Pawn Sacrifice
Short description
Pawn Sacrifice is a drama set during the Cold War, centering on the American chess player Bobby Fischer as he prepares to face the Soviet champion Boris Spassky. Their 1972 world championship match in Reykjavik becomes more than a contest between two players, carrying the weight of the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, whose players had long dominated the game. Fischer, a gifted but deeply paranoid man who believes the world is conspiring against him, comes close to walking away from the match altogether, while Spassky must cope with pressure of his own.
Edward Zwick directed the film, his tenth feature, following work such as Glory, The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond and Love & Other Drugs. Christopher Wilkinson, Stephen J. Rivele and Steven Knight wrote the screenplay, and Zwick produced alongside Gail Katz and Tobey Maguire, who plays Fischer. Liev Schreiber appears as Spassky, with Peter Sarsgaard, Michael Stuhlbarg and Lily Rabe in supporting roles.
Released in 2015, the film runs 115 minutes. It earned 7/10 on IMDb from around 54,000 votes and 6.7/10 on TMDB, while a critics' rating of 6.4/10 sits below the audience scores. Against a budget of 19 million dollars, its worldwide box office came to about 6 million.
What's left behind the scenes
- The recording of a lecture on conspiracy theory that Bobby Fischer listens to was narrated by Liev Schreiber, who plays Boris Spassky in the film.
- In some episodes where Fischer examines a small chessboard, it is shown with a black square in the lower right corner. According to the rules, when a game begins, a white square should be located in the lower right corner in front of each player.
- When Bobby recreates a game described in a Soviet chess magazine, the first moves involve pawns at the edge of the board. In reality, only amateurs begin a game this way, not grandmasters whose games are published in such magazines.
- The screenplay for this film was on the “Black List” of the best unproduced screenplays of 2009.
- Bobby Fischer loved European football as much as he loved chess. He very much wanted to see a “Manchester United” game live, which he mentioned repeatedly.
- In several shots, modern emergency exit signs are visible in the audience, which were not yet in use in 1972.
- Contact lenses can be seen in Toby Maguire’s eyes in close-ups.
- When Fischer sits down to play with Ivanovich, a sign with a misspelled name – “Brent Larsen” – is visible on another table beside them.
- The film on American television shows a broadcast of the games. In reality, the game itself was not shown directly at that time. Shelby Lyman, a Harvard-educated sociology professor and talented amateur chess player, received information about each move in real time via teletype and moved the pieces on a demonstration board on the wall, after which he discussed these moves with one or two chess experts. The film says nothing about Shelby Lyman, although it was he who devised this method of broadcasting chess games.
- The film shows Fischer losing the first game immediately after Spassky trapped his bishop. In reality, he made 26 more moves before resigning.
- The film shows Fischer and Spassky drawing lots immediately before the first game to determine who would play white first. In reality, this procedure was carried out five days before the first game.
- When Fischer first meets Boris Spassky in Santa Monica in 1966, Boris is introduced as the world champion. However, Boris was not yet the world champion at that time; Tigran Petrosian was.
- “Sacrificing a pawn” is a move in a game where a player gives up a pawn in exchange for a small advantage, which opens up new squares or makes it possible to position their pieces in order to launch an attack later. This move is used to disrupt the balance on the board. If the player who made such a move does not take advantage of the temporary advantage, the opponent can seize the initiative and win the game by having more pieces.
- Tobey Maguire played the son of Joan Allen’s characters in two films – Ang Lee’s “The Ice Storm” (1997) and Gary Ross’s “Pleasantville” (1998). In Steven Zaillian’s “Searching for Bobby Fischer” (1993, also known as “The Art of War”), about the childhood of famous chess player Joshua Waitzkin, Allen played the mother of the young prodigy.
- Tobey Maguire and Liev Schreiber starred in films based on Marvel comics. Maguire played Peter Parker/Spider-Man in Sam Raimi’s trilogy, and Schreiber played Sabretooth/Victor Creed in “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.”
- Director Edward Zwick explains the meaning of the film’s title: “There’s Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon calling Bobby Fischer; there’s Brezhnev and the KGB agents watching Boris Spassky. Both were pawns [in the hands] of their nations.” Spassky himself recounted in 2016 that a group of KGB officers, centrally directed by Colonel, later General, F. D. Bobkov, flew in from Moscow specifically for the Reykjavik match.
- The film shows a scene from 1965 where Paul Marshall gave his card to Fischer, boasting that he promotes Jimi Hendrix and “The Rolling Stones.” In 1965, Jimi Hendrix was not yet known, and he formed his band “The Jimi Hendrix Experience” in the UK only in the fall of 1966.
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