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46th N.Y. F.F:

Che

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

 

Press Conference with Director Steven Soderbergh

-At the end of the process of going through, getting the screenplay together and the filming, what is it that you yourself learned about Che?

(Steven Soderbergh) Well, because the process of developing and making this film was so extended, we started talking about it when we were working on "Traffic." Laura Bickford, who produced "Traffic," and Benicio and I started talking – so that's eight years ago. What I found was sometimes you say yes, and you're not sure why you said yes, and that reasoning changes over the course of making the film. And it really wasn't until the films were finished, around the time of Cannes, that I realized what they were really about to me or what really drew them to me was this issue of 'Engagement vs. Disengagement' – that every day in our lives, on a personal level, on a community level, on a global level, we are making a decision about how engaged we want to be, or how disengaged we want to be. Do we want to participate, or do we want to observe? And I realized that what was compelling about Che to me was once he made the decision to engage that he engaged fully; that he was able to sustain whatever it is you need to sustain every day, especially when your life is at stake. And you have to remember he's also an atheist, so a lot of times when you have figures that can sustain this level of engagement, they attribute it to a higher power, or there's some other element they can call upon. He didn't have that; or at least he expressed it in terms of what people were doing to each other here. So that's where I ended up landing but as I said, it sort of changes throughout. But ultimately, it was about engagement.

-How much did you have to go on as far as historical records are
concerned to aid you in your research for the film?

(Steven Soderbergh) As many of you know who've read up on Che, you go to the bookstore and there's an entire wall of Che material. There's a lot to go through and we tried to go through all of it. We spoke to anyone who was still around – and willing to talk – who fought with him and knew him. J.G. Ballard once said, "Research is the refuge of the unimaginative," and there were times where I thought he was absolutely right. We were overwhelmed with information, and as John Lee Anderson who was one of our consultants said at the press conference in Cannes, "Look, there are a million Che's. He means something different to everyone." And at a certain point we, the core creative team, had to decide what to use and not to use, and frankly a lot of it was by exclusion. I went in with more of an idea of what I didn't want to do, as opposed to what I wanted to do. At least that's a start, and you can begin to shape it. I was trying to avoid scenes that I thought were too typical. Like I didn't want to have that scene where someone asks, "Hey, why do they call you Che?" Or have him in battle and his hat blows off, and he runs over and picks up a beret – I didn't want to do that. But you found these crazy little stories from people. One of our favorites we found very late, and it's from the memoirs written by the Acevedo brother who we see at the end of the film driving the car to Havana and Che stops him and tells him to turn around – we found that very late in the process, and I thought it was such a perfect Che scene; a perfect expression of who he was.

-Why did you decide to exclude Che's exploits in Africa?

(Steven Soderbergh) Well if this film makes $100 million, I'll make the third one. We talked about it. The story of Che in the Congo is absolutely fascinating. We actually sort of sketched an idea for a very small film that took place in the Congo, and then Prague where he went after fighting in the Congo to lick his wounds and write a very self-critical book of what happened in the Congo. The glib answer is we didn't have enough money to do that. And also, it's a fascinating chapter but it didn't really fall into the bookend idea that we ended up with. When the film was first being developed, it was only about Bolivia. And it was a little more than halfway through the process of working on that that we decided Bolivia doesn't really make a lot of sense unless you've seen Cuba, because you keep wondering, "Why doesn't he just quit when it's going so badly?" And you have to see what happened in Cuba to see why he thought they were really gonna pull this off. So, it grew from one manageable film into one GIANT film, and overseas it's going to be split in half. So, we just couldn't fit that in. But we read all that material, and in fact there was a quote from one of the African rebels that fought with Che, Victor Dreke, which was fantastic, he said, "Che would rather face a bullet than reality," and it's a perfect description of him I think.

-There's been a lot of talk of how this film, at 4 hours plus, is
going to be released. How would you like to see the film released? As one massive 4-hour epic?

