Shared with you
The year 1972 was packed with watershed events across the globe, including the winding down of the war in Vietnam, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union, the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, the Watergate break-in and Richard Nixon's groundbreaking trip to China. But it was an international event of a very different kind that dominated headlines that summer. In Iceland, Bobby Fischer, America's foremost chess player, faced the reigning champion, Boris Spassky of Russia, in a series of matches that held the world spellbound. Around the world, people were captivated by a mano-a-mano fight between two masters of the so-called "game of kings." Eastern European players dominated the chess scene, and Fischer unknowingly became an avatar for the United States and its Cold War battle for dominance with the Soviet Union. This movie chronicles Fischer's pursuit of the chess world's ultimate prize and the price he paid for his victory. This is the major subject of this movie. Fischer is played by actor Tobey Maguire and Spassky is portrayed by actor Liev Schreiber.
Bobby Fischer was wanted in the United States of America for violating economic sanctions against the former Yugoslavia by playing a chess match there in 1992. He fled to Japan and was arrested in July 2004 for trying to leave Japan on a revoked U.S. passport. Thus, he was detained in Japan awaiting deportation to the USA. He renounced his U.S. citizenship and tried to become a German citizen, but was denied. Finally, in March 2005, Iceland's parliament voted to grant him Icelandic citizenship. He remained a fugitive from the USA until his death.
In preparing to write the movie's script, screenwriter Steven Knight read many of the books that have been written about Bobby Fischer and the "Match of the Century", as well as speaking with people who knew him. "The most useful material was archival footage of him being interviewed," said screenwriter Knight. "Bobby spoke and moved oddly, and to see that was helpful. If you noticed him walking down the street, you'd think, 'there is a curious person'. He might have ended up just another homeless person, but he was just so good at chess that he was saved by it. And, of course, cursed by it as well."
The narrator of the conspiracy theory audio that Bobby Fischer (Tobey Maguire) is listening to is Liev Schreiber, who plays Boris Spassky.
A "Pawn Sacrifice" is a move in chess in which a player sacrifices his pawn for a soft advantage such as more space for his pieces or positioning them in better squares in order to develop an attack subsequently. It aims to create unbalanced positions so if the player who is committed to the pawn sacrifice did not capitalize on his temporary advantage, he would lose the game at the end due to his inferiority in material.
Of the movie's title, the film's director Edward Zwick said: "You have Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon calling Bobby Fischer; you have [Leonid] Brezhnev [Leonid Brezhnev] and the KGB agents following Boris Spassky. Both of these men were pawns of their nations".