1 week Ago By Stephen Schaefer
After collaborating on the provocative What If? movie “Civil War,” Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland wrote and directed Friday’s brutally realistic “Warfare.” Intense and unrelenting, “Warfare” is based on Mendoza’s 2006 Iraq War experience as a Navy SEAL when his platoon was trapped on a mission. The action unfolds in real time.
The cast includes D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai as Mendoza and Michael Gandolfini. “IRay really put us through a boot camp and trained us and I got to talk to guys who were there. One of the important things that I didn’t know at first,” Gandolfini, 25, said in a post-screening Q&A, “was this sense of – I wouldn’t say calmness – just stoicism.
Just keeping their cool. What happened on this day was they have a shield they felt was impenetrable and it cracked.” Gandolfini’s LT McDonald is part of an Air Naval Gunfire Liaison.
“He wasn’t a SEAL, he was there to support the SEALs. The thing that me and him spoke about was being there to support all the guys the best he can. “That was actually, he expressed, one of his biggest fears of the day: That he was maybe not doing a good enough job.
That was one of the things I wanted to have in there. “There’s this flow, of ‘Okay, we’ve got a handle on this right now’ and then ‘Now we don’t.’ That’s the job in some ways, trying to always stay on track.
” Garland, 54, spoke of the film’s origins, which began as work on “Civil War” ended. “I asked Ray if he was interested in making a film, about 90 minutes, where we would attempt to forensically recreate an incident with combat. “Ray told me his story and the writing process began with a week in Los Angeles where Ray lives.
He just downloaded every single thing he could remember about this incident. “I want to say that this film is the product of an enormous honesty. There’s all sorts of uncomfortable things in this film.
Things people would want to hide or gloss over. There was absolutely none of that at all. “We then extended it to interviewing as many people as we could who were there.
There was a simple rule: Nothing could be invented. “We worked by cross referencing people’s memories – that’s why it says, ‘Based on memory.’ “I won’t go too far on this but you know memory is a complicated thing with the passage of time, memories formed in extreme stress, trauma.
Several people suffered from concussion. “What that does to memory is a complicated jigsaw to put together.” “Warfare” is in theaters Friday Ray Mendoza, left, and Alex Garland on the set of “Warfare.
” (Courtesy of A24).
