Creating films based on real life events or real life people is always a challenge, especially if the events are not well documented in the media.

For Antonio Banderas, Rodrigo Santoro, Lou Diamond Phillips, and Juliette Binoche, this was not the case when preparing for the upcoming film "The 33." The four actors had the advantage of seeing the news surrounding the events that took place with the 33 miners, who were trapped thousands of feet underground for more than two months in 2010.

But, for all four actors, the approach was very different. Not all all of them were able to meet the subject they were portraying when preparing the roles. Banderas and Santoro were among the luckier ones.

In the film, Banderas portrays Mario Sepulveda, the leader of the miners who is also known as Super Mario. Banderas notes that his interactions with Sepulveda were helpful in understanding the character.

"One of the things that I experienced when I talked to him [is that] he is explosive. The guy is bigger than life," he said during in an exclusive interview with Latin Post. "He gives you so much data and so much information that you feel a little frustrated that you cannot put everything in the movie."

Banderas' experiences with Sepulveda were so positive that he said that they have become friends since the film was shot.

Santoro, who plays Laurence Golborne, approached his character in a very similar way but his preparation also dealt with doing research online and looking at footage.

"The preparation started with research online. There was so much coverage by the media on this event so I pretty much tried to watch everything I could," Santoro told Latin Post. "Some documentaries, some special research that the producers had ... and of course I went to Chile and I met with the real character, met with the miners, the 33 of them, their families, the people that participated in the rescue so it became an official research about what happened."

The meeting with the miners was special for Santoro because he was able to soak in the information and apply it to his acting role.

"It was just a beautiful moment where I shared stories and we could look into each other's eyes and share some good moments, some good laughs. I was more listening to anything else. And that was important because I carried that experience and those moments with me throughout the shoot," he noted.

However, the preparation for the other actors was not the same. Binoche and Phillips were forced to work with their intuition as they were unable to meet their respective real-life characters until after the filming.

Binoche, who plays Maria Segovia, the sister of one of the miners, notes that she had hoped she could have met Segovia while preparing for the role.

"We were already shooting and I met her during the shooting," she relayed to Latin Post. "What I could see in her was the warmth, the love, the sort of knowledge about humanity that she knows because she lived. That is not learned in books. Honest truth, I asked a lot of details about her private life as well as what happened during the 69 days and I am always kind of fair to the moment and fair to the feelings," Binoche said.

Phillips was also adamant about wanting to meet his character, Don Lucho, because he had to use his instincts based on the script. While he was not trying to imitate or look exactly alike, he wanted to create his essence.

"I had to take a leap of faith and some extinct. And obviously I had the script and I had our director Patricia Riggen to give me guidance, but I had to make some decisions about how to approach this character," he told Latin Post. Phillips notes that he was lucky that his instincts led to the right path and when he met Don Lucho during the shoot, he was able to flesh the character out.

"Meeting him certainly filled in some blanks for me and gave me a few more things to think about," he added.