Bobby Fischer captured the world’s imagination in the middle of the Cold War with his 1972 victory over the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky to capture the World Chess Championship. His story also captured the imagination of Tobey Maguire, who spent a decade bringing it to the big screen with “Pawn Sacrifice.”
Maguire joined the film’s director Edward Zwick in the latest edition of “Drinking With the Stars.” The pair sat down with Sharon Waxman, CEO and Editor in Chief of TheWrap, to talk about what drew them to Fischer’s story.
See photos: The Scene at TheWrap’s Toronto Film Fest Video Lounge
They were fascinated by the reclusive person he became later, even if that wasn’t the main thrust of their story. “His paranoia was overtaking him, but the seeds of that existed before that obviously,” Maguire said. “So for us, finding the way to plant those seeds in the middle of what time period this is in was one of those kind of delicate things that we were trying to figure out how to do.”
See the “Drinking With the Stars” interview, presented by SodaStream, in the video above.