the Iraq war. The year is 2006 in Ramadi, Iraq. A platoon of Navy Seals is watching a group of Iraqis from the house across the street. Not much happens for a while, but suddenly a grenade is thrown into the house and the mission takes on a different tone. Warfare was co directed by Alex Garland with former Navy SEAL and Iraq veteran Ray Mendoza. The film is based entirely on Ray's memories of this mission and of the memories of his fellow soldiers. I started by asking Alex how he came to collaborate with Ray on this film.
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Through watching Ray work on set and through talking to him about his past experiences as a SEAL. After Ray served, what, 16 years was it? 17. 17. He moved into the film industry and I met him making a film called Civil War, where he choreographed several of the combat sequences, all of the combat sequences, and worked closely with actors. So I could see him functioning in many ways like a director. And he had just stories available to him, and some he wanted to tell, some he had been telling over the years. So I approached him and said, do you want to make a sort of 90 to 100 minute movie where we would attempt to sort of forensically recreate combat and sort of rid ourselves of some of the grammar that cinema's developed over the years about war movies and really just try to make it as true to life as possible.
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A
Ray, what were some of the non negotiables for you on this project?
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Well, being we were gonna. I wanted to recreate this for Elliot, who doesn't remember what had happened. I think the non negotiables for me was if it didn't happen, because I was gonna use this as a visual medium for him, as a reference. And so there wasn't a lot of creative licensing that was going to be had. So as long as we could stick to, you know, the facts, exactly what happened and how they happened, that was my. Those were mine.
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Alex, what did you see as your role in this film?
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To facilitate one veteran primarily, but in the end, a group of veterans giving an unfiltered account of what combat was like for them. There've been lots of war movies there. They're typically made by civilians, but when they're not made by civilians, because some directors, like Oliver Stone, he served in Vietnam, there's still probably the kind of attendant pressures of a studio movie and drama and the effects of things like music on a scene and how that makes you see something differently. And so my role was to have as few obstacles as possible, hopefully no obstacles between Ray and his colleagues, authentic voice and the finished film.
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A
How'd he do?
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Nailed it. Yeah, no, he did. He did really well. He. He's a great listener. And so it's often times, yeah, it's.
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Why was listening. Why was that important?
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Because the details that were involved, you know, when you. You know, if you're trying to explain something and then when they explain it back to you. I know there's people who will attempt to. It's like, oh, I think this is what's going on. But maybe some things go over their head. But his attention to detail and when you, you know, either we go over what is written or he repeats it back here, the confidence starts to build. You're like, okay, he's getting it. He's like, okay, he's picking up the details, the idiosyncrasies of. Of what I'm explaining. So almost on like an instinctive level.
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As well, what was a detail that stuck with you? Maybe something you hadn't heard before, you hadn't heard described before, that really stayed with you and that made it into the movie.
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In a way. I hadn't heard any of it before. I had, I had. I'd absorbed in the way we all absorb war narratives, I guess, in some written forms. I'd seen some very sort of clear, honest accounts of combat in books, really, is what I'm saying. But when I heard it and really tried to think about what it was Ray was talking about and explaining, I was thinking, this is not what I had previously considered. This is. It is more complicated, it's more subtle. There are many ethical questions, but they're not often the ethical questions that you think you're going to encounter. And so some of it, some of it I think is just to do with the effects of concussion, stress and. And the. And really understanding the nature of struggle. So I'll give you a detail, right, after all that I should have just given you a detail. That would have been the best thing, wouldn't it?
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You're giving yourself some time to think.
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I needed time to think. Here's an example. Ray described trying to get a tourniquet around Joe Hildebrand's leg. Very badly injured, bleeding very badly. And a tourniquet is a bit like a belt in some respects. You have to feed part of it through a buckle and then tighten it. And as a consequence of the effects of shock and concussion and stress and everything, Ray could not feed that belt material through the buckle. And it had, in his description, the quality of a nightmare. The nightmare where there's something simple you want to achieve, but you're not. You need to run, but you can only walk or whatever that thing is. But it's not a nightmare. It really happened. And it's something that haunts him and stays with him and, and. And then just really trying to absorb what, for an individual who had to live with that, what that was like, not that Just that moment, but the memory of the moment.
