The Movie
7 years of Research
"The process of
playing Che
was very different for me than other movies I have made," allows producer and star Benicio Del Toro. "In this case, as a real person, you start with the man himself and what he wrote. This led us to seven years of research into what other people wrote about him. Even so, I always returned to what he had written himself."
"Over the past seven years," says
Bickford
, "we’ve gone to
Cuba and Bolivia and Paris and Miami
- pretty much everywhere there was somebody on either side of the
story
who had something to tell us. One of the amazing things about making a story about the
Cuban Revolution
is that so many people are still alive who fought in it. If you do a story about the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Mexican Revolution, there’s nobody left to talk to.
"There’s a huge amount of documentation and photos. The rebels were pretty good at documenting their experience. "There are three men who met
Che during the Cuban Revolution
who followed him to
Bolivia
and survived: Pombo, Urbano and Benigno. All three are in both PART 1 and PART 2. We’ve interviewed them individually and occasionally Pombo and Urbano together about what happened to them in Cuba and Bolivia. Urbano was an advisor in Spain. What that did for us, and what it did for the actors, was infuse them with a sense of reality that you can only get from someone who was there. The truth is you could make an entire film about each of them; each one has his own story.
"The information the
Che movie actors
needed from them was very specific. Details like: how would they hold their guns in a certain situation? How did they know how to get from here to there? Would they have deployed a leapfrog formation or would they have gone through the bushes? Very specific tactical information, and it really energized the
Che movie cast
. In our group of actors portraying this piece of the Cuban Revolution and this piece of Che's life, we have the whole political spectrum. Every single political perspective on the Cuban issue is represented by somebody on this
Che movie
."
ABOUT THE FILMING
"I don’t think we could have made these
two movies
with the amount of money we had had he (Soderbergh) not been directing. The speed with which we needed to move was a big challenge every day for the cast and crew," says Bickford. It was always
Soderbergh's
intention to film as much as possible using only natural light. Most of the action of both films takes place outdoors. In the end, lamps were used only very occasionally. One way that the production was able to cut down on time was through Soderbergh’s use of an innovative new camera: the
RED
. Initially they had hoped to be able to use it, but the camera wasn’t available on time. Recalls Bickford,
"We had a very happy accident because our Spanish work papers and visas hadn't come through on schedule. Steven and Benicio and I were grounded in Los Angeles for a week and that week they called to say the prototype was ready." The RED camera is a high performance digital cine camera with the quality of 35mm film and convenience of pure digital. The body was designed for flexibility and functionality. It’s a streamlined package and weighs around 9 lbs. "Shooting with RED is like hearing The Beatles for the first time," says Soderbergh. "RED sees the way I see. Someday I hope to find out exactly how they made something so technologically advanced seem so organic, so beautifully attuned to that most natural of phenomena - light. But for now I’m just glad I’ve got my hands on it because it actually made the
films
better."
