Warfare is not a typical war movie. It's based on true events (the memories of co-director Ray Mendoza), and it foregoes traditional cinematic expectations to present as realistic a portrayal as possible of the titular experience. As I write about in my four-star review for CinemaBlend, it's a unique film to take in – and it was special enough to attract the interest of star Will Poulter despite the actor's complete lack of interest in contributing to the war genre.
As captured in the video above, Will Poulter spoke about his first time meeting with co-director Alex Garland during the press day for Warfare last month, and the story is not what you'd typically expect from a junket interview. He explained that he was a fan of the filmmaker prior to their meeting, but his experience talking to him about his latest project was a roller coaster. Said Poulter,
When I first got the opportunity to meet with Alex, I was so excited. And initially when I heard it was a war film, my heart slightly sunk just because I wasn't necessarily that motivated to be part of a of a war film. Then when I heard the objective, which was to try and contribute to the canon of war films with something that was made devoid of Hollywood grammar, no score, no fictionalization, like a very literal, apolitical and, objective recreation of real events… I was all in and, yeah, I should have known about... I should have known that Alex Garland is too clever to do otherwise.
The director of Ex Machina, Annihilation, Men, and Civil War, Alex Garland has made a massive impact on genre cinema in the last decade-plus, and one might think that Will Poulter was going to be meeting the filmmaker about a new science-fiction or horror idea. In contrast to Garland's previous work, Warfare is super grounded, and it was the special degree to which it's grounded that let Poulter see it as a project he wanted to be a part of.
Will Poulter has one of the standout roles in the new 2025 movie, but he is surrounded by a cast full of talent, including D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (playing Ray Mendoza), Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor, Michael Gandolfini, Noah Centineo, Joseph Quinn, Henry Zaga, and Charles Melton. If the unique approach to the film wasn't a particular draw, certainly being a part of the ensemble must have been.
Kit Connor also discussed his first time reading the script during CinemaBlend's interviews during the Warfare press day, and he remarked that it was the structure of the story to which he initially reacted – comparing it to a short film:
My immediate reaction to the script, actually, was that it kind of read a bit like a short film. I find that with a lot of short films, they, are very aware of the fact that they don't have the time to have an entire narrative structure. They can't have a specific kind of climax, beginning, middle, end. So they often just convey a sort of space of time. And that's really what this film is trying to do.
Because it's intended to reflect reality, Warfare doesn't have a first, second, and third act. It's a narrative film by technical standards, but one might say it is more a window into the reality of the characters during a particularly hellish time.
Connor continued,
It's not trying to force any kind of beginning, middle, end, climax, you know? It's not trying to do anything like that. It's just trying to tell about an hour-and-a-half worth of time’s story, without any kind of embellishments and any kind of dramatization, which is very, you know, it’s unlike any script I've ever read. And I just thought it was, frankly, incredibly ballsy as a filmmaking endeavor, which was exciting, you know?
Adding to his co-star's point, Cosmo Jarvis added that the focus on reality and attention to detail didn't end with the script; Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza brought that same energy to the production:
And even from the script in the first place, moving on to when we were actually going into specific pieces, that same attention to just the events that were of the film’s concern became more focused on a moment-by-moment basis, specifically from Alex and Ray.
Having spent the last few weeks building up buzz and hype, Warfare arrives in theaters everywhere this Friday courtesy of A24 – and be sure to stay tuned here on CinemaBlend for more from our interviews with the movie's fantastic cast.
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