The Argentine/Guerrilla - Che Guevara biopics

[The Perineum Falcon]

I guess everybody knows by now this is available exclusively through Blockbuster (2 separate DVD's).  Es fantástico.

Tons of nudity and sex, surprisingly.  Some excessive S&M, but not any more than really required.

I did NOT know that. Thank you.

My girlfriend will be out of town this weekend and that sounds perfect.*

*it's really too bad there's not an emote that rubs his hands together maniacally for instances like this.

[MacGuffin]

*it's really too bad there's not an emote that rubs his hands together maniacally for instances like this.

Best I can do:

[Pozer]

*it's really too bad there's not an emote that rubs his hands together maniacally for instances like this.

also,

[modage]

Steven Soderbergh: 'I can see the end of my career'
Source: The Guardian UK

His sprawling biopic of Che Guevara cost $58m but has earned less than $2m worldwide. The director of Traffic and Erin Brockovich tells Henry Barnes why he might just disappear

Steven Soderbergh doesn't sound fine. A bad telephone line between London and Los Angeles isn't helping, but it's not wholly to blame for that air of tired resignation. That crept into his voice as soon as he started talking about Che, his two-part, four-and-a-half-hour-long biopic of Ernesto Guevara.

"Everybody got scarred by [Che] a little bit," Soderbergh says. "I don't know how to describe it. It took a long time to shake off. It was just such an intense four or five months that it really ... "

There is a long pause. He speaks slowly and evenly.

"You know, for a year after we finished shooting I would still wake up in the morning thinking, 'Thank God I'm not shooting that film.'"

Does he wish he hadn't done it?

"Yeah."

Really?

"Yeah. Literally I'd wake up and think, 'At least I'm not doing that today.'"

Soderbergh knew Che (recently released on DVD in the UK) would be difficult from the start. The project was brought to him by its eventual star, Benicio del Toro, and producer Laura Bickford, during the shooting of Traffic – the drug war docudrama that won Soderbergh the best director Oscar in 2001. Che was essentially Del Toro's baby and Soderbergh, who was interested in the man but nowhere near as smitten as the actor, approached the movie cautiously, heading into the production with what he describes now as a "pretty significant sense of dread".

Lack of funding fuelled his fear. And the money wasn't there partly because of Soderbergh himself. In the characteristically noble pursuit of authenticity he decided to film Che in Spanish, a decision that effectively blitzed any hope of finding significant investment within the US.

"It's a film that, to some extent, needs the support of people who write about films," he argues. "If you'd had all these guys running around talking in accented English you'd [have got] your head taken off."

Eventually European investors were tapped for $58m (£35m) – a paltry figure considering the project's ambition. As a result Soderbergh was forced to shoot extremely quickly to stay on budget. The two parts were filmed over 76 days, four days fewer than for his glitzy Vegas action comedy Ocean's Eleven, an $85m capitalist fat-cat of a movie in comparison with Che.

"It's hard to watch it and not to wish we'd had more time," he says of Che. "But I can't tell you that if we'd had more time it would be better – it would just be different. There was an energy and intensity that came out of working that quickly."

Indeed, Che is easily Soderbergh's best film since Traffic. But it was a terrible failure at the box office, grossing under $2m worldwide. Soderbergh blames piracy ("We got crushed in South America. We came out in Spain in September of last year and it was everywhere within a matter of days. It killed it.") but it probably didn't help that his film is a foreign-language marathon with an admittedly distant and impersonal lead.

Che seems, in retrospect, like a glorious, sad aberration: a niche-audience epic it would be impossible to commission in these straitened times. Today, the willingness of the studios to take such a punt has all but evaporated – a fact that Soderbergh is more alive to than most.

"I'm looking at the landscape and I'm thinking, 'Hmmm, I don't know. A few more years maybe,'" says Soderbergh. "And then the stuff that I'm interested in is only going to be of interest to me."

It would all sound depressing if Soderbergh didn't pepper his speech with fits of incredulous laughter. Perhaps the last few years – capped by his recent run-in with Sony over his revised script for Moneyball, a baseball movie starring Brad Pitt, that saw him elbowed off the project – have left him punch-drunk.

