‘Che’: the one movie Steven Soderbergh wishes he hadn’t made
As a filmmaker who’s made it abundantly clear they’re willing to try any genre at least once, it was only a matter of time before Steven Soderbergh made a period piece. However, whereas Kafka and The Good German went off largely without a hitch, the two-part biographical drama Che was an entirely different story.
Ever since bursting onto the scene with the 1989 classic Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Soderbergh has always done things his own way. The closest he’s ever come to bowing down to the studio machine was the Ocean’s trilogy – unless anybody counts his stint as a second-unit director on The Hunger Games during his self-imposed exile – but even then, the heist capers were shot through with his signature kinetic style.
As a result, there have been some monumental battles to wrangle the necessary pieces required to pull off an ambitious project that still retains his authorial fingerprints. This proved to be the case for his epic retelling of a revolutionary who inadvertently became a license to print money after his image became plastered all over the walls of self-appointed suburban rebels everywhere.
Even as an Academy Award-winning filmmaker having scooped a ‘Best Director’ prize for Traffic, and with an Oscar-winning star in the leading role via Benicio del Toro, Che was nightmarish from the start. The combined budget for the complete 267-minute epic was $58million, which isn’t a huge figure considering the level of talent attached, but the obstacles were apparent from the beginning.
In the name of authenticity, Soderbergh decided to film Che in Spanish, which had a hugely detrimental effect on its chances of securing funding from American-based backers. As a result, the entire operation was funded without a single penny coming from the United States, and it entered production without a distribution deal in place. International pre-sales may have covered a great deal of the costs, but Soderbergh still knew he was up against it from day one.
He wasn’t above making things intentionally difficult for himself, either, with Part 2: Guerrilla shooting first before he dived straight into Part 1: The Argentine, filmed back-to-back on identical schedules of 39 days. For the latter half, Soderbergh favoured handheld, intimate camerawork to add extra layers of realism. In contrast, the first was shot in a more traditional manner to evoke a more classical Hollywood approach.
In essence, he opted to shoot two movies consecutively the wrong way around from their release, deploying completely different aesthetics on each of them, and in less time than it took him to shoot a single Ocean’s film. Understandably, then, it doesn’t stand out as one of the greatest experiences of Soderbergh’s life as a filmmaker, to the point where he wishes he’d never made it at all.
“Everybody got scarred a little bit,” he confessed to The Guardian. “I don’t know how to describe it. It took a long time to shake off.”
Reflecting on it being “just such an intense four or five months,” Soderbergh would admit that he was glad to be rid of it. “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,'” he said.
When asked flat-out if he wishes he hadn’t done it at all, he responded with a weary “Yeah.” He didn’t believe it to be the best possible version of the story he wanted to tell, explaining how “it’s hard not to watch it and wish we’d had more time”. Part of that was entirely of his own making, albeit with Stateside investors playing their part by refusing to commit and plunging Soderbergh into a race against time to get Che shot, edited, and released on budget and on schedule.
In the end, both halves of Che only reached $42million in ticket sales to go down as a box office bomb, and neither did they make a splash during awards season. That’s not to say it was an entirely pointless exercise, but based solely on Soderbergh’s appraisal of the way things turned out, he was left crushingly disappointed by the results.
