To celebrate the June 29th DVD & Blu-ray release of Che: Parts 1 & 2, we spoke with director Steven Soderbergh and star Benicio Del Toro

Steven, why did you want to bring the story of Che Guevara to the big screen?

STEVEN SODERBERGH I wasn’t really interested in Che and if I hadn’t been approached by Benicio and [producer] Laura Bickford during the making of Traffic, I don’t think I ever would have imagined making a movie about Che. I knew who he was, I had a superficial understanding of his life but I didn’t know how he died. If it wasn’t for them I never would have considered it.

I said yes without even knowing why I was saying yes. I had a feeling it was going to be trouble, but I also had a feeling it was something I needed to do and ought to do. So I got involved and began a very lengthy research process, the most interesting aspect of which was our multiple trips to Cuba to talk to Che’s family and to talk to people who fought with him and knew him.

Why do you think the legend of Che persists today?

SODERBERGH I think Che’s ideas are still alive and are still being played out, especially in the part of the world where he operated. You could make the argument that in Bolivia he was just 40 years too early. Bolivia has an indigenised Indian President now and that was unthinkable 40 years ago. It wasn’t unthinkable to Che but it was unthinkable to the country 40 years ago.

Che was early, he was impatient about his ideas and he was usually ahead of the curve in terms of feeling something should be done in Cuba. I think that’s why he still is in people’s minds, the core principals of social equality are still out there and still being played out.

The success of the film obviously depended on the casting of Che, and Benicio Del Toro is outstanding in the role. How did he approach such a massive character?

SODERBERGH Well Benicio is very much an actor who believes in detail both in the physical part of the performance and the mental aspect. What he tried to do in this case was to soak up every piece of information he could find and what’s great about that for me as a director is that I know that within a certain scene, even if it’s semi-improvised, if it’s an interaction with someone that isn’t scripted, he has all of the material to call upon. I know he’s never going to give the wrong answer to a question in a scene, even a philosophical question about what someone should be doing and that’s great for me. I don’t have to worry about him doing something that’s going to seem out of character because he has soaked himself in it. In this case, I’m sure he would confirm he’s never lived with a character this long, so by the time we were shooting it was cathartic for him, to finally get it out and to finally commit to it. It’s scary but cathartic.

I think for Benicio the pressure was bigger for him than for the rest of us because of the fact he’s Latin Amercian, it’s Che, it’s his face up there and there are so many ways in which things can go wrong. I think he can be really proud of what he did, I don’t think there is a false note to be found. He never sells Che, he never trying to present him in the typical movie fashion, he just conjures Che’s behaviour and I think it’s a really amazing, subtle and secure performance.

Benicio, your really do inhabit the character of Che throughout the film. How did you approach the role?

BENICIO DEL TORO Che was photographed quite a bit all through his revolutionary life, all the way to the moment of his death, and you can learn a lot from a photograph. It was the first movie I did that I really worked with photographs. It’s the first movie I did that is based on a truth and 100 percent based on the life of someone that actually lived.

The other thing I did was work on my Spanish accent. I started reading his work, muscled my way to be part of the research and travelled to Cuba, Argentina, France, and England

Is it more challenging to play a real-life character, particularly such an iconic one?

DEL TORO When you do a fictional character, if that character has never been played before or has never been filmed before, then you’re the sole author of that character (unless someone does a re-make down the line) and everything you do is the truth, or your attempt at the truth, and it’s complete. As an actor when you’re playing a character that really lived and is a historical figure, you never get 100% there, especially if that guy has been documented like Che was documented in many ways through film, radio, audio, photographs and also written about.

Steven, how did you decide which areas of Che’s impressive life to focus on in the movie?

SODERBERGH It was great that we were able to have access to all this material and to all these individuals. The danger starts when you begin compiling so much information that the editing process gets very intense and so it took us a while to find the shape of it and figure out what our filter was going to be.

When you are dealing with that much information, you have to actually start the process through exclusion, you need to at least start whittling things down and that means, what don’t I want to include? Or what scenes don’t I want in the film? Or what kind of film do I not want it to be? That’s the beginning of the process, so just by starting there you can begin to get rid of certain things. I wasn’t interested in his personal life, so I didn’t have to worry about that, research it or read any material that related to it.

I wasn’t interested in the traditional big movie moments, the things that they show in clips on television. I was interested in scenes in which he did things wrong or when he was told, especially by Fidel, that he was doing something wrong, just little things, little personal interactions that somehow humanized him, that brought him down off the pedestal that a lot of people have him on.

Why did you choose to focus more on Che’s public persona than his private life?

SODERBERGH I wasn’t interested at all in Che’s private life, I guess because everybody has a private life, everybody who fought in that revolution had a private life and that’s not exceptional to me. What is exceptional is somebody who feels so strongly about their ideas that they are willing to pick up a gun and live in a jungle with a bunch of other guys, that to me is exceptional and so there was never any moment during the development of this that I was pursuing or interested in what his personal life as like, I just didn’t care.

Benicio, did you always want to play Che as a hero?

DEL TORO We didn’t have a motive of trying to make him more likeable or less likeable, we stuck with our research and tried to stay as impartial as possible. I don’t think we shied away from any aspect of Che and I don’t think our intention was to make him more of this or more of that. Our intentions were to show the real Che and our goal was always to make sure that no one could tell us that what we filmed didn’t happen.

Why did you decide to divide the film into two parts?

SODERBERGH Initially the movie was only going to be about Bolivia but I felt that wasn’t enough, as Bolivia was a failed campaign and highlighting that wasn’t really fair. To just represent him by that campaign really didn’t tell the whole story of what he did as a revolutionary, so we started to expand that script and include Cuba and include his trip to New York. The script started getting so big but also became less readable because you couldn’t spend any time with any one scene or sequence and that’s when I floated this idea of chopping it in half, of making two separate sections, two war movies that mirrored each other, that depending on the fortitude of the distributor could either be one giant movie or could be split up into two separate films and surprisingly everybody was fine with that. It meant we had to re-do some of the deals but once we explained to them why everybody seemed to think that that wasn’t a bad idea.

Benicio, what would you personally like the audience to take away from the film?

DEL TORO To learn a little bit, maybe to stimulate an interest in him and in Cuba, Central America, Latin America and it’s history. By studying history we can learn about the future and we can also improve on the future.