Che Guevara's journey from Argentina to Venezuela was the ideal road movie - and Walter Salles has made it, writes Michael Dwyer.
'This is the story that comes before history," Brazilian director Walter Salles says as we settle down to talk about The Motorcycle Diaries, which charts formative experiences in the life of the young Ernesto Che Guevara.
"When we met his family in Havana, one of his sons, a very bright young man called Camillo, put it this way. He said The Motorcycle Diaries is the story of Ernesto before he became Che. This freed us to look at those characters and who they were at that time and age, and not as people who would later become icons. We didn't want to mythologise or demythologise anyone, or to make a patronising or preachy film. We wanted to find their humanity through a period of very gradual change."
The film begins early in January 1952 when Ernesto Guevara de la Serna is a 23-year-old medical student specialising in leprosy. He leaves his well-to-do family behind in Buenos Aires and takes off with his pharmacist friend, Alberto Grenado on a 12,425 km journey through Argentina, Chile and Peru en route to Venezeula.
In the venerable tradition of the road movie, this proves to be a journey of self-discovery for the idealistic young Guevara, as his social conscience is nagged and heightened by the experiences of people he meets along the way - dispossessed farmers, exploited mine workers, and the inhabitants of a leper colony.
Salles showed his compassion for marginalised characters in his earlier Brazilian movies, Central Station and Behind the Sun, both of which demonstrated his distinctive flair as a visual stylist, and in the powerful contemporary slums drama, City of God, which he co-produced.
He admirably eschews didacticism in his new film as it subtly observes the gradual formation of a socialist revolutionary in the making - years before he became known as Che, joined up with Castro in Cuba and was murdered in Bolivia in 1967, becoming a poster boy for that turbulent period of world change.
"Change in this film happens in layers," says Salles, "as it did in the original journey in 1952. These guys went searching for adventure, and they discovered a social and political reality of which they were not aware. It changed their lives, defining the ethical and moral principles that would guide them throughout the rest of their existence."
Salles regards Guevara as a model of political integrity. "He was a man who fought for his ideals from the beginning to the end - in an age where people were pragmatic or quite cynical.
"You can agree or disagree with Guevara's positions on various matters, but you have to respect that he was one of the very few men who said what he believed in and acted on it. If you look at the political spectrum today, you won't find many people who do that.
"His life is so complex, rich and eventful that you would need many more films to tell it completely. The youthful years covered in The Motorcycle Diaries seemed to be the period that was possible to achieve in a single film because you don't have to venture into the parts of history that most, or a lot of, people know about."
Researching the film took more than two years. Salles retraced the epic motorcycle trip for himself. He and his screenwriter, Jose Rivera, drew on Guevara's personal diaries, various biographies written about him, and on the account of the 1952 journey as documented by his fellow traveller, Alberto Grenado. Salles enjoyed the co-operation of Guevara's family, including his widow, Aleida, who first met Che when she was a 24-year-old revolutionary, and of Grenado, now "a young man of 82", as Salles puts it.
"He's an extraordinary storyteller and a man of great humour and intelligence. He came to visit the set twice and he was very important to us because he gave us total freedom to do what we wanted." The project also enjoyed the freedom offered by the enterprising UK feature film production outlet, FilmFour. It was one of the last films developed there before FilmFour was closed down by its parent company, Channel 4 - although it has been reactivated on a smaller scale since then.
"The film exists thanks to FilmFour," Salles says. "When we started this journey and the screenplay was shown to American companies, the response was the same from all of them, that the story's okay but there's no conflict there, and they had reservations because it is spoken in Spanish. FilmFour truly believed that the film needed to be in Spanish. Can you imagine if the film had to be made with Hollywood actors and spoken in English? It would have been suicidal." A vivid example of how ineptly a Hollywood production could treat the subject already exists in Richard Fleischer's simplistic, heavy-handed 1967 movie Che, a risible effort that miscast Omar Sharif in the title role and Jack Palance as Fidel Castro.
For the leading roles in his own film, Salles astutely cast Gael García Bernal, the gifted young Mexican star of Y Tu Mama Tambien and Bad Education, as Guevara, and a talented relative newcomer, Rodrigo de la Serna, as Grenaldo.
"When you're working with actors as intelligent and as sensitive as Gael and Rodrigo, your job is made much easier," says Salles. "Gael gives a very internal performance. It would have been very easy to portray a flamboyant Guevara, because that is what most people would expect. It was very courageous of Gael to take him in the exact opposite direction, to play him as a very introspective young man who opens himself to the world and at the end of that journey discovers on which bank of the river he will spend the rest of his life.
"I was stunned when I first saw Gael in Amores Perros. As soon as I saw him in that three years ago, I invited him to be in this film. He has a visceral quality, an inner strength and a maturity as an actor that is remarkable for an actor of his age.
"He doesn't go for the grand gestures, the larger-than-life performances that are such a part of the big screen today. I think he is one of the most extraordinary actors from any generation. I didn't know Rodrigo before the shoot. He hadn't played any major roles before this, and I found him when we were auditioning actors for the part. I was very impressed by the ease with which he moved from drama to comedy and to be believable in both." The Motorcycle Diaries is, in many respects, the ultimate road movie, and of necessity, it had to be shot in sequence - a rare luxury in an industry dictated by economic exigencies. It was a long shoot because of all the movement between locations - they followed exactly the same route undertaken by Ernesto and Rodrigo - and of the 16 weeks it was shooting, four were spent travelling.
"We all learned so much from working on this movie. Like the two principal characters, we were very different by the time we reached the end of this journey. For me, I started out on the film as a Brazilian director and by the end of it, I felt more than ever that I am a Latin American director. I felt much more a part of the continent than I ever did before."
After completing The Motorcycle Diaries, Salles directed a remake of the haunting Japanese horror-thriller, Dark Water, which he shot in Canada with a cast led by Jennifer Connelly, Dougray Scott, Tim Roth, John C. Reilly, Pete Postlethwaite and Shelley Duvall. He is reticent about discussing it at this stage, especially when I tell him I've seen and admired the original version.
"I wanted to venture into making a genre movie," he says. "It was another adventure. But now I will go back to Brazil to make a small film, which I will co-direct with Daniela Thomas, with whom I did Foreign Land. We're going to do a film about four brothers who are in their 20s in the outskirts of Sao Paolo and who try to break the social apartheid pf Brazil through different ways, one of which is football. Third division football, though - nothing Beckham-like!"
The Motorcycle Diaries opens on August 27th