“Cinema has a very long, complex history with war”: Alex Garland, Kit Connor and Cosmo Jarvis on Warfare
Shunning spectacle in favour of fidelity, Alex Garland’s Warfare – co-written and co-directed with former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza – is far from the conventional war epic. Instead, it delivers something altogether more visceral: a meticulous re-enactment of an encounter Mendoza and his platoon experienced in the wake of the Battle of Ramadi. At the BFI IMAX this week, Garland, joined by actors Kit Connor and Cosmo Jarvis, spoke of the film’s pursuit of truth.
Garland opened by pointing to the movie’s universal relevance, resisting the framing of Warfare as simply another Iraq War narrative. “What you are seeing is a group of young men and some civilians under an extraordinary amount of pressure,” he explained, emphasising that while the specifics of Iraq are present, Warfare speaks to a broader human experience. “You would have found some of these things playing out two and a half thousand years ago with some Greek soldiers, and I think you find them playing out now in Gaza or Ukraine.”
“Cinema has a very long, complex history with war, to the extent that there’s a genre that is the war film,” Garland stated, outlining the ways in which Warfare both stands within and apart from that tradition. “Almost always, those films are made by civilians,” he noted, highlighting how Warfare, by contrast, is anchored in first-hand testimony – “a group of film technicians assisting and getting out of the way of a veteran who is simply trying to tell their story in as honest a manner as possible.”
Connor, who plays the newest member of the unit, echoed that emphasis on realism over archetypes. “It’s not about their characters – it’s not about where they’ve been or where they’re going to go; it’s just trying to present that 90-minute period,” he shared, underscoring the feature’s focus on collective experience over individual narrative arcs. He credited the three-week boot camp the actors took in preparation with embedding a sense of structure and hierarchy that deeply informed their performances. “There was a methodology that was sort of instilled in us from the beginning,” he recalled, “It meant that I looked at Will Poulter as my boss, as my leader, and that informed a lot of the decisions that I made.”
Mendoza is not only behind the camera, on the page and depicted onscreen by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai – he is the very flesh of the film. The characters depicted are based on real people, their memories, trauma and testaments shaping every frame. Jarvis, who plays sniper Elliot Miller, spoke of how this altered the process of performance. “There were so many holders of the memories in question that we were employed to relive,” he shared.
For Garland, that quest for authenticity was the project’s entire foundation. Asked whether he missed the convenience of genre shortcuts while writing, he replied, “No, not at all,” revealing that he welcomed that constraint. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s appropriate; it’s what happened.” What might sound creatively limiting, he added, was “actually quite freeing”.
The emotional weight of Jarvis’s role was amplified by the proximity of Miller himself, who was present during filming. “Cosmo is playing the real Elliot, who is six, seven, or eight feet away from him in his wheelchair,” Garland noted, describing it as “an extraordinary, strange blurring of states”. That proximity is the core of Warfare, which, beneath its surface, is about vulnerability. “It’s the intimate moment of the very worst moment of people’s lives which we, in a sense, get privileged access to,” Garland reflected. “Navy SEALs are fetishised – by the media, by films, by comic books and video games, and also by themselves, to an extent – but really they are, in this instance, very young men in an appalling situation.”
That mindset was central to a production defined by its rejection of actorly flourish. “There was an aspect of being afforded, I guess, respect, to absorb the responsibility of carrying out work as a technician rather than an artist,” Jarvis added.
Christina Yang
Warfare is released nationwide on 18th April 2025.
Watch the trailer for Warfare here:
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