The evolving landscape of cinema and the film industry

[Music] Welcome and welcome to a new episode of Actually, the podcast of Will who talks about the change that seems to arrive slowly and then turns us all into a deal. Let's continue this usual summer program. You can also hear a little bit of rumble because the locations in which we record are not the usual ones and are not the studies of Milan. And this summer program continues with an episode a little out of the schemes, but in full style Actually. It is a conversation that we have already recorded a few months ago, but that we have not yet published. We were waiting to publish it on the occasion of the release of Warfare Time of War, a new film has already defined the new frontier of the War movie, which will be in the Italian salt from August 21, distributed by Warner Pictures. I leave you then to Ricky and to the nice conversation that has been made. At this point we have nothing but to announce the jingle and good listening. [Music] So, big story of today, completely out of the schemes and the normal of our podcast. Why? Because we enter the world of cinema. We enter the world of cinema with a film, a title and two people who have directed and directed this film. One of these, you will know him, is Alex Garland. Now I will tell you something more than him, but already the name will tell you something and the other is Roy Mendoza. The film that will be released in the salt from a few days ago in Italy is called Warfare. It is a production of A24, distributed in Italy by I Wonder, which we thank you for this opportunity. Now guys, I go to the English and I go directly into our conversation. Alex Garland and Roy Mendoza, welcome to the show. Thank you. So, guys, I'll start with Alex, just a couple of words on you, director of Warfare, your latest movie. You're a novelist, then turn filmmaker known for Ex Machina, whoa, this was a powerful thing. Annihilation and Civil War, my 2024 favorite movie. And you're here with Ray Mendoza, who has a very, another very peculiar history, as Ray is a former US Navy SEAL with 16 years of service, a Silver Star from Iraq and now a Hollywood experience. First, as a military advisor, we'll ask you about this profession, Ray. And then now with this experience as a director. Thank you so much once again, guys, to be here. I'll start with Alex, and I'll ask you, Alex, do you have a unique perspective on the movie industry nowadays? You saw it, you started with the beach by writing the thing, and now you arrived to Warfare. I'll start asking you, do you prefer the current state of the industry or the one that you got to know when you first started? So, I feel like more than 20 years ago. That's such an interesting question. The thing about so two and a half decades ago, the industry was bigger, had more money, more films were made, more people were going to the cinema. So you could say that was better. And it was great for that period, the kind of currency, the cultural currency that film had. But in those days, if you had a difficult idea or a sort of morally complex idea or something thoughtful or cerebral, you often had to smuggle it in to the film. You couldn't just do it. You had to hide it around other things. And you had to sometimes kind of trick studios into making films or making it seem like a slightly different kind of film than it really was. And these days, there's been two really big changes. One of them weirdly is television. The Sopranos changed the landscape in terms of adult drama within genre, I would say. And it demonstrated that audiences were more sophisticated than studios had had believed them to be. Yes, we are. Yeah, yes, you are, I agree. And the other was, for me, personally, was the arrival of A24 as a studio, which thought in the same way that creatives used to think they were less like a studio and more like directors or writers in that respect. Can you explain what makes A24 such a special thing? Because here in Europe, we just see every now and then some very cool hats. Everyone is looking for those hats and no, and amazing movies. But I'm not sure we're really grasping the uniqueness of this thing in modern movie making. I should say there are some other studios who like A24 are willing to make more difficult films. They're not the only one, but they are the one that proved the point and showed the way in some respects. So it's really, there's a very simple answer to that question. They are prepared to make movies that other people, the traditional legacy studios are not prepared to make. So I had, not long ago, a guy who I've known for a very long time, who runs one of the studios, come up to me and say, you know, I would never have made Civil War. I should have made Civil War, but I never would. And A24 not only did make it, they made it at a higher budget, taking a bigger risk with a smaller studio than any film they'd made previous up to that point. So that's the difference. Well, and then thank you guys, you and A24 for giving birth to such an incredible movie like Civil War. Ray, I'll move to you actually sticking a bit to this idea of change and how the industry changed. I mean, you've been working in the movie industry as an advisor and now as a director. How have you seen the industry changing among those years? And I'll also ask you, because I mean, you started as a military advisor. I'll