IFC Films presents “CHE”, a film by Steven Soderbergh which stars Benicio Del Toro as Ernesto “Che” Guevara, an Argentine doctor who shares a common goal with Fidel Castro portrayed by Demián Bichir, to overthrow the corrupt dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.  Initially, “CHE” was released on December 12^th for one week in New York and Los Angeles as the full road-show version.  That was a special presentation with an intermission and a collectible program book.  On January 9^th, CHE will open in the top 25 markets as two separate admissions: CHE Part 1: The Argentine and CHE Part 2: Guerilla.  A national rollout will follow on 1/16^th and 1/22^nd with further expansions planned.  On January 21^st the film will also be available nationwide on Video On Demand [VOD].  The producers are Benicio Del Toro and Laura Bickford and the screenwriter is Peter Buchman.

On November 26, 1956, Fidel Castro sails to Cuba with eighty rebels, one of them being Ernesto “Che” Guevara.  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.

In 1952, General Fulgencio Batista orchestrated a coup in Cuba, took control of the presidency, and suspended free elections.  Although his corrupt dictatorship was backed by a 40,000 man army, a young lawyer named Fidel Castro tried to incite a popular rebellion by attacking the Moncada barracks on July 26, 1953.  The attack failed, and Castro spent two years in prison before going into exile in Mexico.

Meanwhile, a young Argentine idealist named Ernesto Guevara had become involved in political activity in Guatemala.  In 1954, when the elected government of Jacobo Árbenz was overthrown in a CIA organized military operation, Guevara escaped to Mexico.  Following up a contact made in Guatemala, he sought out a group of exiled Cuban revolutionaries.

July 13, 1955 marked a quiet yet momentous event in the history of the Cuban Revolution.  In a modest apartment in Mexico City, Ernesto Guevara was introduced to Fidel Castro by Fidel’s younger brother, Raul.  Guevara immediately enlisted in a guerrilla mission to overthrow the Cuban dictator.  The Cubans nicknamed the young rebel “Che”, a popular form of address in Argentina.

On November 26, 1956, Fidel Castro sailed to Cuba with eighty rebels, only twelve of them survived.  One of them was Che, who had joined the group as company doctor.  Che quickly grasped the art of guerrilla warfare and proved indispensable as a fighter.  As he threw himself into the struggle, he was embraced by his comrades and by the Cuban people.

After the Cuban Revolution, Che is at the height of his fame and power.  Then he disappears, re-emerging incognito in Bolivia, where he organizes a small group of Cuban comrades and Bolivian recruits to start the great Latin American Revolution.

CHE Part One tracks Che’s rise in the Cuban Revolution, from doctor to Rebel Army Commander to revolutionary hero.  The story of the Bolivian campaign is a tale of tenacity, sacrifice, idealism, and of guerrilla warfare that ultimately fails, bringing Che to his death in Che Part Two.  Through this story, we come to understand how Che remains a symbol of idealism and heroism that lives in the hearts of people around the world.

Following is the dialog from IFC Films “CHE” Press Conference with Steven Soderbergh, Benicio Del Toro and Demián Bichir.

So it’s been a long rocky road with Che, even before Cannes, it was up and down since it opened there.  Steven, how do you feel about finally having done an American release with it?  And Benicio, do you consider this one of the defining roles of your career?  And is it upsetting when you give your heart and soul to something like this and all people ask you about is the Wolf man?

SS: Well, this has taken longer than anything else that I’ve been involved with, although The Informant, which we’re in post in right now, took six years, but it wasn’t like this. It helps mitigate the negative responses when you know what it took to just do it at the end of the day.  The film is designed, or hopefully is going to function, as a provocation, so when all this stuff was going on at Cannes, and you get e-mails from your friends saying “Oh, I’m so sorry about the review,” and whatever, our attitude was to go there and suck up as much of the oxygen of that festival as we could and to detonate, and that’s what happened.  Pro or con, we wanted to go make a big noise, and so I came away pretty satisfied with the way that went.  It used to be, in American cinema culture, in that great era of ‘66 to ‘76, it used to be a good thing that you made something that polarized people.  That was viewed as a badge of honor, and those kinds of movies would still end up being talked about at the end of the year or might even show up on a list or an award show.  Not anymore.  The consensus now is if you don’t make something that receives pretty universal acclaim that the movie’s a failure, or there’s something wrong with it and it gets pushed off to the side. It’s almost like what you see in college football. Your eye goes right to the team that’s undefeated, and psychologically, as teams get one defeat, two defeats, three defeats, you kind of brush those teams off your mental list of the ones you want to watch. It’s just the way it is. But thanks for coming [Laughter].