(Steven Soderbergh)Five one-hour films? [Laughs] Here's our plan currently: that whenever the movie enters a specific market – New York, L.A., San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas – that for one week, on one screen, you can see it like you just saw it [at 4 hours+]. And there will be a specially-printed program with the credits from both the films, and we're referring to that as 'the roadshow version,' the way they used to do in the 50's and 60's. I think that's the ideal way to see it… It's a lot to ask of someone to throw away an entire day, but I guess my only argument is that cinematically we're making a demand on the audience that's very similar to the demands that Che made on the people around him. [Laughs] It's a big commitment, and it requires a certain kind of personality to want to experience it like that. But it was certainly designed that way, so you get the sort of call-and-response' between the two parts.

-When was your first connection with Che Guevara?

(Steven Soderbergh) I think like most people in this country I first heard Che's name in history class at school when you would get that sort of quick sketch of the history of Cuba. One of the great things about having this job is that more often than not I get paid to educate myself. A lot of the details of the Cuban Revolution obviously were not known to me. I thought that it was basically all Fidel; I had no idea about these other groups that were basically trying to do the same thing. And my idea of Che was from those images of him near the very end of the Cuban Revolution with the beret and the cast on his arm. I had no idea of this transformation from the medic to becoming a leader.

-What was the most valuable thing that you learned about Che Guevara in making this film?

(Steven Soderbergh) I think the thing that I learned about him that was interesting to me was what a hard-ass he was. Talking to the people that fought alongside him, one of the doctor's that he fought with also had a great quote. He said, "You had to love him for free," and he just described how uncompromising he was. Most people wanted to be in Camilo's column because he was fun. Che was just a very, very strict disciplinarian, and there was no moment where he dropped the ideology – even in a personal, one-on-one situation. A lot of people found him cold and distant. So Benicio and I talked about that a lot – that he really only reserved the warmer side of his personality for when he was in the 'doctor mode.' When he was in the 'leader/Comandante' mode he was really, really harsh and I can understand why – the stakes were pretty high.

-Will you be taking the film to Argentina?

(Steven Soderbergh) As far as going to Argentina, we're trying to figure that out now – the South American tour. The release dates for the film are sort of staggered – the film has opened in Spain so far and that's it – so we're trying to figure that out now.

-One of the differences between the Cannes cut and the current
incarnation is that the voiceover is in English, instead of Spanish. Why did you decide to change it?

(Steven Soderbergh)Here's how I justified it: it seemed organic to me because we used the actor who was his interpreter following him around in New York, and so it seemed appropriate to use that idea to continue hearing this guy translate Che. More importantly, there are sequences in which he is speaking in which I do not want an English-speaking audience to be reading – I want them to be able to watch the images and hear the words without having to read. Especially for instance the Battle of L'vero where he does the Tolstoy quote. I've seen the film with English subtitles and you cannot watch both things at the same time. You just can't.

-How hard was it finding financing for the production? And could you elaborate a little bit on the shoot itself?

(Steven Soderbergh) Well all I can say is I'm glad we're not looking for money right now! It was complicated, but we knew it would be. I mean look at it. And it took a couple people sticking it out for a long time and ultimately believing in the commercial viability of the brand of Che. I mean that's the weird paradox about this guy – here he is the icon of Marxist/Leninist economic ideology, and you stick his face on anything and it sells. It's a very weird situation. And I believed that if we were just able to get the thing made, it would find enough of an audience to get its money back. The amount of money that we had dictated a pretty strict shooting schedule. We had 39 days for each part, and to put that in the context of something else that I've made, that's fewer days than it took to shoot the first "Ocean's" film. We had a 10-day gap in between the shoots, and we shot the second part first, and we shot it backwards, so it was very confusing. The principal sources of funding came from Wild Bunch, which is a French sales and production company, and Telecinco, which is a very large Spanish television and film production company.

-Could you talk about the visual differences between the two halves of the film, including the usage of widescreen in the first half?

