Five actors and one director are seated around a table in a London hotel room, when there is a knock at the door. The room service attendant enters, bearing a tray of dainty glasses filled with a custard-coloured tipple. It’s not even noon, but cut these people some slack: they’ve been through something traumatic.

Ray Mendoza, the 45-year-old Iraq war veteran turned film-maker, has just co-directed Warfare, which restages in distressing, claustrophobic visuals and concussive sound the terrifying ordeal he underwent in November 2006 as part of a group of US Navy Seals who were trapped, along with two Iraqi scouts and two marines, under fire from al-Qaida forces in a crumbling apartment building in Ramadi, 70 miles (110km) west of Baghdad. Mendoza and his fellow soldiers had to care for their wounded comrades, after an improvised explosive device blew up the armoured vehicle that was trying to facilitate their escape, all the while holding off their attackers and hanging tight for a second batch of rescuers.

Now, he and Alex Garland, who became close when Mendoza was an adviser on Garland’s explosive thriller Civil War, have recreated that experience. Just as Stanley Kubrick brought the Vietnam war to an east London gasworks for Full Metal Jacket, Garland and M...
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