BDT: It definitely is the longest one of my career, and the hardest one, and regarding how I feel when people talk about Wolf Man. [Laughter] I feel good. [More Laughter].  I have no control over that.  It’s what it is.  But I’m in agreement with Steven; I just think the movie-but it’s not like that in other parts of the world.  Being in other parts of the world, there’s been very little of the Wolf Man and a lot of Che.

So is it a polarized reaction in other parts?

BDT:  Not my experience, no, when it comes to “The Wolf Man” question. I’ve been to Brazil, Argentina, Spain, France, England, and The Wolf Man is not so prevalent.  Here I would say, yeah it is.

Benicio and Demián, how did you relate to the passion of your characters, and also if there was something that you would start a revolution about today, what would it be?

SS: That’s a good question.

BDT: I’d jump at the revolution today.  I’d say you do it by voting, I think that’s what we’ve kind of seen now.  And respect the voters.  A good example is Obama being elected President of the United States, and another example would be an indigenous president elected by the people in Bolivia.  I don’t think that was even on Che’s radar back in 1964.  I don’t think it was on anyone’s radar that an African-American could be President of the United States of America or an indigenous president could be elected by the people.  So, I think an election is the way to do it.

And how did you relate to Che’s passion?

BDT: Four-and-a-half hours?  How do I relate?  I don’t know…I relate with a lot of the morals: education, medicine.  I relate to some of the things that he fought for.  I don’t relate with the death penalty, but then again I’m an actor.

DB: I guess I relate to El Jefe in many, many ways.  You need a revolution when things are not equal to everyone, and in Mexico we had a revolution a hundred years ago, and it seems like we need another one.  Nothing has really changed and if the vote was respected everywhere, then you’ll have that type of revolution-I’m talking about Mexico and some other countries.  So, hopefully we won now-I have to say we won, because we wanted this [the election of Obama] here-but it seems that in some places, like in Mexico, the vote’s not really respected.  Then there’s no other way, right?  But I think the last armed revolution that we saw was the one that these guys did in Cuba.  And there are so many other ways.  I think in Mexico we need a cultural revolution more than anything else.  So that people can really learn to read, and that way get educated, and defend themselves better.

I was wondering about the research that you guys did for your roles. Who did you speak to who actually knew Guevara and Castro, and what were some of the conceptions that you had about these men that changed during the course of the film, and also both these guys have such a polarizing idea to Westerners, and teenagers say Guevara-you know, wearing t-shirts and all that stuff-how’s the movie going to affect the way that Che’s seen?

SS:  You guys go first.

BDT: What was the question?  The Wolf Man, [Laughter] the purple shirt of the Wolf Man will be sold outside for $6.99, but the yellow one will be for $10.99 because it’s a limited edition and it’s signed by Steven Soderbergh.  So, um, the question was?

Who did you speak to from Guevara’s past that affected your performance?

BDT:  I got a chance to speak to his brother in Argentina, younger brother. He did two trips through Latin America-the Motorcycle Diaries-and then the second one where he goes and he never comes back, and he ended up in Cuba.  I talked to the guy who went with him all the way up to Bolivia-his name was Calica Ferrer, an Argentine.  And then after that we met with his second wife, Aleida, his daughter, his son, his second daughter.  We met with the survivors of Bolivia, the three guys that were with him the last day of the Yuro Ravine, the last battle where he was captured.  There are three survivors that were still alive.  One lives in France, and the other two live in Cuba.  We met with all three.  We met with guys that were with him during the Cuban Revolution.  Well, it affected the performance; it influenced the performance quite a bit, because you get to talk to someone who actually was with them when they… little things, like how they dealt with him when he had asthma.  The bottom line is that what I got from them right off the bat was respect, and then there was this love, and then at the end they just made sure that I knew that he was made out of flesh and bones.  That he was not just some superhero.  There were so many little things that I took from all of them in some ways.

DB: I wanted to meet Fidel, and that’s obviously impossible, I knew it was impossible then too. A character like this, so well known by everyone, there’s so many things about him, and books, and pictures, and video, and footage, and all that, so I had the chance to get access to all that. So that was my material, the things I worked with, and lucky enough I had five months to prepare.  I had Fidel for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for five months, and that was basically it.

