It’s been a long road – in 2009 Steven Knight’s Pawn Sacrifice script made a Hollywood list of the best unproduced screenplays, in 2010 David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club, The Social Network) was announced as the director, in 2013 filming actually took place with Edward Zwick taking over, in 2014 it was shown at the Toronto Film Festival and now finally a trailer has been released ahead of its September premiere:
Although the film covers familiar ground – most recently seen on the big screen in Liz Garbus’ 2011 documentary Bobby Fischer Against the World – it’s unlikely chess fans will mind another retrospective on the career of arguably the most brilliant and enigmatic figure in chess history.
The film features flashbacks to when Fischer was just starting out
What gives the Fischer story wider appeal, of course, is how it chimed with the Cold War atmosphere of the time, with the trailer including the half-cliché of, "a poor kid from Brooklyn against the whole Soviet empire."
Fischer: "I want to play the Russians..."
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly the director explained how Fischer’s international fame was a relatively new phenomenon, describing the American star as “a pre-punk hero”:
The task of portraying Fischer from his late teens onwards fell to Tobey Maguire, who shot to stardom by playing the lead role in the Spider-Man trilogy from 2002-2007.Edward Zwick: Those of my generation who grew up in the midst of the cold war had a very, very strong awareness and very much were sort of influenced by the demonization of the Soviet Union, whether that was through the Cuban Missile Crisis or duck-and-cover, or any of those things that so affected us then. But the other thing you have to realize, the idea of international celebrity was relatively new. The Beatles had come to America a couple years before this, and [Fischer] was one of the first, I would call him a pre-punk hero. He was in some ways unruly and he was unpredictable. He was anti-authoritarian in certain ways. He was also kind of stylish and great looking and homegrown, so all of these conspired to give him this cache. We were all aware of him.
Jeff Labreque: Bobby Fischer was all those things, but pardon my language, but he was also an a–hole.
Absolutely. That’s the pre-punk thing. There’s a certain amount of a–holery that came to be a very important part of his character in popular culture.
The film shows the match in Reykjavik, but in this first trailer the whole emphasis is on how the crowd and cameras worked on Fischer's nerves