STREET FIGHTING MAN
Benicio Del Toro is talking about Che—the man and the movie—in a slow drawn out way. His voice on the phone from L.A. has a kind of dreamy, meandering quality when he speaks, as if he’s feeling his way through his thoughts. He’s picking and choosing as he goes along, coming to something, finding ways to express in words whatever it is that he can convey with such apparent ease, non-verbally, so artfully on the screen. He doesn’t just say one thing, he goes back, circles an idea, lights on one word, then another. You can sense him trying to get it, process it and give voice to it.
Three months earlier I had seen him triumphant.
“I’d like to dedicate this to the man himself, Che Guevara,” Del Toro beamed when he accepted the Best Actor Award, at the Cannes Film Festival, for his title role in Steven Soderbergh’s epic portrait of the iconic revolutionary figure.
For over four hours Soderbergh’s gripping, action-oriented film focuses on three periods in Guevara’s life: the more than two years he spent as a guerilla fighter in Cuba after meeting Fidel Castro in 1955; the spirited speech he gave to the UN General Assembly in 1964; and his last year taking his act on the road in Bolivia where he died in 1967.
Che, the movie, is a monumental marriage of Peter Watkins’ intense battle film Culloden and Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. In the way it examines the process of a revolution, it’s much broader-based and (of historical necessity) much less urban. Del Toro’s performance, grounded in over seven years of research, is all-consuming—physically and psychically visible on the screen. Mesmerizing.
For Del Toro the few steps up to the stage of the vast Lumière theatre in Cannes, filled with more than 2,000 people in evening dress that night in May, was the end of a journey that had its origins 20 years earlier when he walked into a bookstore in Mexico City. He was in town filming his second feature film, the James Bond movie Licence To Kill, in which he plays a switchblade killer. He happened to pick up a collection of Guevara’s writings.
“It was a picture that drew me to it. Him smiling or something. It was a picture of this guy, smiling, so I bought the book and read the letters.”
Del Toro is circling around his words the day I speak to him, the day after Che was announced as a Special Presentation at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Except TIFF is showing it in two parts, split over two nights. That’s not the way he thinks it should be shown. The New York Film Festival isn’t doing that. They’re showing it—all 4 hours and 18 minutes of it—in one go, with an intermission. Like in Cannes, where the intermission included a mini brown bag lunch consisting of a slice of ham on white bread, a chocolate bar and a bottle of water. I couldn’t help but think about how long that would have sustained Guevara in the Cuban jungle.
“And then at the New York Film Festival I think they’re doing the Cannes thing which is the way to show it.” His voice is definite, clear, pointed. “My instinct tells me that it should be shown that way. It was shot as one. In my head as I was working on it, it’s one. You learn this guy, you see this guy, then later, hopefully, you feel something.”
But Del Toro doesn’t press his concern. He doesn’t get worked up. He moves on, just the way he once moved on from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, despite its poor showing at the box office. He doesn’t appear to be weighed down by things that happen, which has allowed him to navigate the system and not be ruled by it. He did get noticed though, in Fear and Loathing, he always does. And that led directly into his Oscar-winning role in Traffic, which is when he first worked with Soderbergh.
Soderbergh once said that Del Toro “has that ineffable quality that some performers have.” It may be hard to define his screen presence, but it’s indisputably compelling. Talking to him it’s apparent he’s thoughtful, intelligent, really into music, an uncannily gifted actor who lives in the moment.
That moment might be one after a day of shooting in the Puerto Rican jungle. On the 30-minute ride back he’s listening to Silvio Rodriguez’ album Rabo de Nube (The Tail of the Cloud) originally released in 1979 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. Rodriguez was a heartthrob then, singing about love and revolution, lyrically, in a passionate tenor voice that kills with honesty and passion. On the Che shoot there were plenty of moments “to decompress” as he puts it.
“There were drives from wherever we were staying. And we listened to Silvio Rodriguez, The Clash, the usual suspects.” He pauses. “The Beatles.” I can hear a smile in Del Toro’s voice as he realizes what he’s just said. The Usual Suspects was the movie that really got him noticed by the general movie-going public. It was playing the part of Fred Fenster, with that invented mumble and those cocky gestures, that first imprinted him on our consciousness and won him his first Independent Spirit Award.
So to hear him saying “the usual suspects” now, as he is remembering that in the car it was the revolutionary blast of Sandinista by The Clash, and that it was The White Album, the first album the Beatles recorded after Guevara’s death, I couldn’t help but smile at the moment. And then I realize that Del Toro was listening to John Lennon singing “We all want to change the world” as he travelled back and forth to the set of the Cuban Revolution.
