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Warfare stars Joseph Quinn and Charles Melton were honored to help pay tribute to retired U.S. Navy Seal Elliott Miller on behalf of co-directors Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland.

Mendoza, who’s also a retired Seal himself, previously worked as the military advisor on Garland’s Civil War and contributed to the design of its battle sequences. Along the way, he struck up a friendship with the English filmmaker, before sharing the story of his fellow Seal, Miller, and the rest of their platoon’s evacuation during a 2006 mission in Al Qaeda-controlled territory of Ramadi, Iraq. Upon wrapping Civil War, Garland decided to turn the harrowing account in their follow-up film, anointing Mendoza as co-writer and co-director of Warfare.

Mendoza and Miller’s team of U.S. Navy SEALs, which was regarded as Operation 1, were surveilling a residential neighborhood when they were attacked by neighboring insurgents, gravely wounding Miller (Cosmo Jarvis) and Quinn’s character,...

Warfare co-directors Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland explain the personal inspiration for making the Iraq War film. Serving as Garland's follow-up to Civil War (2024), Warfare chronicles the experiences of one Navy Seal platoon in Ramada, Iraq, with memory serving as the basis of the story. For Mendoza, who is a former Navy Seal, the upcoming movie marks his feature film debut as a director after serving as a military or technical advisor on projects like Civil War, The Terminal List (2022), The Outpost (2019), and Lone Survivor (2013).

In a recent interview with Empire magazine, Garland and Mendoza talk about Warfare's origins, with the co-directors revealing that the movie stems from a fortuitous aligning of creative goals. While Garland was interested in recreating a real event as accurately as possible on film, Mendoza's motivation was far more personal. For the former Seal, making the movie was a way of conveying what happened...