Development
| “ | The film shows what we were, which was two young men - boys, really - who went looking for adventure and found the truth and tragedy of our homeland. | ” |
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— Alberto Granado, 2004 |
To prepare for the role of the young Che Guevara, Gael García Bernal went through six months of intense preparation. This groundwork included reading "every biography" about Guevara, traveling to Cuba to speak with Guevara's family, and consulting with Guevara's then still living travel partner Alberto Granado. Despite being in his eighties, Granado was also taken on as an adviser by Salles, and enthusiastically followed the film crew as they retraced his former journey.
Moreover, Bernal (who is Mexican) adopted an Argentine accent and spent 14 weeks reading the works of José Martí, Karl Marx and Pablo Neruda (Guevara's favorite poet). Bernal told reporters "I feel a lot of responsibility. I want to do it well because of what Che represents to the world. He is a romantic. He had a political consciousness that changed Latin America." As Bernal experienced locales in Chile, Peru and Bolivia; with social conditions unchanged or worsened since Guevara passed through a half-century before, he took to heart Guevara's internationalist assertion in a "fiction of nations." Bernal believes this process allowed him to "engage with Latin America", in much the same way he believes that the young Guevara had. According to Bernal, the role crystallized his "own sense of duty" because Guevara "decided to live on the side of the mistreated, to live on the side of the people who have no justice - and no voice." In surmising the similarities between his own personal transformation and Guevara's, Bernal posits that "my generation is awakening, and we're discovering a world full of incredible injustice."
Granado later stated that he appreciated the movie's effort "to dig beneath the "mythical Che", whose defiant image appears on t-shirts and posters around the world, "to reveal the flawed, flesh-and-blood Ernesto beneath."
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