"In terms of my career, I can see the end of it," he says. "I've had that sensation for a few years now. And so I've got a list of stuff that I want to do – that I hope I can do – and once that's all finished I may just disappear."

The list isn't that long. Lo-fi relationship drama The Girlfriend Experience is up next, followed by the breezy Matt Damon comedy, The Informant! After that there's another biopic – Michael Douglas as Liberace; a rock musical of Cleopatra with Douglas's wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and his long-gestating adaptation of John Barth's picaresque, The Sot-Weed Factor. "Three or four years worth of stuff," says Soderbergh.

It's said with resignation, not desperation. With the voice of someone who has gradually realised what Guevara might not have – that some systems are just too big to beat.

• Che Parts 1 & 2 are available on DVD and Blu-ray now

[matt35mm]

 

I guess it's unfair of me to think of Soderbergh as a guy with limitless energy and enthusiasm, which is a conception of him based on his being one of the most prolific and consistently ballsy and intelligent filmmakers of the past decade.

I still don't see him just disappearing, though.  He may (and probably should, for his own sake) take a break.  But new ideas would be bound to catch his interest, and a lot of loyalty toward him from some of the most powerful people in Hollywood would likely make it so that he'll have several more opportunities to make some really great films down the line.  I just hope that he'll want to.

[socketlevel]

I just bought the criterion of this, watched the movies and then the docu about the making of the film... i gotta say the 'making of' is one of the most depressing things i've seen in a long time. basically at the end soderberg describes how he felt after making this (not clear if he still feels this way, implies yes and no at times) there is no meaning left in film. how the industry and films have become disposable. how there has to be a unifying belief that a film is good, and polarized opinions are of the past; people just check rotten tomatoes for opinions based on an average, rather than follow individual critics they like. that debate and awe inspiring conversation from eras like the 70s is dead.

I know i've got nothing to really show for myself in this regard, and i don't really have any work to make my opinion seem valid but for what it's worth i agreed with pretty much everything he said. i'm sure this reads like an emo post but I have often felt the magic in cinema is gone for the majority of films made these days. i guess he was a little destroyed after this film, but it's extra sad seeing it come from a guy that's done so much for the medium. sometimes i wonder if '99 was the last swan song of such cinema. i know it's bleak, and possibly short sighted, but contemporary moving image storytelling seems to be such a shit show.

anyone else see this and have opinions?

[Sunrise]

socketlevel...i also recently watched the criterion releases and the making of doc. my wife and i kind of looked at each other after watching the doc and said "did he say what i think he just said" in reference to soderbergh's comments. he just sounds completely defeated and it left me empty. i've been an admirer of his for 15 years or so and to hear him say that he thinks movies today are essentially devoid of purpose and that filmmakers can no longer be have the impact the great one's like soderbergh desire...well, it was just depressing. i wanted to write him a letter and let him know that we're still out here even though it may not seem like it times. but for someone that just took the beating he did with Che (even though i thought was incredible by the way) it will likely be difficult for him to see the point in continuing to put himself out there. hopefully he can get past this.

[socketlevel]

the most hope i've taken from all this is the possibility of meeting a woman, marry her and watch not only a slow moving film like che but also the making of documentary! you got a diamond in the ruff my man. where you meet her cuz i'mma start hanging out there

but seriously, glad to see this affected someone else. for two days i was thinking about it in main mental rotation. here is a guy that can pretty much do anything he wants (or damn close) who's jaded... i hope he gets the gusto back too.

oh and i kinda loved it too, both films coulda been a tad shorter, but that's just nit picking.

[Stefen]

Did he say he should have let Malick do it?

[Sunrise]

Did he say he should have let Malick do it?

no but there was a few mentions of Malick's involvement early on the pre-production process.

[socketlevel]

ya they mentioned that malick might have picked up the project if soderberg decided to balk at the mid pre-production point.  this is when the film was basically just part 2, part 1 came about cuz soderberg felt you had to see the revolution model being successful to understand why che went to Bolivia.

[Pubrick]

the most hope i've taken from all this is the possibility of meeting a woman, marry her and watch not only a slow moving film like che but also the making of documentary! you got a diamond in the ruff my man. where you meet her cuz i'mma start hanging out there

Sunrise don't tell him!

unless you want to live like this for the rest of your life:

[socketlevel]

haha.... it's true...