WAMG Interview: PAWN SACRIFICE Producer Gail Katz and Chess Grandmaster Maxim Dlugy

PAWN SACRIFICE is a gripping true story set during the height of the Cold War. American chess prodigy Bobby Fischer (Tobey Maguire) finds himself caught between two superpowers when he challenges the Soviet Empire. Also starring Liev Schreiber and Peter Sarsgaard, PAWN SACRIFICE chronicles Fischer’s terrifying struggles with genius and madness, and the rise and fall of a kid from Brooklyn who captured the imagination of the world. PAWN SACRIFICE is produced by Gail Katz, known for her work on such films as AIR FORCE ONE, IN THE LINE OF FIRE, and THE PERFECT STORM. She has numerous projects in development including a television  series based on the international hit board game “The Settlers of Catan.” Maxim Dlugy is a chess Grandmaster. He was born in Moscow, USSR. He arrived with his family in the United States in 1977. He was awarded the International Master title in 1982. He won the World Junior Chess Championship in 1985. He was awarded the Grandmaster title in 1986 for his result at the World Chess Olympiad in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where he played on the U.S. team that was in first place going into the last round.

Both Gail Katz and Maxim Dlugy were in St. Louis to promote PAWN SACRIFICE and We Are Movie Geeks sat down with them to ask questions about the new film, their careers and the man at the center of their new project, Bobby Fischer.

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman September 3rd 2015 (this was part of a round-table interview with several other journalists. The questions from We Are Movie Geeks are identified as such)

Question: A significant portion of this film was Bobby Fischer’s anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories though apparently he had Jewish heritage.  I’m glad you didn’t avoid that in the film. Tell me about writing the script and including that in the right way. 

GAIL KATZ: The idea to do this movie was mine. It was something that had occurred during my lifetime and I remember how important it was. To me Bobby Fischer at the time was this great Jewish American hero. I’m Jewish and my parents are Holocaust survivors. I decided to do this movie about him even though knowing what had happened to him. I just recalled that the summer of 1972 was a most remarkable summer with a chess game just captivating the world. When I started this project in 2004, Bobby was in Japan and about to leave. Shortly after I started it, he was arrested (on charges that he attended a 1992 match in Yugoslavia in violation of a U.S. ban). So there was a time there when I was working on this that Bobby was still alive and still communicating with the world at large with his anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism and all of that. So there was concern about doing a movie about him and there was a question on how to portray this. Our feeling was that this was a story about a remarkable human being who certainly had mental problems and issues. It was something we needed to show as accurately as possible. I consulted several psychiatrist and experts on what he might have had in terms of his mental illness to make it accurate. That was something we had to address. It was very much a part of him, as much as the early part of his life, the rise of him being a genius and taking over chess world. At one point I consulted with a rabbi who’s a friend of mine. I did not want to support what Bobby Fischer believed in, but we had to show had warts and all. His mother was Jewish and his biological father was Jewish as well so the question becomes ‘where does this come from?’. The movie doesn’t really answer that because I don’t think anybody knows but it raises a lot of interesting questions and discussion.

We Are Movie Geeks: Didn’t that get much worse as his life went on after 1972?   

GAIL KATZ: Yes, much much worse.

WAMG: You address it a little bit at the end in the addendum and some of that footage is quite startling. You could make a sequel.

GAIL KATZ: ‘Bobby the Later Years, yeah’. There’s no question that we had to address it. The seeds of it were there. There were anti-Semitic comments that had come out and he was difficult in many ways. That was part and parcel with his mental problems.

Q: I think it was great that you showed his sister saying “but we’re Jewish”, because that would express for many Jewish people the outrage of somebody raising that. 

GAIL KATZ: He’s the best kind of anti-Semite, one that says “some of my best friends are Jewish”. Paul Marshall (Fischer’s attorney and manager) was also Jewish – it doesn’t say so in the movie but he was as well.

Q: I think it was good that you tied it into his mental illness.

GAIL KATZ: That was part of his paranoia and mental decline. I think it was very tied up with his mother. As far as I know he never saw a psychiatrist nor was officially diagnosed. We had to do with the research that we had.

WAMG: Fischer claims in the film that the Russians were cheating, that they were stacking the deck. He wrote a famous article in Sports Illustrated called The Russians Are Cheating At Chess. How much of that was in his head and how much of that was true?   

MAXIM DLUGY: Of course there was some truth to that because in any competition when you have a situation where it’s possible that your competition is colluding, then you are disadvantaged by definition whether or not they are. Just the possibility. If there are six Russians playing and only one American, and they could lose games to each other to bring up one of the players to win and you see one of them winning then you think that may have happened for a reason or it may have happened by accident.

GAIL KATZ: Isn’t it true that they were able to do that because it was a round Robin format, and then they changed The rules after because of Bobby’s article and his campaign to change things and he succeeded in getting it changed to a pyramid  format so that that couldn’t happen again?

MAXIM DLUGY: Fischer was the first chest professional. Chess players are extremely indebted to him because he basically created professional chess. Before him there was no professional chess. He not only created it, he commanded it and changed the rules.  People are now using those rules, things with the clock and other things. He was always thinking about the game. He was a very interesting character.

WAMG: Did you ever get to meet Bobby Fischer?

