(dramatic music)
- What really struck me about "The Queen's Gambit"
was that it wasn't at all about chess.
It's not about a game.
It's about the cost of genius.
- It's a story about how you survive in a world
when you have a very specific gift that makes
you harder to understand.
- I think she looks to chess as very much an escape.
- Although it tells that story
about a child genius working up to a world level.
It's actually still more about her demons.
(dramatic music)
(people chattering)
- Scott sent me the book to read before I met him.
And I devoured the book in about an hour.
I fell in love with Beth immediately
and there was a really strong kinship.
- This character is essentially her own antagonist.
And I was fascinated,
I'd never read a character like this before.
Somebody who was so brilliant and so self-destructive,
and in a world that she was already kind of,
not a part of.
- Are you sure you want to do this?
- I'm sure.
- We don't have a women's section.
- Back in the 1950s, there are very few females turning
to chess.
They weren't given the opportunities,
Beth trying to make her way in a male dominated discipline
in world is something that's quite distinctive and unusual.
- Tevis was writing with an understanding
of the next century almost.
It's quite brilliant.
- How old are you?
Nevermind. Don't answer that.
It'll just depress me.
- I'm 36.
- She's so centered in how intelligent she is
that she doesn't necessarily think
of herself as a woman first.
And I do think that there's something to that,
because you're experiencing the sixties
through her in the way that
she just automatically assumes that she is equal.
- Am I good enough now?
- To tell you the truth of it child,
you're astounding.
- [Crew Member] Marker.
- And action.
Almost 10 years ago, Bill Horberg had brought
up the book to me as something that I might want to do.
We briefly flirted with doing it as a feature.
And Allan Scott had written quite a nice script,
and nothing ever came of it.
It was very hard to get a movie like that made at the time.
Then right after I finished "Godless",
I had this revelation and I said to him,
what about "The Queen's Gambit" as a mini series?
- The overriding interest I've always had
is to make it powerfully emotional.
And I think when you extend something,
you get the time to follow all kinds
of paths and all kinds of seams.
- What I really wanted to focus on and the challenge
in turning it into a mini series for me,
was making sure that what you're really invested in, is her.
- Someday you're going to be all alone.
So you need to figure out how to take care of yourself.
- She's come from a home life, and just a lot in life,
that has left her feeling very unstable.
She doesn't really know where she's going to end up.
- What's that game called?
- [Mr Scheibel] It's called chess.
- Will you teach me?
- I think Beth's first true connection is with Mr Scheibel.
It's with somebody who she feels understands,
not only her gifts, but how her brain works.
Also somebody who can tell her, no.
- You have resigned the game.
- You didn't tell me that in the rules.
- It's not a rule, it's sportsmanship.
- And then I think she's got a wonderful friendship
with Jolene, and that comes from a place of,
both understanding that they're very different,
and yet have come from the exact same place.
- Most of us are lifers, been here a long time.
- I would say she's kind of like a mother to Beth
in her own little way.
They're not adopted for the majority of their lives.
So they kind of do need to depend on each other
in that place.
- [Carer] Greens to even your disposition,
orange and browns for building a strong body.
Take them both.
- In the early sixties, late fifties,
it was very common to give children
in orphanages tranquilizers to make them easier to handle.
So, yeah, she becomes addicted to tranquilizers
and sedatives when she's nine.
- Well, the trick with addiction,
with drinking or drugs or anything,
is making sure that you empathize
with the character and still tell a compelling story.
A sleight of hand for me was humor sometimes.
There's a long sequence where she steals the pills.
And that was as funny as it is harrowing.
- Elizabeth.
(glass crunching)
- As she gets older, she forms many addictions.
She discovers alcohol when she's about 15.
(Beth coughing)
- It's good.
- And consummates that relationship.
(upbeat music)
- Anybody who's dealing with problems
of addiction is their own worst enemy.
She keeps self-destructing along the way.
- There's a moment when she's been
on a particularly tough bender,
and she meets the first person that she ever played,
who's another girl called the Annette Packer.
- I knew you were going places.
And that meant something to me.
- That whole exchange was really, really tricky,
and rough to do because I just had to be
in this state of everything is falling apart.