Del Toro says you can’t take the Che story out of the context of the sixties. He talks about an African-American running for president as something that would have been inconceivable then. He sees Guevara as a light at the end of the tunnel, a Latin American hero, working for the weak and the needy, against oppression and for education. He’s groping for Guevara’s essence, talking about how, as he did more research and got closer to the people that had really known the man, how moved he was by the love they still feel for him. He says their eyes would water when they talked about him. As an actor he relates to the way they can access a moment so long ago, to the physicality of the teary eyes. The enduring legacy of that emotion was part of the force that fueled the making of the movie.
Just before Del Toro went to Spain last year to film the Bolivian section of Che, he used a few Rolling Stones songs to describe to a magazine writer the kind of movie they were making. He said it wasn’t going to be a “greatest hits” kind of movie but more selective. It would be the kind of movie that would finish with “Infamy” (A Bigger Bang, 2005). I looked at those lyrics:
Oh why have you got it in for me
Things they are not what they seem
You’re living in a nightmare baby
But I mistook it for a dream.
I couldn’t believe how apt they were. Guevara’s life in Bolivia was doomed from the start. It was late in 1966 and he had virtually disappeared from the scene following his impassioned 1964 UN address. An attempt to influence the outcome of the ongoing Angolan conflict had come to naught. Castro sent him to Bolivia with the idea that he would lead a small group of revolutionaries, secure some territory and become the focus of a movement that could spread to the country’s neighbours, linking up to other like-minded groups already operating.
Guevara spent almost a year there, arriving disguised as a Uruguayan businessman with a fake passport and a radically altered hairstyle. Things went wrong from the start. The Bolivian Communist Party withdrew its support, the foreign allies weren’t solid, he was discovered and, along with his men (mostly Cubans), forced to go on the run. The group lacked proper training and the terrain was far less protective than they had grown used to ten years earlier. In the end, burdened by health problems (he had severe asthma) and physically wasted away, his enormous willpower fell victim to the bullets of the Bolivian Army. The dream of exporting the Cuban Revolution died along with him.
I ask Del Toro if he still feels that those “Infamy” lyrics were a suitable metaphor for the film, “That’s far out,” he says laughing. “ I’ll let you run with that one.” He’s giving me permission.
“That’s interesting,” he goes on. “Yeah I remember I was talking to someone who liked The Stones a lot.”
I quote the lines back to him, saying there’s doom in them and he agrees. “Right, right.”
The guy obviously relates to music. How many actors, picking up on a journalist’s Stones fixation, could so spontaneously throw down the more obvious “Satisfaction”/”Start Me Up” version of a Che “album” (the version they would never do) and then come up with the subtler “Blue Turns To Grey”/”Stray Cat Blues” analogy that would finish with “Infamy.”
I tell him that it’s a measure of how well he inhabited the character—how real his performance was—that the unfolding of Guevara’s inevitable death was actually tough to watch. I wonder how he went about building a character when he had to be true to the integrity of a real person.
First of all, he says, you have to trust the people working with you, the director, the other actors, the script, the research. Your own work. “At one of our meetings in Cuba, Aleida [he draws out the sound of her name out of respect], Che’s wife, said something along the lines: It doesn’t matter if the actor looks like him or doesn’t look like him. What’s important is that the actor understands the scenes and plays them.”
He used her comment as a kind of validation. “I relied on that. It was me playing Che but at some point you have to let yourself come out and interpret the scene and try to work with the truth and what you know.”
I know that Del Toro has just wrapped the title role in an update of the original Lon Chaney Wolf Man movie that he hopes will stay true to the classic Universal style. He’s always liked those old horror films; all it took was a word to his manager and a phone call to the studio to set it in motion. The shoot lasted five months compared to Che’s eighty days.
He’s a producer on it, as he is on Che and I’m curious about the difference. He assures me that he is involved, but “maybe not as much as with the Che thing.” There the head was Steven Soderbergh and Del Toro was the point man. With The Wolf Man his part was smaller and there was a big studio with more specialized departments like action in which he had no involvement.
“Did you have a personal soundtrack to ‘decompress’ with on that shoot?” I ask him. He laughs a fast, almost cackling laugh. He sounds surprised but he’s enjoying having his own words thrown back at him. You can hear him winding back to the moment on the set of The Wolf Man when the make-up was being put on and he was listening to Nick Cave’s Dig, Lazarus, Dig. They played the album during those six hours every morning before filming.
“We’d flip it, every now and then we’d have to play something else, Quadrophenia, the new Radiohead because it had come out too, that was pretty good. Black Sabbath Vol 4.”
I push him for more details.
