“It’s how quickly they respond in certain situations, and the right hesitations at points, how you write your moves down in a score sheet, how you hit the clock, and how you look at your opponent after certain moves, all these little intangibles” he said. ![]() He worked closely with the actors before and during filming on how to best imitate actual professional chess mannerisms. “You can tell if you just watch people when they’re grabbing chess pieces, if they’re good enough,” Pandolfini said, comparing it to the way you might be able to tell a fake baseball player if they grab the bat in the wrong place. Coach the actors to look like they know what they’re doing. ![]() Bobby would’ve been a rival that might’ve thrown it off in a way.”ģ. Benny is kind of like him, but a little sexier. “You’ll notice Bobby Fischer is not mentioned,” Pandolfini said. The characters on the show often mention real chess stars of the era in passing, and discuss moves that those players might have used, though there’s one famous American analogue for Beth that seemingly doesn’t exist in her universe. “I tried to find moves that displayed a certain naturalness, which might not be bookish, and which might veer from what’s traditionally accepted as right,” Pandolfini said. ![]() In the show, the characters describe Beth as a very “intuitive” player, something you need to understand through the way she moves her pieces on the board. Give the characters a playing style that makes sense for their personalities and the era. As many as 350 total positions were brought on, and that wasn’t just myself.” Garry Kasparov, the Russian grandmaster, also contributed positions, especially for Beth’s matches against the Russian characters, as well as two German chess techs who also consulted onsite.Ģ. Other players, even actors off camera, are doing things that are logical. In fact, many more positions were created beyond the essentials, because you want to have the ambience. I came up with 92 positions, we called that the Bible, that reflected the actual scenes in the series. “So I read through all that and made sure the moves actually matched the scenarios that were going on. “Scott went more or less with what Walter had written in the novel in the script,” Pandolfini said. His assignment: going over all the chess moves you see onscreen to make sure they made sense. Since the book’s publication, there have been several attempts to adapt it for film (including by Heath Ledger before his death), but Pandolfini wasn’t involved in any of them until producer William Horberg, who had also made Searching for Bobby Fischer, reached out to him about working on the show. “Really the only thing I gave to the novel was the title,” Pandolfini said, saying that he tossed off the idea for using the chess opening as the name of the book in an early meeting with Tevis and his editor. Pandolfini consulted on the original novel back in 1982 and suggested chess positions to Tevis then, though the author decided not to include any of his suggestions. “It’s one thing to have moves that don’t quite make sense in a novel,” Pandolfini said, “but onscreen, it has to be very clear.” Tevis’s original novel describes many of the chess moves seen in the show, but filming the series meant filling in more details on Beth’s matches, and inventing many other ones. The two of them talked to Vulture about mapping out the series’ many chess matches, finding innovative ways to cut them together, and the useful advice they got from grandmaster Garry Kasparov.ġ. Think through how all the chess matches will look onscreen - even the ones that are offscreen. Two key figures in putting together those sequences were Bruce Pandolfini, a longtime chess author and coach who also consulted on the original novel, and Michelle Tesoro, The Queen’s Gambit’s editor, who also worked with Frank on Godless. By the end of the show, you might actually find yourself wanting to watch more chess - or at least I did. The show is filled with sequences of Beth playing chess, which could make for dreadfully boring television, but the series, developed by Godless’s Scott Frank and Allan Scott, plots out numerous engaging matches, and edits each of them together in a variety of ways to hold your attention. ![]() Once Beth starts to play chess, she can’t really bring herself to stop thinking about it, playing out games in her head, and obsessing over the matches she does and does not win over the course of her career. The Netflix series, based on Walter Tevis’s novel, imagines the life of a fictional addiction-prone American chess prodigy, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, who rockets into the highest levels of the international chess circuit in the 1950s and ’60s. Once young orphan Elizabeth Harmon gets in front of a chessboard, her life snaps together around a purpose, and so does The Queen’s Gambit.
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