While we didn’t get a chance to see the two-part, 268-minute”Che” twice (vacation beckoned; we had already seen the two films in Toronto), but we did get a chance to attend the Steven Soderbergh Q&A at the New York Film Festival earlier this week.
Soderbergh has already talked about the possibilities of a third ‘Che’ film and did so again. The two films bookend the rise and fall of ‘Che’s revolutions – Cuba and Bolivia in each film respectively (loosely known as “The Argentine,” and “Guerrilla”). But the stories of Che’s missions to the Congo, Venezuela and Mexico aren’t shown in the two films.
Soderbergh mentioned this during Cannes. “Even though we’ve made two parts we still haven’t shown everything. There’s actually another movie, I think, to be made about what happens between these two parts but we didn’t have enough money.”
When asked during the NYFF about why the films didn’t show Che’s African expeditions, Soderbergh quipped, “Well, if this film makes $100 million dollars, I’ll make the third one,” he said. Yeah, he was kind of joking and also making an allusion to how already-difficult it was to mount the money for the first two films, but obviously having mentioned it once already, there’s definitely some truth to it too.
“We (writer Peter Buchman and I) talked about [the third film]. The story of Che in the Congo was absolutely fascinating. We actually sort of sketched an idea for a small film, that would take place in the Congo andPrague, where he went after fighting in the Congo to sort of lick his wounds and write a very self-critical book on what happened [there].”
“The [real] answer is that we didn’t have enough money to do that. Also, it’s a fascinating chapter, but it didn’t really fall into the bookend idea we ended up with.”
Soderbergh notes that when they first started developing the project it was only about the fall in Bolivia, but then they needed the context of Cuba to tell the full story.
“It was a little more than halfway through the process of working on the [Bolivia story] that we decided, ‘Bolivia doesn’t really make a lot of sense if you haven’t seen Cuba.’ You keep wondering why doesn’t he just quit? [The Bolivian campaign] is going so badly. And you have to see what happened in Cuba to understand why he thought he could still pull this off. We just couldn’t fit that all in.”
One amazing quote that Soderbergh read that he wished he would have included from a African rebels that fought with Che, that he thinks sums up a lot of Guevara’s idealistic spirit. “Che would rather face a bullet than face reality.”
We’ve got just one piece of video below. We actually shot like five clips, but we’ll save some of those for later. We thought ‘Che’ was tremendous and totally engrossing. We hope the unimaginative naysayers who apparently like information spoonfed to them can get over its straight-forward and unadorned nature.
It probably won’t happen, and surely ‘Che’ can’t make that much, but we’d love to see a third film. But if they mounted the money in say four years, would anyone still have the drive and passion to tell the story? Would del Toro still be game?