also ask you how the technology that changed a lot during the last, let's say, 10 years, affected your work, especially as a military advisor? Yeah, I would say in the beginning, you know, when the war kicked off, there wasn't, I think like the first one of the first war movies about GWAT, global war on terrorism, a rack of gas, and I want to say active valor, maybe, which I was a part of. And so there, in regards to the change or the evolution, that was like, there's this explosion and I think in a lot of veterans, a lot of veterans want to tell their stories. I was lucky to have a good inside track when I started tech advising, but there's this huge explosion, I think, with books and veterans in the military space in general, whether that's them trying to be directors, writers, cameramen, you name it. Me as an advisor, I think that allowed me to be on more films, not just on military films, but just film, had action. Maybe I need to have another question. Like, can you briefly explain what is the role of a military advisor? Because I think it's not that common here in Europe to have such a figure on set. Well, even that is there's different kinds. So I think there's a technical advisor, right? So that's a technical advisor could be someone who's an expert in anything. It could be if it's a movie about surgeons or about astronauts or about race car drivers, right? You bring on a technical advisor. So I'm also a technical advisor because I'm talking about something very technical. It can also be a military advisor that is even more specific. That means like the movie is probably something about some sort of military story. So therefore, or there's a military component to the movie there. Therefore, I am a military advisor and I'm advising only on the military stuff. But I brought it as a technical advisor. That could be all aspects of it could be gunfighting and it could be maybe my communications because that was my specialty. So there's you know, it's loosely interchangeable kind of. But for me, you know, in between in the beginning, there wasn't a lot of military movies being done. Like I said, it was active valor and then load survivor. And I think maybe just the studios weren't doing them for some reason, but it was far and few between. So I had to figure out what am I going to deal in between? And so I started to I was a PA, a production assistant. I worked in camera. I sat in editing rooms and because I wanted to learn. And so I think what is enabled me to be a better technical advisor. I can now I'm learning the language. I can start speaking the same language they're speaking. I think some tech advisors, military advisors just stick to their what they're good at, which is just advising on weapons and what the uniforms look like. But I feel where I broke out was I learned every facet of filmmaking, not just how to hold a gun. And I often was hired just for that. I would be brought on set and I'm just a check in the box. The director never spoke to me, didn't care what my opinion was. And that's I'm just an advisor. He could take my advice or not. And some, a lot of them did not. I was there because some producers had to be there and they could really care less what I had to say or what I thought. The ones that do, I think a lot of the movies, they those movies have separated themselves from the other movies. I mean, you can see you can see it here. Yeah, exactly. You can see it in warfare. Yeah, exactly. To your point, yeah. So when you surround yourself with experts, that's like that's the sign of a good leader, right? Somebody who relies on the people that know what they're doing. And he just gives the direction of what he wants in his vision. And that's the sign of a intelligent leader of those. You know, if you have these people who are experts and you don't use them, then you're a fool. I go back to the other director here, Alex. And I'll take just a bit of the question that they just asked to Ray on technology and AI. There's been a lot of talking about AI, reshaping the industry, AI being, I mean, this huge risk. And then last night, I was watching your movie, guys, and thought, who cares about AI? It's such, from my perspective, I mean, again, I never shot a movie, but it really had like the look and feel of a very artisanal movie. Like, I don't see, did you use even a bit of AI in that? I'm just curious to see. And if not, again, I'll brother the question, how do you see the role of AI evolving now in the industry, Alex? Yeah, we didn't use AI, but I think, personally, what I think is that AI is coming. So it's not really a question about whether you like it or not. Yeah, for sure. It's coming. And so you just have to figure out how you legislate it's coming, how you manage it's coming, not whether it's going to come or not. And I suspect that AI will in some ways be just like a tool in the way that visual effects are a tool or special effects are a tool. We're in a way, cameras are a tool. So it will be a tool. It has one significant difference, which is it will 100% take jobs away. So less people will be earning a living. Yeah, onset in actually in pre-production, physical production and post-production. What about the writing like a movie like this now? OK, so it's based on the true story. What about because I mean, I know in the US has been a lot of talking about the writing part. You could use AI in