(Steven Soderbergh) I was trying to find a specific way to create a sensation for each part, so the wider frame – what I consider to be a more 'Hollywood' format - I thought was more appropriate for the Cuban Revolution because it really had the trajectory of a sort of classic Hollywood war film. Eighty-two guys start out, then they're down to 12; it looks like they're not gonna make it and then they do; everything that needs to go right goes right and they get all the breaks. And I honestly wanted it to have a more traditional Hollywood aesthetic, including the music and the cutting. In the second film I wanted it to film a little more less-settled, where you felt like the outcome was not clear – even from the beginning. So I used the 1:85 frame, which is a little less wide, and went all handheld. It seemed to me a very simple way of sending a different message to the audience about what each part was to feel like.

-Can you comment on the film's political nature?

(Steven Soderbergh) Well I guess I believe that any movie that accurately presents anyone's life, or any situation – any movie that's not a fantasy, and isn't just a pure entertainment – is to me by definition a political film, whether it's a cop movie or "Erin Brockovich." Any movie that attempts to look at things in a straightforward fashion and not polish it up I think you could argue is a 'political film.' These are political films in a sense that there's an ideology being expressed and acted upon, but that's not what drew me to them ultimately. I'm obviously not a communist. As I said to someone a couple of weeks ago, "There isn't even a place for me in the society that Che was trying to build." He says in 'Man and Socialism in Cuba': "There's no great artist who's also a true revolutionary." He didn't have a lot of use for the kind of stuff that I do, and I think personally he probably would have hated me. But again, I can still look at him and find him one of the most compelling political figures of the last half century, and I do think the ideas are fascinating to debate and to look at in the context of what we live in now. One of the interesting things to me about the Cuban Revolution is that is the last time you're ever going to see a revolution like that fought. That's what I call 'the last analog revolution.' Today, that would have been over in two weeks. Technology just makes it impossible to fight a revolution the way they did as we see seven or eight years later. It was interesting to make a period film about a type of war that can't be fought anymore.

-In the second film (or second half of the film), there are several cameos featuring recognizable actors that pop up, including Matt Damon, whereas in the rest of the film it's a largely unrecognizable Latin American cast. Were you at all worried that this would negatively affect audience recognition?

(Steven Soderbergh) I was trying to stack the film with as many well-known people as I could frankly, so I put a lot of calls out. I think a lot of people see the film and don't even know it's Matt, but I guess I wasn't really worried that it would pull them out of the film because they were supporting characters, and they didn't carry the film on their shoulders. But I was absolutely looking to cast it up. I had to.

-Could you talk about the locations and where you shot the film?

(Steven Soderbergh)Unfortunately as you know, as an American I'm not allowed to shoot in Cuba, but we made many trips there that were licensed through the State Department, so at least we got a look at where the events actually took place. And Bolivia we were able to shoot in. Part one was [shot in] Mexico, Puerto Rico, and New York. And Part two was [shot in] Bolivia and Spain. But it turned out we had somebody working on the film who grew up in La Higuera, and when they came to the set – because we built that La Higuera set on the top of this mountain in the middle of nowhere – and when he came to the set he was stunned and said, "This is exactly where I remember growing up." So our production
designer Antxón Gómez did a fantastic job.

-If Che were alive today, how do you think he would view
contemporary Cuba? And since he's not, how do you view it?

(Steven Soderbergh) That's the question that everyone wants to know the answer to, and of course it's one we can't answer. As far as what's going on in Cuba now, I don't think we've been very smart in how we've played this. I think there could have been other moves made on our part in order to make a dialogue more inevitable. I'm still stunned that this embargo is still going on – it's just shocking to me, and doesn't seem to make much sense. It's my personal belief that if you want the embargo to end, and you want to see some change there, you should flood the place with tourists. There's nothing like exposure to new ideas that get people thinking about new ideas. So in fact our policy is the opposite to what I would be doing, but of course I'm not running the country. But November 4th maybe!