So I got to talk briefly with Benicio tonight. After the Q&A I basically just thanked him for answering my question and congratulated him on the film. I took a number of pictures of him throughout the night, but I haven't uploaded yet so I'm not sure how good or bad they are. If they're worth posting, I'll share them here. I didn't ask for a picture with him unfortunately, because he was getting mobbed by people for a good 20 minutes, and by the time he got near me he was clearly tired and annoyed and just wanted to get in his car to go home. He was still very gracious the whole time though, and took more than the fair chunk of time to sign autographs and stuff for people.
But, I did get to ask a question earlier, which wasn't a particularly great question admitedly, but it still garnered the best answer all night. I asked something like "I know the film was in production for nearly 8 nears, and that Terrence Malick was working on the script and attached to direct for a while, so what do you think might have been different had the film been done in any prior period of production or do you think this was the right time for the film to be made?"
At first he said, "Well you know they old saying 'If my aunt had balls, she'd be my Uncle.' "Then he went on to talk about Malick's particular contributions to the film, and having gotten to actually work with Malick for a pretty long period of time during the pre-production of the film learning a great deal in the process. Another fun bit of trivia too: apparently the two of them went to school together. Cool shit.