this movie quite easily. So, for example, at some points, we have a jet that doesn't pour. So impressive, that's enough. So so that's we didn't have a real jet because we were a low budget film. I think Top Gun sometimes used real jets, but we couldn't write. We just don't have the money. And so we use visual effects. And actually, those visual effects shots are ultimately, if you add it all together, are in effect created by hundreds of people. And it's possible that in whatever it is, five or ten years, a shot like that will be created by two people. So it's really it's not so much about the creative role within film. It's more the societal role you just have. It's like the Industrial Revolution. You just have less people earning money, paying tax and being able to support their family. OK, thank you so much. Now, let's move quickly to quickly, not that quickly, actually, to the movie. I mean, we won't spoil anything under a very strong NDA, but I'm asking Ray, your perspective. I mean, the very end of the movie was a pretty this pretty touching section where your involvement and direct involvement comes out. You were part of the facts that are narrated in the movie. I guess it's the very first time in your life you've seen something you lived depicted directly in a movie. What was the feeling the first time you saw the movie? Such a tragic movie of such a tragic moment of your life. And you watch it and say, what was the feeling? Yeah, I mean, I sat in the editing room, so I watched it hundreds of times. OK, you were burned at some point. Yeah, no, but the first time I actually saw it in a theater was with the guys that were there. A lot of my colleagues that were there that day also contributed to the film. As in the recount or the retelling of their perspectives and utilizing their memories of it. But so we kind of it was the first time showing them. And it was the first time being watched on a big screen with the sound. And I was nervous. I was extremely, extremely nervous. Both we were both had some anxiety going into it because that was like the first test. It was a test of if we got it right. If we depicted everyone's testimonials right, correct. And so, yeah, and then, you know, some of the comments were, you know, it was great, accurate. We we probably can't get it closer than that. That's as close as we can get to what it was that day. And so, yeah, for I think, for me, I can't speak for Alex, but that at that point, the weight starts to come off, right? There's a lot of there's a lot of pressure. There's a lot of weight that we're carrying. And so each, you know, there's these kind of checkpoints of approval that was the first one. And you just start to feel relief and the weight starts to come off. And that's an indicator that we did it right. Alex, I just tried to put this movie in perspective on your career. You move you started as a novelist talking about backpackers in Thailand. And then you move to different places like like AI. And now why a war movie at this point of your career and such a strong, powerful, let's say, bloody movie, movie like this in 2025? The honest answer to that probably in some ways goes back to my childhood, because one of my dad's closest friends was a foreign correspondent who's covering war in Southeast Asia at that time. And he used to come back. He would report on it, but he'd come back and he'd talk about it and he'd bring back little sort of souvenirs or it was he was just a big figure in my life. And I think having a closeness to a really very good war correspondent just taught me at an early age that there is a value in writing or filming or presenting narratives honestly about what war is actually like. And in some ways, then I became increasingly aware that I worked in an industry that was distorting some elements of war. And that sounds like a criticism. It's more complicated than that. I think there's there's room for lots of different sorts of films, performing lots of different sorts of functions. But I was aware that in written form, there were actually many authentic first person accounts of combat raised, referred to soldiers, people in the Navy or the Air Force or whatever it was, would write books, usually, that gave an account of what their experiences were like. But there was very little in cinema that was an authentic voice, an unfiltered voice of a veteran. And there was even less that attempted to sort of forensically recreate combat. There may be almost nothing that attempts to do that. And I I thought that it's it's good to be honest about war sometimes, maybe not always because nobody bear it, but but sometimes it's good to be honest. And and what Ray did was present the opportunity to to do that. I could not do that on my own, because I don't have the first hand experience that is necessary. I could only do it with with Ray, actually, in this instance, partly because Ray is experienced as a soldier, but is experienced as a in combat in the military, but also experienced on film sets. So the two just came together perfectly. Well, it's a honest movie about war. This I can say for sure to prepare because it's really, really honest. I thank you and I need to thank the co-directors of Warfare, Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza. Thank you so much, guys, for being with us. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Thank you.