The Movie
CHE Moive
, PART ONE: JANUARY 1 On November 26, 1956, Fidel Castro sails to Cuba with eighty rebels. One of those rebels is Ernesto
Che Guevara
, an Argentine doctor who shares a common goal with Fidel Castro - to overthrow the corrupt dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.
Che
proves indispensable as a fighter, and quickly grasps the art of guerrilla warfare. As he throws himself into the struggle,
Che
is embraced by his comrades and the Cuban people. the argentine tracks
Che's
rise in the
Cuban Revolution
, from doctor to commander to revolutionary hero.
About Che The Movie
"Forty years after his death, there are many reasons why
Che
remains a potent symbol today," explains Laura Bickford, one of the producers of Steven Soderbergh's
CHE
- PART 1. "He's clearly an image of youthful rebellion and idealism and I think those two things are eternal, timeless. We aren't interested in the current politics in Cuba. We're filmmakers making a movie about a specific period of time seen from
Che's
point of view. "We've talked to everybody on every side and all of our research went into the script.We'll never make everybody happy. It's impossible to get every detail exact. We spent three years researching what eventually became
CHE
- PART 2.
The original idea was that we would explore one part of
Che's
life in great detail. What we found was that by just doing PART 2, you didn't understand the context in which he made the decision to go to Bolivia. "When we decided to add Cuba and New York and began working on the structure, it just kept getting bigger and bigger. That's when we realized we needed to make two movies.
"When Benicio and I first became interested in
Che
and were approaching various writers, Peter Buchman, who had written "ALEXANDER", was recommended to us. Peter spent a year reading all of the books in preparation for writing the screenplay. When producing "TRAFFIC" became a reality, we were sidetracked for a few years. When we came back to the project,
Steven
had agreed to direct the
film
. It was Steven who wanted to look at Cuba and New York and re-examine Bolivia. "One of the biggest difficulties for
Steven and Benicio
in terms of the screenplay was that we had so much information and we'd met so many people who had told us their amazing stories," continues Bickford. "How to condense things yet still tell this sweeping story and make it feel real was extremely challenging. "Every writer in town wanted to help Steven write his version but it would have taken them at least a year to get up to speed. Then Peter called to remind me that he had already done all the research. I was very grateful. He was absolutely brilliant in helping us to structure the movie." Recalls Buchman: "I remember that when I called Laura five years or so after I had done the research, I told her that if they just wanted a writer to sit in a room with Steven and brainstorm I'd be happy to have him use me as a sounding board.
That was two and a half years ago. I flew to New York and met with him and
Benicio
. My biggest issue with doing just Bolivia was that it presents a tragic ending to a story that I wanted to know more about. I felt it didn't have enough of a sense of loss because we didn't really know what came before. "I went away and wrote a single script with three storylines:
Che's
life and the Cuban revolution in one, his fall in another and in between, the trip to New York to speak at the United Nations. "The one disadvantage of doing a single movie with that much story is that whenever you have to condense time you start distorting history. We all knew there was a lot at stake with the material. I always try to stay true to the spirit of history but in this case there are so many people on both sides of the fence who are still passionate about this subject. "
Steven Soderbergh
thought we weren't doing each major story justice in a single script and said he had an idea for
two movies
. Because the United Nations was about to undergo a major renovation, we went ahead and shot the scenes of
Che speaking to the General Assembly in 1964
. Laura turned to me and said, "Isn't this a celebratory moment?" and I said I'd have thought it was a great moment too - if I didn't have to go home now and write two screenplays! "I had to rethink the whole structure of the Cuban story because initially I had written such a condensed version of it. I had to go back to the history and this was a process that
Steven and Benicio
and Laura were very involved with.