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Ray, the actor who plays you is Deferowanatai. A lot of people know him from Reservation Dogs. What conversations did you have with him about you, about what you were like at this time in your life?
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A lot. You know, there's a lot of context that needs to be supplied there, but not a lot of time to do it. And so I try to focus just like on the principles. I mean, there's so much. We had a lot of personal talks, but when it came to being on set, I had to really detach myself and not make it personal and not emotional because it's really hard to maintain that, to be in that constant state of emotion being. I had lots of other jobs to do as one of the co directors, but, you know, I allow. You know, I needed to let him inhabit that space somewhat. So I just. Applying principles of, like, what's. What stress is and how to push through stress. And, you know, some people use. You know, I was a very stoic person and I think I use that to my advantage of just being able to. To. To breathe, calm down and, you know, if you're calm, hopefully calmness spreads through other people. So, yeah, it was just concepts and principles, really, which it's hard, you know, it's hard to do. So. Yeah, just detached myself and me wearing multiple hats. Yeah, it was a step by step, it's almost like scene by scene basis. Yeah.
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What questions did he have for you, the actor?
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Yeah, a lot more is just about like a mental state. Just like, where were you? What were you thinking? Or how were you feeling? Yeah, which is. It's hard to explain. You know, even then it's hard to explain. And a lot of times it's using. It's great having those. Those visual references of Cosmo Jarvis playing Elliot and Joe Quinn playing Joe Hildebrand. I was just saying, like, all right, here's what they're feeling and me trying to calm them down. So a lot of times just the situation in the scene, rebuilding the scene was enough context for them to utilize. So it.
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Yeah, the cast is wonderful. Cosmo Jarvis, Charles Melton, Michael Gandaffini, Kit Connor, Joseph Quinn, Will Poulter, many more. Alex, what were you looking for in a cast? Because you weren't just casting one person. You had to cast a platoon.
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Yeah, I should say we had to. And Ray had a. I think in the end, I would say a bigger voice than mine in the. In the casting. I think that when we first started working on this, I imagined casting Completely unknown actors. And as the, as the project sort of developed and became clearer in the writing process and actually something to do with the budget and the speed we would be shooting, we had to shoot this film in about what, in five weeks. We had 25 days to shoot. It's very short for, for a film shoot that I increasingly began to think we need super experienced actors. We can't pause at any moment in the day to discuss anything. We are going to be at a breakneck speed from 8 o' clock in the morning till wrap at 6 o' clock at night. And there's nothing that, nothing can really slow that down. So, so we went not so much with established actors as experienced actors. And, and then aside from that, I think really a lot of the casting decisions were right.
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What were you looking for in these?
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Attitude.
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Attitude?
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Yeah, the willingness to, to do what, you know, what Alex was speaking about is it's going to be long day, stressful, you're going to be learning a lot. Very kinetic or shooting in close proximity and if you're not comfortable with that, this is not the movie for you. So the ones that jumped at that opportunity, that's the, just the attitude that we wanted. Then there's a youthful component of it being that we were all very young. Kate Connor's character was, you know, just turned 21. So the very youthful. We're all young, you know, young, young men. So I wanted that face where I think traditionally, oftentimes there'll be an older actor because of his ability will portray someone who's younger in real life. So yeah, those are like the two major factors for me.
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It's so interesting you talked about them being young. You happen to have 20 years hindsight on this event. Was it difficult or was it hard in any way to stay within those boundaries of this has got to be in 2006. This has got to be in my mind, in my memory of 2006.
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It was difficult. You know, it's like these are deeper questions. But yeah, you know, that was when I was, I changed and when that ID went off, I've, I always tell people when I explain this is that that's when my youth, like I, I, the young part of me died there and I just started viewing things differently. So yeah, so try to go back to, to that. That's a life changing altering event for a lot of us that were there. So yeah, it is difficult. It brings up emotions, it brings up a lot of regrets. There was, you know, not just me, but I think a lot after Doing a lot of the interviews just because we don't really talk about feelings. And So I think 20 years later, I think we have the tools and we're a little bit more mature, able to talk about the more emotional components from that day. It becomes closure, but you have to go through that, you have to talk about it. And I think hearing how my friends felt on that day was probably, though, therapeutic. It's always rough to hear how some of your brothers feel.
