TORONTO - There are many reasons why actor Benicio Del Toro felt compelled to do "Che," Steven Soderbergh's epic, two-part bio pic about the iconic Cuban revolutionary.
"Anywhere south of New York City, even in New York City, years before we even shot anything, people would say 'A Che Guevara movie! It's great!' In a way, the movie was already in motion before we even stepped on the gas," says Del Toro.
"Why did I do this? I guess you could say I'm for the underdog," Del Toro smiled as he, director Soderbergh and producer Laura Bickford faced the press at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Bickford and Del Toro first pitched the idea to Soderbergh while the Oscar-winning director was filming the acclaimed drama "Traffic." Their original concept was based on a single, two-hour movie about Che Guevara's campaign in Bolivia.
"Seven years of research has gone into the film," says Bickford. That time, however, was packed with considerable creative upheaval.
"As we got further and further into developing that script, we began to feel that Bolivia without the context of Cuba didn't make a lot of sense," says Soderbergh. One year into the project and with no readable script to show for their efforts the team split the project in two.
The final cut, which Bickford calls "the shortest we could make it" to fully reflect this this revolutionary and man clocks in at four and a half hours.
Unravelling the mystery of Che Guevara
"I didn't know much about Che Guevara," says Soderbergh. "But I felt obligated to do this film."
Part of the reason was to understand why the famed revolutionary is still so much a part of popoular culture. Plasterd on everthing from T-shirts to handbags, beer bottles and mugs, Guevara's image, says Soderbergh, "Is still resonating with people who don't know what it represents."
The charismatic Guevara was a doctor, diplomat and intellectual theorist. He was a tenacious fighter in the annals of history. But he was also an asthamatic. "He was a vulnerable man," says Del Toro, who found the prospect of recreating Che's bigger-than-life bravado and unexpected frailty a challenge.
Shooting in Spanish without understanding a word of it, says Soderbergh, was his sometimes humourous test on this film of "Lawrence of Arabia" proportions.
"From now on I will make it a point to shoot films in languages I don't understand," says Sodergergh. "There's a musicality to it. Somehow your mind moves above the language and you know intuitively what's going on in the shot."
"I do speak Spanish," laughs Del Toro. "I'd look over at Steven just to watch him while we were shooting. I don't know how he did it. If I forgot a line he'd come on over and ask 'What happened there?'He didn't miss a thing."