Benicio, this is such an in-depth character study of Che.  Was there a daily ritual that you did in order to become this character and what was most rewarding about playing this character?

BDT: The daily ritual was getting up and doing an average of five or six scenes a day.  There was no time.  Like, I tried to keep a diary but I got tired.  So that was the ritual, there was no ritual, per se.  It was just trying to survive it, trying to get to the finish line.  It was just paddle, paddle, paddle, paddle, and try to get the finish line.

And what was most rewarding about playing this character?

BDT: There were many things that were rewarding.  I think the most rewarding thing was the people around you that were involved in this movie.  It was a motivator – the actors, the set designer, the director of photography, and the director.  That was really a motivator.  When you’re in doubt and you see other people just doing it, you suck it up, and push for the best you can do.  I think seeing other actors, from Damien to actors that came in that are stars in Spain and came in to do just a cameo, and came in and focused and you see that dedication to it, that’s a big motivator to a rewarding thing that you feel.  ”I can’t complain here.  I can’t just lick my wounds over here.  I’ve just got to keep going.”

Benicio, you lived with this character for a long time. Not only as involved with the acting, but also in the process of making the film.  There must have been something residual that remains with you, or you carry from it, that has affected, or influenced, or in some way changed your life.  And Steven, I would have to ask you the same question.  Because, has it changed any idea or attitude about filmmaking or the importance of filmmaking for the both of you? And I guess Demián can answer that as well about playing Castro.

SS: There’s no way to come out the other end of this without constantly being aware of your physical surroundings and what they mean.  Being in this room, being in this hotel, taking the cab up from Chelsea, paying with a credit card, wearing a Paul Smith shirt.  You are constantly thinking about what all of that stuff represents.  Who made it? How much did it cost? Where did it get made? How did it get here?  And that’s good and bad.  It’s good because you should think about these things; it’s bad because you can’t stop thinking about them once you start.  I’ve been working on trying to figure out what to do with that, because I think something should be done with it. I tend to, when I have tangential interests that sustain over long periods of time, they end up as something.  I don’t know what this will end up being.  A lot of it’s in the movie, and yet I came out of this feeling that movies have the ability to really change how people think.  So when people say, “What is somebody supposed to think when they get out of this film?” because it’s certainly not made to be a recruitment film-I say, “Look, all I would hope is that somebody comes out of the movie going, ‘Is there anything I feel that strongly about?  Is there anything in my life I feel that passionately about that I would engage at that level?’” That’s really it.  There’s a lot of residue.  When we were talking about motivation, I felt so lucky to talk to people who actually were with him [Che] is pretty intense.  To be that close to history that’s that significant is really something.  Dr. Fernandez Mell, who’s in the movie, who is a doctor in the last part near Santa Clara, and who was one of the few people that was close to Che, said this great thing.  He said, “You had to love Che for free.”  That really stuck in my head, and it’s been interesting in talking about the movie to have people say, “Oh, it’s kind of a glorification of him.  It’s obviously very pro-Che,” and yet 50% of the people who see the movie claim that it’s cold.  What I got from all the people that I talked to is that there was a certain distance in him that’s partially in his personality, partially the result of being transposed into another culture-even though it’s still a Spanish-speaking culture, it’s very different from the one he grew up around-and part of it is the obligations and responsibilities of being a leader.  And that phrase always stuck in my head, that unless he was in doctor mode, he’s apart from people.  That’s the impression I got.  So, that’s a long answer to a short question.

BDT: So, basically, he’s like, “Well, I still smoke a cigar, I try to keep a diary.”  I don’t know, maybe I feel like history is important to study, to learn from history.  I’m trying to say things that are different from Steven, because I do agree with everything that Steven said.  I feel that movies like this are good to present.  There are many other stories that can be told, not only about Che, but about other people who sacrificed their life for a cause that you might say is just, or that I might say is just.  I do believe I would like to see more movies that are in this vein, or at least the attempt, the effort, I like the effort.  At some point I was at Steven’s office here in New York, which doesn’t have any place to sit really.  It doesn’t have the Louis Vuitton chair, yet, anyway.  And I was sitting there and I think he saw this fear on my face, this fear of “Oh, here I am.  Who do I think I am playing Che Guevara?  Here we are doing this movie about Che Guevara, and it’s not only a movie about Che Guevara, it’s a movie about a history of an entire country,” and Steven said something to me: “It’s impossible to do a movie about Che.  It’s impossible to play him.  Let’s try.”  That to me was very much the way I look at life.  Just try, give it your all, hope for the best, and I think if you stay true to yourself, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

