Liz Garbus
American filmmaker Liz Garbus's Bobby Fischer Against the World, a documentary about the legendary world champion of chess, opened last Friday at Toronto's TIFF Bell Lightbox. She talked recently to The Globe's chess columnist about the film and its subject, who died in 2008 at 64.
Why make a movie about chess?
The project started on the day I read his obituary.
Bobby Fischer led an extraordinary life. He was an extraordinary figure in Cold War history. Bobby Fischer was chess and is chess.
Do you play chess?
I am not a serious chess player. But I understand the game enough. Dr. Saidy [international chess master Anthony Saidy]and, before he died, Larry Evans [a chess champ] were kind enough to be our eyes and ears around the way we discussed and depicted chess, so they'd be checking our graphics and our diagrams. They were great. I think that there are many who'd lament that - at least in the United States - chess has not been able to regain the fascination it had under Fischer, but there are players such as [Magnus] Carlsen [a chess Grandmaster]that people are hoping will increase the popularity of the game. Certainly the Fischer time was seen as the heyday of the game, and that was something, at least in the eyes of the American players, that we've never quite returned to.
Fischer came up in chess entirely before the digital world.
He lamented the advent of that world.
In the film, Shelby Lyman says that Fischer was better known than any other person with the exception of Jesus Christ.
It's the kind of thing that people might say, but it's difficult to verify. It was about the summer of 1972 when Fischer met Boris Spassky for the World Chess Championship in Reykjavik. Fischer and Spassky bumped all the other stories, even Watergate.
One of them is still with us.
We did approach Boris Spassky several times. His health had been up and down in recent years and so it never quite worked out, timing-wise. At first I deeply regretted that and felt sad not to be able to interview him, but at the same time I felt that this way the film was more about Bobby because had Boris been in the film, and Bobby not, it would have been a different type of story.
In general, your films (two of which have been nominated for Academy Awards) are gritty accounts with life-and-death drama. Was making this film a bit of a vacation for you?
Honestly, this movie has more laughs in it than most the films I've made, that's true. The world was obsessed by chess in those three months of 1972, so it was a very entertaining period to work with. But it wasn't a vacation.
Fischer divided people, even in death. People had strong feelings. There were people who were incredibly devoted to the idea that Bobby Fischer was totally sane and that any project that approached him and wanted to explore the more tragic aspects of his personality, was invalid. And there were people on the other side of the equation. For a filmmaker it was a challenge, Bobby's life was so original and fascinating - it was a challenge, but we hope that we were able to bring in all the threads of what made Bobby such an interesting human being. And also to capture the excitement. I think it is particularly relevant today as we live in an increasingly bipolar world, just as we did back then, in the seventies.
The film fits into a convenient, just-over-90-minute format. Did you think that, in another world, you could have made a whole other movie from the rest of the material that you collected?
There's always that one scene, and parts of the story that you end up not being able to include because it ends up being too long, but that's why there's a wonderful thing called DVD extras.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Jonathan Berry writes about chess every Saturday in The Globe and Mail.