MAXIM DLUGY: I did have the occasion twice. Once when I was fighting for the world championship and I qualified to play in a tournament in the US, A mutual friend of ours told him about that and he said that he would be glad to help me and another player prepare. I made a mistake when I told him I had a budget from the American chess foundation of $5000 to help prepare. But when he realized that the money was coming from Jews, he said no and refused to help. And in 1991 The same friend said that Fisher was ready to play a young upcoming player but he didn’t play until the next year when he played Boris Spassky again.

WAMG: Did you know Boris Spassky?

MAXIM DLUGY: Yes I know him very well. He had a heart attack recently but he’s recovering. When Spassky visited Fischer’s grave, he said that he wanted to be buried next to him.

WAMG: They should’ve put that in the movie!

GAIL KATZ: Yes this is my first time hearing that! We’ll have to put that on the DVD.

Q: Bobby Fischer raised the pop culture profile for chess like Tiger Woods did for golf. Can you comment on that.

MAXIM DLUGY: Yes, he created professional chess. I think Tiger Woods helped propel golf but for Bobby Fischer there was no chess in popular culture so I think he did more. For Bobby, there was a Soviet supremacy. The Soviets didn’t care how much they earned because all of the money was taken by the sports ministry.

WAMG: Why do so many great chess players come from Russia historically?

MAXIM DLUGY: It was a way to prove that communism was a good ideology because they’re smarter and they can play chess well. Now that that has receded, you see top players from all over the world. A couple of people from Russia but there’s no domination like there used to be. Chess is becoming part of the culture in places like India and China and Norway of course.

Q: How old were you when you started playing chess?

MAXIM DLUGY: I learned to play when I was six. When I was seven I was playing in Estonia. People would call me the new Bobby Fischer not the new Boris Spassky.

Q: Why were you drawn to chess?

MAXIM DLUGY: My grandparents played it and when I started playing it, I just loved it.

Q: Let’s talk about the casting process for the film. How did you settle on Tobey Maguire?

GAIL KATZ: I approached Tobey in 2004. I pitched the idea to two writers I wanted to work with. We worked out the story and met with Tobey. Producers make lists, so I made a list of actors that could be Bobby and obviously Tobey was on that list. He didn’t have the physical characteristics, but in certain pictures he looked a lot like Bobby.

WAMG: Who else was on that list?.

GAIL KATZ: Oh gosh, I can’t remember right now. That was over 10 years ago. Tobey at the time was one year younger than Bobby was in 1972, so I thought he was perfect. We pitched it to Sony Pictures and they bought it. We developed it for nine years. At the top of my list for Boris Spassky was Liev Schreiber from day one. I thought he was a doppelgänger and there was no question. He had the perfect look and he’s an amazing actor. With Tobey it was interesting because Bobby was over 6 feet tall. Tobey not so much, but Tobey has very long elegant fingers and the way Bobby handled chess pieces was very unique so we felt like Tobey could really do that and the camera can make you act tall. Tobey has these qualities that we really wanted. He’s very endearing and has a humor like Bobby had, and he can certainly summon up the fiery attitude that he needed to be able to play the part.

Q: How do you make the film accessible to those that don’t know anything about chess?

GAIL KATZ: I should ask you that question. The fact is it’s not a movie about chess. It’s a movie about a man who has amazing odds against him mentally. It’s really about his journey and his struggles and also about the times. To me I always thought it was going to be a cold war thriller. I never had the attitude that I was working on a chess movie it was more a cold war thriller set in the world of chess.

WAMG: “It’s World War III on a chessboard” is a line from the film.

GAIL KATZ: Yes, a great line thanks to screenwriter Steve Knight.

Q: I like that you included dialogue where they would talk about chess by trading moves and speaking the moves without even needing a board. Tell me about the part of the chess advisor on this film?

GAIL KATZ: We shot the movie in Montreal so it looks like it’s everywhere in the world. We shot one and a half days of exteriors in Iceland and two days in Los Angeles. Other than that, everything was shot in Montreal. Our first chess advisor was Richard Berube, who is head of the Quebec Chess Federation. He started with us in preproduction helping to train our actors, to make the moves and help set up every board and every move for every shot. He was vitally important to us to make sure we had everything right. We wanted to make it is accurate as we could possibly be.

WAMG: Were you concerned about making this board game cinematic or did you leave that concern in the hands of the director?

GAIL KATZ: Not at all. I’ve seen movies that are cinematic about a guy blinking an eyelash. It’s how we shot. We had a brilliant cinematographer and Ed Zwick is a director that makes movies bigger then you can imagine so we were only constrained by our budget.

Q: As a Grandmaster, how did the final film impress you?

MAXIM DLUGY: I thought it was very true to life. My first coach was Bobby Fischer’s coach. I revered Bobby since I was 12 years old. It’s a battle of wills. Like most of sport played at the highest level, it’s about strategy and endurance and talent.

WAMG: Was the movie fictionalized at all?

GAIL KATZ: You might find little moments. You’re not in the room to hear every conversation but the big events, all of those things were in it and the idea was to make it as accurate as possible. We were making a movie, not a documentary so there are times when you have to take some license. You combine a few characters and move things around but there was very little of that. At the beginning of the movie it says it is based on a true story or and there are lawyers that vet that and allow you to say that. Some of it is so ludicrous that you can’t believe this happened. Taking months to even decide to go to Iceland, we couldn’t have made that up!

Look for the We Are Movie Geeks review of PAWN SACRIFICE later this week!