CANNES -- Ernesto (Che) Guevara is either a despicable dead terrorist, an heroic revolutionary with his own mythology or a pop-culture icon who still looks good on a T-shirt.

"Che means many things to many people," filmmaker Steven Soderbergh told the Cannes Film Festival yesterday.

The world view of Che -- who was murdered four decades ago by the Bolivian army while trying to export the socialist revolution he had helped Fidel Castro establish in Cuba -- is now being expanded by an epic film that Soderbergh just presented at Cannes. The title is, simply, Che. It is a two-part, 41/2-hour, Spanish-language opus. Che, still searching for a distributor in North America, played in competition with Puerto Rican-born Benicio Del Toro portraying Che.

Soderbergh, whose work ranges from Traffic to the revived Ocean's franchise, said he is not trying to make an overt political statement by trying to humanize an icon.

"I came to this as sort of an agnostic. I'm not from Latin America. I'm not personally invested in building him up or tearing him down. I'm just interested in him. I can make a movie about a true believer without believing everything that he believes.

"I'm just compelled by the fact that he, twice, gave up everything to go put his ass on the line for somebody else's benefit. I'm just interested in that, especially the second time (in Bolivia). I mean, he walked away from everything to go try to do it again."

The first half of Che is a thrilling spectacle which shows how Castro gathered a band of 80 guerillas, including the Argentine Guevara, and eventually overthrew Batista's repressive dictatorship in Cuba. Only 12 of those originals survived to take power.

The second half of Che shows Guevara abandoning his comfortable life in Cuba to try it again in Bolivia, only to fail, find himself captured after a gun battle and then be summarily executed on orders from the Bolivian president.

"It's all a very elaborate way for us to sell our own T-shirts," the droll Soderbergh joked about his motivations.

Del Toro said yesterday that it took years of research to conjure up the human being behind the familiar photo that is now the "Che Chic" image on T-shirts.

"It is not my imagination. You do a lot of reading. You meet people who knew him. You see the pros and cons of the character and you work from photographs. That's how you go about it.

"I never knew much about Che when I was a kid. I only knew one side, he was a bad guy."

Through his research, Del Toro came to appreciate Che, he said. "The love that people felt for this man made me more interested in getting to know about the man." Eventually, "I was working on the character with silk gloves."

Soderbergh made five trips to Cuba and never got to meet Castro, although he was alerted to the possibility that "Pedro" might call to chat, even in the middle of the night, because each visit was officially arranged. The phone did not ring.

Castro, however, is well known to love movies and often stops screenings to make speeches before starting them again. The length of Che could kill him, Soderbergh worried.

"He may not survive these two films. It's unimaginable."

Del Toro did run into Castro in Havana at a book fair.

"I met him for about five minutes," Del Toro said. "He knew about the project and he said to me that he was very happy that we had spent so much time researching the subject. And I would love for him to see it."