SS: The alternative is giving up, and that seems worse.  Even worse than making something that people hate.  To not take one of the hundreds of opportunities we had to just let this thing fall apart.  There were so many times when literally by just not picking up the phone or answering an e-mail I could’ve let the movie crater, and to just make the choice.  ”No, pick up the phone, write the check, do whatever you got to do, keep this thing going,” was why getting to end of this was all we needed out of this, frankly, because there were just so many times when you thought it wasn’t going to happen or you had friends say it’s not going to happen.  ”Why are you investing yourself in that? It’s not going to happen.  You’re not going to get the money.”  But then there’s this vague feeling when you get out of it, of “Was it enough?”  In a larger sense, was it enough?  We’re seeing the results now of a system in which money is being made that doesn’t represent anything.  It doesn’t represent any labor, or product, or idea.  It’s meaningless.  And that can’t sustain, it can’t hold.  This is what happens.  You can’t come out of this, having spent eight years on it, and watch what’s going on, and not start thinking about that.  What does a dollar represent?  Does it represent anything, and if it doesn’t, where are we going?  Again, I think for all of us, there’s a residue, a bomb-residue that stays with you.  It has to.  If you’re paying attention, it has to.  Okay, it’s your turn [to Demián].

DB: I don’t remember encountering any other character that made me feel so guilty and lazy, because no matter how hard I worked, they always worked double and triple. Fidel, throughout his life, up until now-I mean, as we speak–he’s writing. He writes every day. He writes a column about his thoughts about the world, and he reads a lot. He always said that it was a waste of time even shaving. That’s why he keeps his beard. That’s one of the reasons. And he said that, said by his own words. And the revolution, [Spanish? 24:45], he said they wouldn’t do that, they wouldn’t cut their beards, because if any intruder wanted to be infiltrating the guerilla, he would have to have at least a six month long beard to be part of it, and not be like, “What the hell is this guy doing here?” After that Castro said, “No it’s a waste of time. Because if you add 15 minutes, that you spend shaving your beard everyday, you add that, you could use that by reading, doing sports.” So, I really feel lazy, I feel useless, compared to these guys.

Is that why you keep the beard?

DB: No, I wish.  Yeah, I’m grooming it.

SS: That’s not six months. That’s half an hour.

Steven, what was your inspiration in creating this film?  Did you have any reservations about doing the film given the fact Fidel is still around and what about the length of the film?

SS: The inspiration was from Benicio and Laura Bickford [the producer], because when we were on Traffic, that’s when we started talking about it, and I came along.  You have a different angle on a project when you haven’t initiated it, and sometimes that’s good.  You can be more dispassionate about it, and there were definitely cases where we had to make large, difficult creative decisions, and we were able to make them, or at least I felt comfortable making them, because in some way I was the Swede coming into a culture that wasn’t mine.  I didn’t have the emotional baggage that somebody else might have, and I could say something like, “We’re going to cut everything that happened from the Grandma to just before el libero, because narratively we need to do that.” There’s a lot of great shit that happened in the first six months of the Cuban Revolution-it just had to go.  That’s easier for me because I can stand back and say, “This is what needs to be amputated.”  No, we really had the luxury of being able to do whatever we wanted to do.  We had the best of both worlds.  We were given access to all the people that are still alive, all the material that still exists that was relevant to what we were trying to do, but we had total creative control, and honestly that must have been a very difficult, or scary, situation for the Cubans.  I wouldn’t trust an artist, frankly.  But they gave us everything they had, and I guess we’ll find out in the next week, what the public thinks.

And how about the length of the film?  I’m sure you must’ve cut a lot, and it’s still somewhat lengthy?

SS: Oh, and it’s still too long? [Laughter]

No, No, I’m not judging just inquiring.

SS: You know what we should’ve done?  We should’ve gone and done the ten-hour miniseries. That’s what we should’ve done.  No, I’m serious.  There’s so much stuff we wanted to do.  The period that we didn’t cover, which different people think means different things, the period between those two campaigns is fascinating, and the Congo is fascinating, and it was just no time.

Doesn’t Che at least deserve as much as Harry Potter?

SS: Yeah, he does. And if that many people show up, no problem.