“You know, you’re always listening to stuff. I’m influenced by the place and whatever is happening around. There was another album that had just come out called For Emma. Bon Ivor was the name of the musician. It’s pretty good.”
The day after I spoke to him, I boughtFor Emma. It is pretty good. I’m addicted to its low-key, haunting groove. Perfect for decompressing.
Three months earlier I had seen him triumphant.
“I’d like to dedicate this to the man himself, Che Guevara,” Del Toro beamed when he accepted the Best Actor Award, at the Cannes Film Festival, for his title role in Steven Soderbergh’s epic portrait of the iconic revolutionary figure.
For over four hours Soderbergh’s gripping, action-oriented film focuses on three periods in Guevara’s life: the more than two years he spent as a guerilla fighter in Cuba after meeting Fidel Castro in 1955; the spirited speech he gave to the UN General Assembly in 1964; and his last year taking his act on the road in Bolivia where he died in 1967.
Che, the movie, is a monumental marriage of Peter Watkins’ intense battle film Culloden and Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. In the way it examines the process of a revolution, it’s much broader-based and (of historical necessity) much less urban. Del Toro’s performance, grounded in over seven years of research, is all-consuming—physically and psychically visible on the screen. Mesmerizing.
For Del Toro the few steps up to the stage of the vast Lumière theatre in Cannes, filled with more than 2,000 people in evening dress that night in May, was the end of a journey that had its origins 20 years earlier when he walked into a bookstore in Mexico City. He was in town filming his second feature film, the James Bond movie Licence To Kill, in which he plays a switchblade killer. He happened to pick up a collection of Guevara’s writings.
“It was a picture that drew me to it. Him smiling or something. It was a picture of this guy, smiling, so I bought the book and read the letters.”
Del Toro is circling around his words the day I speak to him, the day after Che was announced as a Special Presentation at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Except TIFF is showing it in two parts, split over two nights. That’s not the way he thinks it should be shown. The New York Film Festival isn’t doing that. They’re showing it—all 4 hours and 18 minutes of it—in one go, with an intermission. Like in Cannes, where the intermission included a mini brown bag lunch consisting of a slice of ham on white bread, a chocolate bar and a bottle of water. I couldn’t help but think about how long that would have sustained Guevara in the Cuban jungle.
“And then at the New York Film Festival I think they’re doing the Cannes thing which is the way to show it.” His voice is definite, clear, pointed. “My instinct tells me that it should be shown that way. It was shot as one. In my head as I was working on it, it’s one. You learn this guy, you see this guy, then later, hopefully, you feel something.”
But Del Toro doesn’t press his concern. He doesn’t get worked up. He moves on, just the way he once moved on from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, despite its poor showing at the box office. He doesn’t appear to be weighed down by things that happen, which has allowed him to navigate the system and not be ruled by it. He did get noticed though, in Fear and Loathing, he always does. And that led directly into his Oscar-winning role in Traffic, which is when he first worked with Soderbergh.
Soderbergh once said that Del Toro “has that ineffable quality that some performers have.” It may be hard to define his screen presence, but it’s indisputably compelling. Talking to him it’s apparent he’s thoughtful, intelligent, really into music, an uncannily gifted actor who lives in the moment.
That moment might be one after a day of shooting in the Puerto Rican jungle. On the 30-minute ride back he’s listening to Silvio Rodriguez’ album Rabo de Nube (The Tail of the Cloud) originally released in 1979 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. Rodriguez was a heartthrob then, singing about love and revolution, lyrically, in a passionate tenor voice that kills with honesty and passion. On the Che shoot there were plenty of moments “to decompress” as he puts it.
“There were drives from wherever we were staying. And we listened to Silvio Rodriguez, The Clash, the usual suspects.” He pauses. “The Beatles.” I can hear a smile in Del Toro’s voice as he realizes what he’s just said. The Usual Suspects was the movie that really got him noticed by the general movie-going public. It was playing the part of Fred Fenster, with that invented mumble and those cocky gestures, that first imprinted him on our consciousness and won him his first Independent Spirit Award.
So to hear him saying “the usual suspects” now, as he is remembering that in the car it was the revolutionary blast of Sandinista by The Clash, and that it was The White Album, the first album the Beatles recorded after Guevara’s death, I couldn’t help but smile at the moment. And then I realize that Del Toro was listening to John Lennon singing “We all want to change the world” as he travelled back and forth to the set of the Cuban Revolution.
Del Toro says you can’t take the Che story out of the context of the sixties. He talks about an African-American running for president as something that would have been inconceivable then. He sees Guevara as a light at the end of the tunnel, a Latin American hero, working for the weak and the needy, against oppression and for education. He’s groping for Guevara’s essence, talking about how, as he did more research and got closer to the people that had really known the man, how moved he was by the love they still feel for him. He says their eyes would water when they talked about him. As an actor he relates to the way they can access a moment so long ago, to the physicality of the teary eyes. The enduring legacy of that emotion was part of the force that fueled the making of the movie.
