The making of The Motorcycle Diaries is not the travel journal of the man who would become one of Time Magazine's "icons of the century." Rewritten by Guevara several years after the journey took place, it is a memoir. The Motorcycle Diaries production includes entries from his travel diary depicting the events and people encountered on the trip, combined with his ruminations on their later significance, provide a rare opportunity to witness the retracing of a remarkable man's destiny and the solidifying of his identity from its earlier state.

The making of the Motorcycle Diaries originated at South Fork Pictures with executive producer Robert Redford, and producers Michael Nozik and Karen Tenkhoff of Wildwood Enterprises. They immediately saw the Motorcycle Diaries production project as a prime opportunity to work with Walter Salles, the director who had won the Sundance-NHK Cinema 100 grant in 1996 with the script for Central Station. To balance the film's portrayal of the two main characters, Rivera drew from both Guevara's travel diary and Granado's own account of the trip. Unlike the making of the Motorcycle Diaries, Granado's version is not a memoir. Rather, it contains the actual entries documenting his observations on the road. In the meantime, Salles set out on a personal journey through the towns and cities mentioned in the books to experience firsthand the route that Guevara and Granado had taken some 50 years prior of the Motorcycle Diaries production. The director found he was able to reconstruct the adventure and discover the present-day state of the places described in Guevara's and Granado's accounts and that went into the making of the Motorcycle Diaries.