Filmmaker Liz Garbus Discusses Bobby Fischer Against The World

Filmmaker Liz Garbus Discusses Bobby Fischer Against The World
Posted: 06/ 6/11 02:32 AM ET

By the time he died in 2008, Bobby Fischer had proven that chess was more than a simple board game. His takedown of world champion Boris Spassky from the Soviet Union in 1972 grabbed more headlines and more airtime than a little break-in at the Watergate Hotel. The Soviets dominated the chess world, so Fischer’s victory resonated throughout the western world. When Fischer wavered about flying to Iceland to compete, Henry Kissinger personally called him to persuade him to face Spassky.

Fischer popularized the game of chess and made millions want to follow in his footsteps. Unfortunately, Fischer’s path to victory later led him to madness. Having difficulty dealing with the pressure his sudden fame, Fischer abruptly left competitive chess until 1992 when he met Spassky for a rematch in Yugoslavia as genocide was taking place.

After that, he became a fugitive for violating U.S. sanctions against the Belgrade government. Fischer’s increasingly bizarre, truculent behavior alienated friends and family and landed him in serious legal trouble. He also started giving radio interviews where he spouted vitriolic anti-Semitic and anti-American tirades despite the fact that is own ancestry was Jewish.

Liz Garbus’ new documentary Bobby Fischer Against the World skillfully puts both
Fischer’s achievements and his descent into insanity into perspective. It airs at 9:00 p.m. EST on HBO on Monday, June 6. The film, which I caught earlier this year at the True/False Film Festival in Columbia, MO, brings the tension of the Cold War to life and explains why Fischer’s chess matches captured public attention. By demolishing Soviet superiority in the game, Fischer proved that all people really had to fear in the ’70s was gaudy polyester.

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Because film is a visual medium, how do you make something as static as a chess match look interesting on screen?

For viewers outside the chess world, there has to be just the right amount of chess in the movie for it to be true to Bobby Fischer and to understand the key kind of turning points in the movie. But there also has to not be too much chess so as not to turn off the non-chess audience. Quite honestly, Bobby Fischer’s life story and the way that he behaved off the table are as much the subject of this film or more the subject of this film than the play on the table. So, I think that’s where the heart of the story was.

You eschewed chronological order with the movie. How did you decide on how to structure the movie?

I always wanted the match of ’72, which was such a wonderfully thrilling period to be the narrative spine of the film. I wanted the film to be about a sports match, which it was, and a sports match with political, social, cultural implications. And so we sort of structured it around the match and wove in Bobby’s biography and elements about the time period through the narrative spine of the match.

The experts you located to talk about it were people like Garry Kasparov and Susan Polgar who can explain chess to outsiders to the game. Was it tough to find people who had the background in chess but could still talk to a regular person?

Garry Kasparov was not just interesting to talk to about the chess itself. Garry was used to talk about what chess meant in Russia and the Soviet Union at the time.

We really brought Susan in specifically to kind of talk about the games and kind of give a sense of the narrative and dramatic turning points in the match from the chess point of view. We studied it, and we worked with her on what were the moments on what we wanted to dramatize and how they would kind of make sense to people who didn’t have a real sense of chess, which you have to assume most of your audience doesn’t have that. Susan is, of course, very charismatic, clear and telegenic, so she was wonderful for that. I also think it turned out that some people we didn’t expect to be bringing that to the table in the same way did.

I think that it turned out that Dr. Anthony Saidy was wonderfully dramatic in the way he would talk about the chess matches and make parallels to other types of arts like music or painting, so that people could feel inside the matches. As well as (the late) Larry Evans, he did that as well. They’re just great speakers, and they’re all broadly intelligent and can relate chess to other mediums that maybe people understand better.

More here.