Just before Del Toro went to Spain last year to film the Bolivian section of Che, he used a few Rolling Stones songs to describe to a magazine writer the kind of movie they were making. He said it wasn’t going to be a “greatest hits” kind of movie but more selective. It would be the kind of movie that would finish with “Infamy” (A Bigger Bang, 2005). I looked at those lyrics:
Oh why have you got it in for me
Things they are not what they seem
You’re living in a nightmare baby
But I mistook it for a dream.
I couldn’t believe how apt they were. Guevara’s life in Bolivia was doomed from the start. It was late in 1966 and he had virtually disappeared from the scene following his impassioned 1964 UN address. An attempt to influence the outcome of the ongoing Angolan conflict had come to naught. Castro sent him to Bolivia with the idea that he would lead a small group of revolutionaries, secure some territory and become the focus of a movement that could spread to the country’s neighbours, linking up to other like-minded groups already operating.
Guevara spent almost a year there, arriving disguised as a Uruguayan businessman with a fake passport and a radically altered hairstyle. Things went wrong from the start. The Bolivian Communist Party withdrew its support, the foreign allies weren’t solid, he was discovered and, along with his men (mostly Cubans), forced to go on the run. The group lacked proper training and the terrain was far less protective than they had grown used to ten years earlier. In the end, burdened by health problems (he had severe asthma) and physically wasted away, his enormous willpower fell victim to the bullets of the Bolivian Army. The dream of exporting the Cuban Revolution died along with him.
I ask Del Toro if he still feels that those “Infamy” lyrics were a suitable metaphor for the film, “That’s far out,” he says laughing. “ I’ll let you run with that one.” He’s giving me permission.
“That’s interesting,” he goes on. “Yeah I remember I was talking to someone who liked The Stones a lot.”
I quote the lines back to him, saying there’s doom in them and he agrees. “Right, right.”
The guy obviously relates to music. How many actors, picking up on a journalist’s Stones fixation, could so spontaneously throw down the more obvious “Satisfaction”/”Start Me Up” version of a Che “album” (the version they would never do) and then come up with the subtler “Blue Turns To Grey”/”Stray Cat Blues” analogy that would finish with “Infamy.”
I tell him that it’s a measure of how well he inhabited the character—how real his performance was—that the unfolding of Guevara’s inevitable death was actually tough to watch. I wonder how he went about building a character when he had to be true to the integrity of a real person.
First of all, he says, you have to trust the people working with you, the director, the other actors, the script, the research. Your own work. “At one of our meetings in Cuba, Aleida [he draws out the sound of her name out of respect], Che’s wife, said something along the lines: It doesn’t matter if the actor looks like him or doesn’t look like him. What’s important is that the actor understands the scenes and plays them.”
He used her comment as a kind of validation. “I relied on that. It was me playing Che but at some point you have to let yourself come out and interpret the scene and try to work with the truth and what you know.”
I know that Del Toro has just wrapped the title role in an update of the original Lon Chaney Wolf Man movie that he hopes will stay true to the classic Universal style. He’s always liked those old horror films; all it took was a word to his manager and a phone call to the studio to set it in motion. The shoot lasted five months compared to Che’s eighty days.
He’s a producer on it, as he is on Che and I’m curious about the difference. He assures me that he is involved, but “maybe not as much as with the Che thing.” There the head was Steven Soderbergh and Del Toro was the point man. With The Wolf Man his part was smaller and there was a big studio with more specialized departments like action in which he had no involvement.
“Did you have a personal soundtrack to ‘decompress’ with on that shoot?” I ask him. He laughs a fast, almost cackling laugh. He sounds surprised but he’s enjoying having his own words thrown back at him. You can hear him winding back to the moment on the set of The Wolf Man when the make-up was being put on and he was listening to Nick Cave’s Dig, Lazarus, Dig. They played the album during those six hours every morning before filming.
“We’d flip it, every now and then we’d have to play something else, Quadrophenia, the new Radiohead because it had come out too, that was pretty good. Black Sabbath Vol 4.”
I push him for more details.
“You know, you’re always listening to stuff. I’m influenced by the place and whatever is happening around. There was another album that had just come out called For Emma. Bon Ivor was the name of the musician. It’s pretty good.”
The day after I spoke to him, I boughtFor Emma. It is pretty good. I’m addicted to its low-key, haunting groove. Perfect for decompressing.