When did the decision come to not make two movies, making it one movie?  I am curious about that decision, and also the decision to release it on cable within weeks of its theatrical release.  I am curious about your decisions to do those things, and why.

SS: At first we were doing Bolivia, and then it started to expand, and we started to think, “Okay, you don’t really understand Bolivia unless you’ve seen Cuba, and he went to New York and that was cool, and then we should see him meet Fidel, Mexico City.”  I was saying the other day, it became like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice: it kept getting bigger and bigger.  At that point it was still one large script, but it was becoming kind of unreadable-it felt like a trailer for an even longer film.  I took a cue from nature: when a cell gets too big, it divides to survive, and it felt like that’s what needed to be done.  Once we did that, all the solutions arrived for the various problems we were having narratively, and things became a lot simpler. It became more complicated in that the deals that we’d already had in place needed to be renegotiated. Fortunately for us all the people that came on to this project early were enthusiastic enough about it to redo the deal for the two films. But in the back of our minds I think we always saw it as one big thing that you could pull it off and people could see it with an intermission that that would be the Altered States version of total immersion for four-and-a-half hours. That’s the best way to get a sense of what they did, just the physical stamina required to pull this off.  As it turns out, I think just in the States it’s going to be seen like that. Everywhere else in the world they’re cutting it in half.

What about the fact that you have different aspect ratios?

SS: I needed a visual corollary to the difference in the voices between the two texts we were working from.  The reminiscences of the Cuban Revolution were written after the revolution, and there’s a sort of macro-hindsight at play here that results from writing about a victory.  I wanted a visual version of, and that means a wider frame, a more classical approach to framing, a more traditional approach to the music.  The Bolivian diaries were contemporaneous.  There’s no perspective, he’s isolated, he doesn’t know what’s going on, and so visually I’m looking at a style that makes you feel that the outcome is unclear, that the outcome of his scene is not even clear.  The color palette is less inviting.  The terrain is less inviting. The cutting is a little more arrhythmic.  Just everything to give you the sense of dread, just as you’re heading into the mountains in that jeep, there’s a sense of like, “Oh, boy.”  Normally you wouldn’t want to do that because you’d feel like you’re tipping the outcome, but you have the opposite problem here that you usually have, in that Che has no arc.  He’s a straight line, and the tension is in whether he will bend.  So the earlier to me you set up this sense of dread, the stronger he appears throughout.  So that was my idea, but yeah, it is a drag for the projectionists.  During the intermission, they have to scramble to change everything, scary.

In films such as this that deal with such grand characters in our history and such important moments in our history, the film that is based on the true story tends sometimes to be taken as record by people who don’t know a great deal about the realities.  I wonder whether you as a director and you as performers want to acknowledge that you are dealing with this palette from the perspective of now, from knowing things now, and your own time, or whether you feel that it’s important to push that away and try to enter the psyche of the time that you’re portraying, and how you manage to balance that, or how it affects the outcome.

SS: It’s a little of both.  We talked about the one thing that we didn’t want people attacking us for was a scene that’s onscreen that never happened, that just never happened.  We felt like we were going to be attacked for lots of stuff, and it can’t be that.  So every scene that’s in the film happened.  It might have characters in it that are combinations of characters, or when it happened may have been shifted slightly within the sort of blots of storytelling, especially in the first film, but there isn’t a scene in either film that didn’t happen. That’s step one. That’s being true to the record, and not wanting somebody to come after you.  The issue of exclusions is one you’re always going to have to deal with; that’s normal. And you do have to in essence take Che’s point of view if you’re going to make a film about him, whether you agree with him or not. I’m on the side of everyone who appears onscreen. I have to be. I can’t editorialize within a frame, and indicate to you, “You should like that person, you should not like that person.” Because we walk around in our lives feeling justified behaving the way we behave, or we wouldn’t be behaving that way, and that’s the way I approach everybody who shows up onscreen. I don’t care if it’s Abraham Lincoln or Mussolini!  I’m showing you their dream.  It’s not my dream; it’s their dream.  That’s my attitude about it.  But I think we all would’ve felt… I don’t think any of us would’ve wanted to do a scene that we felt was just invented for the purposes of entertaining or manufacturing an emotion that’s just not there.  I just don’t think any of us would’ve felt like doing it.

But you have information that’s beyond what theirs was.  Is that a filter for you?  Interpreting who they are, interpreting what their dreams may have been?

