For Tobey Maguire, it was a 10-year-journey to get his drama about chess player Bobby Fischer on the big screen.
After false starts, he finally secured enough financing for the $16 million picture, “Pawn Sacrifice,” which premieres at Toronto on Thursday night. Director Edward Zwick shot the film in 40 days in Montreal last fall.
Tobey Maguire as Producer
Maguire: I just started going, “All right, let me find things that I want to develop or try to build into movies that I want to make, because I’m not seeing scripts I want to do.” It was really primarily a function of that. My interest started about 13 or 14 years ago. I’ve gotten more serious about it in the last six years.
Playing Fischer
Maguire: Gail Katz, our fellow producer, talked to me about the idea of doing a movie about Bobby Fischer. I was aware of Bobby and dug in and did some research, and had to contemplate it a bit. The current Fischer at the time was a recluse and was really harsh and critical of things in a way that was inappropriate. I didn’t like that. But in digging deeper into his life and compartmentalizing different things, I thought it would be a really fascinating thing to do. And to try to tell the character story of Fischer, but in kind of sports movie way.
Zwick: A couple years ago, Gale and Toby had a piece of material by Steven Knight that they really had some confidence in and they showed it to me and we dove in. It wasn’t the most obvious choice for a studio system.
I don’t have to tell you how many serious adult movies of any kind of intellectual ambition the studios are making right now. By virtue of making fewer and fewer of them, they have, in some sense, have had a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the audiences for them haven’t been cultivated. I think even more so, they realized there was even a riskier proposition to something that wasn’t already branded or a superhero movie.
I’ll give you an example. When Leonardo DiCaprio and I made “Blood Diamond” in 2006, we were able to make a serious adult movie at scale. The movie made a significant amount of money, yet at the end, I had a conversation with someone very high up in the studio, who said, “We can’t make this movie anymore, because this amount of profit given this amount of time and investment doesn’t move the needle in our stock prices.” In other words, they want multiples of a certain number. They would rather lose $100 million and make $300 million than to be in the game of making $30 million. And suddenly all of us in the business, if we want to still make those movies, we have to find others willing to take those risks, and the studios after the fact cherry-pick as distributors.
Getting the film made after 10 years
Maguire: I think we had gone through different iterations and different writers. I got to a point where I felt I’m ready to make this movie. Ed and I got together and decided to make it together. That was a normal process that took a while.
Zwick: This is my first experience in this world. It’s full of vagaries of people who say they are going to do something and don’t.
Maguire: I travel a bit for Spider-man and people know who I am in a lot of places.
Future of adult dramas
Maguire: I think it’s all about the resources that you have. You have to be clever basically about how to get the stuff onscreen. I think the days are very different for dramas to still be a big category for financiers who are spending $70 million or $90 million.
Zwick: Studios have a certain number of slots, and they consider those slots worth a certain amount of money in potential earnings. But scale is sometimes part of story telling. If you take away scale, the nature of the story changes. I made a joke the other day, if I were to try to make “Glory” now, rather than be about a regiment, it would be about a platoon. It would be seven men in the woods rather than all the men on the beach.