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Alex the house that the platoon was in, it was an Iraqi family's house. They were asleep when the platoon came in. They were put in a translator. They had someone translate to them. This is going to be okay. Clearly it was not. How did you think about presenting the Iraqi family in this film?
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B
Thought about it a lot. I mean, not just the Iraqi family, but the Iraqi scouts and having a sense, in a strange way, of a neighborhood. So when there's a lot of bullets flying around, you understand that those are houses that are occupied by people. The thing about this film was that in a sort of liberating way, there weren't decisions to be made that said from, from your question, nothing could go in the film. So there was no presentation of the Iraqi family or of the individual soldiers or anything. There was an awareness of them, but not a presentation of them that deviated from first hand accounts that we could rely on. So sometimes we got a first hand account that we couldn't rely on because it wasn't quite verified. And memory is a tricky thing over a passage of time. And often memories would conflict with each other. And then sometimes you were left in a really uncertain state about whose memory at this moment you could rely on. But where we had something that was verifiable, which usually meant more than one person agreeing in effect, then we included it. So. So that the agenda decision that one could make, which would be to enlarge or diminish any particular scene or role or moment, was removed from us because this film was an exercise in just sort of listen and repeat and listen and repeat things that we could trust. So. So any number of questions like that are actually sort of taken off the table. You have an awareness of it, but according to the rules of the filmmaking, unless someone said, yeah, we watch this video and listen to this bit of music before going out on an operation or this operation, you can't just inject that in there. Nobody was allowed to construct a scene that would be helpful. And in fact, sometimes we were told things that would have been helpful, but for one reason or another we couldn't include it. So because it was nonverifiable or it sat outside the timeframe that we were talking about, those are the rules we set ourselves. You lose something by doing that, but you gain something else. And I think what you gain is a kind of relationship of trust with the audience who starts to sense that this is reliable information. Whether they like the information or not, it's reliable. And that's a key component part.
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Yeah. I was going to ask you, what do you lose by doing that?
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You lose. I'll tell you what you lose. You lose the reassurance that we've got used to giving each other when we tell a story. We reassure audiences, don't worry we're on the same page or put up your defenses because we're oppositional to each other, which is its own sort of reassurance, actually. It's a reassurance of a position. So we lose something in that respect. But it's something that I want to lose. I'm interested in the idea of narratives that are honest but neutral and. And then allow people to absorb the information. Because I think it's very, very difficult to absorb information when you are not in the choir that's being preached to. And so. So then we end in a kind of a sort of agenda driven cycle that gets us into exactly the space we're all in now, which I don't think is a good one.
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What does the word neutral mean to you? Presenting it in a neutral way?
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Yeah, I mean, not imposing a message or an agenda, it's just being factual. I know sometimes factual can, based on what happens, can maybe teeter it in another direction. But us taking a neutral stance as. And this is what happened. This was all of our memories collectively. And you know, there's lack of scoring and music is another example of being neutral because by us putting that in there, I'm telling you how to fill. So, yeah, just conveying what happened that day.
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The sound design in the film is really interesting. What conversations did you have with your sound designer about. I don't want to say what you want to achieve because you're not trying to. You're not trying to manipulate our emotions. But the sound. But the sound does make you emotional with a lack of sound.
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Well, it should because. Because gunfire can be emotional. It can be startling or frightening, intimidating. These are all emotional states of one sort or another. So. So there's. It's not neutral is not to remove emotional states. It's to make the emotional states reliable. Like honest would be one Way of putting it. So what I'll say about the sound design is if you take music or music out of a film, which we do, you are left with sound design. And that puts sound design front and center. So it makes people notice it in a way they wouldn't otherwise notice it. It's always there, but one is made hyper aware of it. And then what the sound designer did was the same thing I did, which was to listen to Ray. So sometimes in a gunfight, little sub bassy noises are added to make gunshots sound cooler, as it were. What Ray would be concerned about, what Ray would be explaining to the sound designer, and therefore also the audience, is this is the difference between incoming rounds and outgoing rounds. This is how loud something is when you're standing right next to it. These are the strange staccato rhythms where silences will fall and then explosions of action or noise. Not sometimes literal explosions, but. But just of movement. And it. What it does is it disrupts the. The rhythms that we expect in cinema. Cinema is sort of neurotic. It doesn't like silen much. Bit like radio, I suppose. And so. So all. All of this will always just fold back to the same thing, which is everybody involved, all the cast, all the crew, very particularly the crew would go back to Ray and. And in effect be saying, what should we be doing here? Because the unfiltered voice of the veteran, which I referred to earlier, is. Is what all of this is built upon.