SS: It helps the audience, I think, decide what the meaning of the events is.  That extra layer of perspective, the things [in this case] that were going on for instance in Bolivia, externally around Che, that he’s not aware of until it manifests itself in a gunshot, gives a different meaning to what he was doing there and what those people were putting up with.  And so that’s good for storytelling.  I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m curious to see W., because I’m fascinated by this idea of somebody making something about an issue that’s playing out right in front of us.  That’s either a really, really good idea, or a really bad idea.  I can’t decide.  I haven’t seen it.

I’d like to hear your opinion when you see it.

SS: I want to see it.  I think Oliver’s never boring, so, that’s a really bold thing to do.  ”I’m going to do it while it’s happening.”  That’s pretty interesting.

BDT: If I may add something about performing, you take one of the things to perform the character of Che, all this history of Latin America makes him.  You go back, I went back, to learn about some aspects of Latin America, the Cuban history before he came into play.  Or Fidel came into play, and that helps you understand choices, because otherwise if you don’t ground it on what he knew at 21, I saw a list of the books he had written [at 21 years old], and was like…when he was a child he was following the Spanish Civil War day by day, like what was going on in the Spanish Civil War, because he had an uncle that was in Spain and I think was on the side of the Republicans.  All that comes into play, [and the choices that you make as an actor] and for me it was more going back than going forward, into what people might say now. I mean I looked into stuff that people might say now in retrospect. But I wanted to-what happened with the Cuban War with Spain trying to separate, which, I’m part of it as a Puerto Rican, the fight between Puerto Rico and Cuba fighting Spain to stop being colonies of Spain, and then the Spanish-American War, and the Platt Amendment. All that stuff comes into play makes it’s interesting to then look at the character like that. Another thing that I did look at that was interesting to me was the last year of his life, and then the very early stages of his life. He was born in a town called Rosario, at age 1 or 2 he has an asthma attack, and the family just takes this child, and they move [to the equivalent of like] six hours away-the equivalent of Poughkeepsie, NY-and they go there and they move there because it’s dry, because it’s good for the child. Right off the bat Che is in this cocoon of encouragement, of love, of care.  It’s really interesting to see that’s the formative years. The mother and the father staying up with him all night long. They move to this town for the benefit of the kid. Those are things that you look at, that you start building this character with. You also have the other sides too. He was daring, he was fearless, and a warrior. That’s something that he had, but there’s other aspects of it that come into play to build this character, not just that side.

Steven, you are always keen on new technology.  Could you talk about aesthetic of shooting the red camera?

SS: In this case the RED really showed up at the right time. Literally the right time: two days before we started shooting. For us, the combination of the image and the size of the camera itself, and the way that it sees natural light, allowed us to do things that I don’t think we would’ve been able to accomplish on the schedule that we had. There are only six or eight scenes in the whole four hours and twenty minutes that we were using lights. To have a camera that can generate those kinds of images, without any augmentation, in so many different environments, is a gift.  For me, it was like a dream that this thing showed up, and it had a direct impact on how I was shooting, and how quickly we could move.  So we were lucky.  Now, that was version one of that camera, and they’re now on version eighteen.  I’ve used it on two other films since, and it’s improving rapidly, so it’s only going to get better.  I don’t know for the audiences how much of a benefit this is.  I think they’ll look at it and say, “Oh that looks nice.” It’s a hidden benefit for the filmmaker, really. It makes my life easier.

Benicio, I just wonder if you see Che at the beginning as an idealist, as a revolutionary, and in the second part, if you see him as disillusioned by what happens, when he cannot generate a revolution, and ultimately he will end up dead?

BDT: I think that’s the direction that the movie goes.  That’s the way history went, I guess.

SS:  I don’t think he seems disillusioned, though.

BDT: You know, when you read his last entry in his diary, the last day when he was surrounded by 2,000 Bolivian soldiers, there’s a feeling of optimism in a way.  I think it’s in the movie where he’s talking about the possibilities of escaping, right before he goes into this last battle.  He was an optimist.  He just kept trying all the way to the end.  I don’t know if it’s necessarily negative, but in a way history takes it that way, but then again, I was just playing the moments.  And the RED cam was right there.  I wasn’t really changing anything because of the RED cam.  It doesn’t change anything when it comes to the acting.

 For comments and inquiries, please send e-mails to Stephanie R. Green at the following e-mail address: SRG4Ent@aol.com

This story is filed under: Columns, Entertainment, Shades of Green