From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to the treatment, which you can also hear at KCRW.com.

I'm Elvis Mitchell. My guest director, Steven Soderberg, has pretty much made a film a year for the last 20 years since the debut of Sex Lives and Videotape in 1989. It is now 2009.

Happy New Year, Mr. Soderberg. Welcome.

Happy New Year. That's right.

Thanks for being here.

Oh, my pleasure. It's been a while.

It's absolutely been a while. You probably made like five. You actually have made five.

I think so, yeah. on is that you want the film, you want people to react to it as a movie rather than a social

phenomenology. And yet, you're funny, that's not happening at all, is it?

Well, it's turned out to be one of those things where, yeah, people bring so much to it.

They have such a personal idea of Che in one direction or another that I think they seem to be looking at it in terms

other than cinematic terms. Certainly for me it's an indication if somebody starts the

discussion about the fact that the years in Cuba between the revolution and him going to Bolivia

aren't in the movie. And they consider that to be a political act, my omission of that section.

It means to me they haven't really looked at the film because it's very clearly designed to be a sort of diptic of two campaigns that he fought in.

And that was an artistic choice on my part because that was the part of his life that I wanted to focus on.

And so to not be able to look at the movie and see the logic of the artistic choice,

but instead see it as a political choice, is an indication

that you've come in with, you know, some sort of expectation about what you're going to see.

But, you know, if we go back to the person we refer to in every interview we've done here, Goddard,

every cut is the political act anyway, isn't it?

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