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Where did you film Ray Bovin?
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An hour north of London. It's an old World War II airfield there.
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Did it look like the place you were in 2006?
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Not until we. We built it. Yeah. So it was just a parking lot. It was just a parking lot. But yeah, Marco and Mish did an amazing job. Again, their attention to detail. They were all great listeners. I know we keep saying that, but I think they're just them really focusing on the things we were all saying, the details. Everyone was amazing in that way.
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We were lucky. We had some photographs as well that were taken very shortly, within 24, 48 hours of this happening. So we had an extremely good reference of what exterior of the house look like and the interior.
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You told npr, quote, I made it for veterans to show that you're not forgotten. How are you keeping veterans in mind when you were making this film?
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C
Well, one of them in particular was Elliot, who is a veteran. So he was kind of my beacon or lighthouse. So as long as I stay true to. I'm making it for him because he doesn't have that core memory. I knew the rest would fall in place. But the sound design, to your point, the sound design, the production design, how accurate the city looked, the culture, the decisions, the burden of leadership, all these components, everything was right. And I felt it's not, you know, the only voice, but it's a voice. And I was hitting those notes that I felt veterans could be felt hurt or use it as a reference to explain their experience, which I think other movies maybe fell just a little short.
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Alex, so many people have strong feelings about the Iraq war. If someone is listening to this and think, I don't want to see this film, what would you say to them? How would you encourage them to see this film?
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I'm not going to encourage them because I don't like trying to sell stuff in that way, but sort of makes me uncomfortable. But I think what I would say is, number one, that this film is attempting to do something faithful and honest and factual. And if you have strong feelings about the Iraq war, the more accurate the knowledge your feelings are based on is, the better. So it shouldn't be an obstacle, it should be additional, it should be additive. I'd also say, and I think this is more important, is that this is set during the Gulf War, it took place in the Gulf War. It to me relates as clearly to Gaza as it does to Iraq. It relates to Ukraine. It also relates to the Crimean War or the Second World War or the First World War, or I, I would suggest a group of Greek soldiers 2 1/2 thousand years ago under an overwhelming attack. And what, what this is about is not the, the whys of the Iraq war occurring, it did occur. It's about, it's about what we request of soldiers, what they will have to go through. So anybody who cares when they say thank you for your service, anyone who cares about what service might entail, what it might mean and want to actually access that instead of looking away, which is, which is really what people do a lot, they look away, they think, yeah, I know it's bad. And that's all I need to know, is that it's bad. And I, I actually think civilians, it, there is, it's incumbent on them. It's a sort of duty to know more than that because we do regularly send people into these circumstances, which involves the young men and women, and it also involves civilians. And because it's civilians that make the decision to go to war. It might be soldiers that go to war, but it's the civilians that, that make the policy and vote for the people that make the policy, we should know it. So I would encourage them not to go and see this film but to just access that truth in whatever way they can. And this film may or may to me I would say it would be part of that.
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Ray, what do you hope this film communicates about what it means to be in the fight?
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It's the cost, you know, I think it's, it's for the bigger follow on question of when we come home. You know, this is kind of a, a tee up or a setup for, for that conversation though I again, my intentions are always recreated for Elliot but there are some secondary and tertiary I think outcomes which are conversations like this is what combat really looks like feels like. But there's a, something else. It's not over. Elliot is still injured and I have my friends that, who have taken their lives and there's, there's issues and so it's, there's, there's. Though there are people that will answer that call every time, know that when they answer that call there should be some sort of a duty to ensure an accountability, to ensure that they're being taken care of.
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That was my conversation about the movie Warfare with co directors and co writers Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland. Up next, director Craig Renaud joins us alongside producer Juan Arredondo. Their new documentary short Armed Only with a Camera captures the life and career of Craig's brother who became the first American journalist on assignment to be killed covering the war in Ukraine. This is all of it.
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Limu emu and Doug. Here we have the Limu emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
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Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
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Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty.
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