Director Steven Soderbergh has gained a reputation for pick’n’mixing his projects. From his first award-winning feature Sex, Lies and Videotape, he’s moved seamlessly from blockbusters like Oceans Eleven to experimental gambits like Kafka, picking up critical and popular acclaim along the way.
One of his latest endeavours, Che, is a film in two parts following the life and legend of revolutionary Che Guevara. Here he talks about making the film, the less-than glory days of 80’s filmmaking and the limitations of art in a free society.
Interview by Ananda Pellerin
How was your experience filming Che? It was quite the journey. There were many times when I thought, “we’re never going to get to the end of this.” And it’s still the hand grabbing Amy Irving at the end of Carrie, I’m kind of elsewhere but it keeps pulling me back in with the same intensity. My relationship to it isn’t like my relationship to any other film I’ve made. I treated it differently.
What is that difference? It’s something I felt I needed to do more than I wanted to do. I’ve had that before — but not to this extent. I knew it wasn’t going to be like making an Ocean’s movie, even though those can be tricky. I knew every aspect was going to be hard: from the research to the script, to the shooting to the cut to the selling. There were no slam-dunks.
Just getting it done was sort of the point. I’m sure like ten years from now someone will put out a new version — they’re always remastering things — and I’ll have to look at it again and I’ll have a better sense of what we did.
Was it presented to you as this sprawling mass of a film? It wasn’t presented to me as anything other than “don’t you think Benecio [Del Toro] would be great as Che?” It started from nothing so it threatened to develop into the Andromeda Strain because first it was just his time in Bolivia, then Cuba, then it was Bolivia and Cuba and New York and then I started getting interested in Mexico City. I felt the more times you could have somebody who was superficially familiar with him say “oh I didn’t know that,” the better.
I’m a process person more than a results person and I was really drawn to the stories we heard about Che’s [own process]: the day-to-day of it, the handling of personalities, the short-term strategy, the long-term strategy. Especially in the middle of being taught and teaching how you’re supposed to do this.
Do what? You mean a revolution? Yeah I mean, how does that work exactly? I was really interested in that. He was learning. The thing he did know was “I’m not afraid,” the thing he didn’t know was “I can lead men” — that’s the first movie — and then the second movie is the reverse, it starts with him knowing he can lead men and it ends with “I’m not afraid.”
One critique has been that the films don’t offer insight into Che’s personal life. I had no interest in his personal life whatsoever. Him just talking or seeing him with his wife and kids, that’s not action to me. This was a guy who went out and really did it. There are a lot of people who believed what he believed ideologically, but they didn’t pick up an M1.
When we were out there in the middle of nowhere and it was just us — cell phones didn’t work, nothing, I got a sense of what attracted him to that; it’s so simple. Like you’re just dealing with what’s in front of you. There’s something so pure about being out there with a group trying to do this one thing.
How did you choose the aspects of his life and legend to portray? It’s a pretty specific take. I just picked the stuff I found interesting, the stuff that stuck with me. The core creative group of the movie is pretty small and at the end of the day I get to make the final decisions. I don’t think it’s an un-commercial movie but its wavelength is kind of narrow and whether you like it or not, it’s up to something very specific. I couldn’t make it under any other terms.
I mean for most directors in a certain position, that’s how they worked. Whether it was All The President’s Men, Taxi Driver, Klute, The Graduate, the sense was the best movies were being made in circumstances in which the filmmakers were in control. And then of course we know, because it’s well chronicled, they lost control of themselves and then they lost control of their movies and we went into the worst decade of American cinema ever, which was the 80s.
Except for Ghostbusters.Yeah I like Ghostbusters. I like the first Ghostbusters.
How did you go about the research?I read what’s there and there’s a lot — both pro and con. We made five, six trips to Cuba and the Che Institute hooked us up with everyone still around and willing to talk. There were only three Cubans who got out of Bolivia and to talk to each of them — you know it’s like, God you were there, it sounded bad.
All these tributaries opened up constantly and you’re trying to figure out which ones are worth following. We went through so many drafts, variations on structure. At one point we were having trouble with the first part — it was just too big. We barely had enough money to shoot what we shot — we definitely didn’t have enough money to shoot what we had written.
In this case we decided, ok, we’ve got the New York stuff, that’s Che at his apex — he really is the t-shirt at this point, he’s Mick Jagger. And we started thinking, what’s the opposite of that? And we found this passage in his diaries where he’s been sent off to meet this group of men from the cities in Cuba, he’s been given a guide who’s totally freaked out, he’s got asthma and it was suppose to take one day but it took ten. That was like the nadir and we decided that’s a great pace to start him, at his lowest. We’re just going to skip the first six months.
It’s been my experience that — and I think about this in politics a lot because I feel like nobody can fix anything anymore — as much as people laugh about the entertainment business, the creative model for problem solving is pretty efficient. My whole career I’ve watched really smart people solve problems in really creative ways. And this instance confirmed what I now believe: most of the time the solution has to be a big idea, a radical idea. It’s usually not “oh if that scene was just a little shorter,” it’s usually, “that character needs to go,” or, “get rid of the second act completely.” In this case we’d researched and written the first six months of the revolution and we literally took out 45 pages and it was like — gone. And it solved our problem.
Robert Kennedy had a great quote; he said “twenty percent of the people are against everything all the time.” So if you’re in the United States, that’s 35 million people. When 35 million people get upset about something, they can keep it from happening and that’s why you can’t get anything done. If I were emperor I’d be doing some radical shit. There are solutions out there to all our problems — you may not like them, but there are solutions, so it’s frustrating to watch. I’m lucky I have the work that I do because at least I get to see problems get solved, that’s nice.
Do you think in your position you can have an impact on political dialogue?Yeah, but I don’t think it means anything. I don’t think movies mean anything anymore — they did, for a while, but I don’t think they do anymore. I think they’re more influential than they’ve ever been and I think they’re less important then they’ve ever been.
It’s this weird paradox that art only means something in a repressed society. I look around, we’re here in London, I live in New York you know, the idea of a play or a movie or something on television or music or an opera having meaning seems impossible since we’re in a free society and people can, to some extent, choose how they want to live.
Now, you go into a repressed society where you can’t do or make anything you want, you can’t put on any play or make any movie that you want, then it becomes important. I guess that’s just my attitude; within a free society art is mostly just entertainment and in a repressed society it actually is very, very important. If somebody’s not shutting it down then it probably isn’t that important. 
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