And you looked up to me and now I have to carry that shame.
Like she was just, she was an angry bird.
- I'm worried about you.
- What on earth for?
- For me, the whole story is organized around that.
Is she going to lose hold of herself?
Or is she going to be able to make it?
- She shows the assurance of a player twice her age.
That's national recognition, dear.
- She's also addicted to winning.
(dramatic music)
She's addicted to feeling like she is in control.
- Chess is the one thing she feels like she can control.
That on that board, she's in charge.
Whenever she's moving those pieces around, she's at home.
- I win.
- I have every confidence.
- You do feel for the relationship that both Mrs Wheatley
and Beth have together.
And Mari played her with deep empathy,
and I think sympathy.
- For the role of Mrs Wheatley,
I had been telling Bill Horberg,
that it's someone like Marielle Heller.
And Bill said to me, why don't you just cast her?
And as we can see she's extraordinary.
- Things are beginning to happen.
- Beth is very obsessive, full stop.
Like I think that is just something that
is intrinsic to her.
- Harry, it'll be check once the pawn moves
and the knight trades, can't you see that?
- No, I can't.
I can't find it that fast.
- Well, I wish you could.
- When your brain works that quickly,
it can drive you a bit mad?
But I also think that she is aware that
her gift makes her special.
- [Reporter] Sometimes people find patterns or meaning where
there aren't any.
- What does that have to do with me?
Well, creativity and psychosis often go hand in hand.
(camera clicking)
- I do think she's like consistently worried
that she's a bit crazy.
- Beth has visions of seeing a chess board on the ceiling.
- This is in the book.
She looks up to the ceiling
and imagines the position and the places of the pieces.
- Do you ever go for games in your head?
I mean, play all the way through them?
- Doesn't everybody?
- The person that she feels closest to,
I think in terms of the way that her brain works
is actually, Benny.
- There's a little bit of a reflection in each other,
even though they're vastly different people.
But I think he enjoys getting into mind games,
and into other people's heads.
And he sees that in Beth.
- I don't even know if I'm good enough.
- You're the best there is.
- His reassurance kind of makes her feel a bit more calm.
But I do think that she's juggling a very fine line of like,
am I insane?
Or am I a genius?
- And I've been watching your games.
You attack like Alekhine.
- You can reach for your best, but it only really matters
if other people see it as well.
And I think Benny appreciates Beth's talent
when he sees it, and finds that attractive from the get-go.
- And action!
To make chess cinematic is, is impossible.
And I realized,
I want the chest that we do show to be accurate enough
but I really am focusing on the stakes around the games,
and the players themselves.
Beth Harman in particular,
and the idea for me visually was to get inside her.
- I found that the strongest points is just being
on people's faces in their reaction,
even if you don't understand chess,
you know the seriousness,
and the drama that they're going through.
- I resign.
(dramatic music)
(people chattering)
- Steven Meizler is quite good at shaping just,
very little light and very natural light,
and finding little spots that create its own drama.
- Sweet dreams.
- The show really shifts along with Beth's perspective.
Every time I got to go onto a new set,
I was always completely blown away
by the way that it looked.
(dramatic music)
- Uli Hanisch is a genius.
I came to Berlin because I wanted to work with him.
We've shot Mexico city here in Las Vegas,
and Paris, Russia, pieces of New York
and Lexington, Kentucky.
- Well, now.
- What Beth does,
is traveling and playing chess at tournaments.
And so we have, like hotel rooms,
airplanes, hotel lobbies, restaurants,
ballroom kind of situation, for each tournament.
So it was our target to-
- To repeat but- - To repeat.
- Make it different. - But different.
- Yeah, exactly.
- I asked for a pleasant room,
and I believe they gave me one.
(Mrs Wheatley laughing)
- This here is a pretty special location in Berlin,
it's the Haus Cumberland,
and we turned it into a hotel in Paris.
- What will you have then for your one drink?
Must be special if it is your only one.
- Cut, awesome. That's a cut.
For me, every set I would walk on would be
a fantastic place to shoot.
And the whole crew would come on the set,
and you would hear 50 people,
a hundred people oohing and ahing about these locations.
Benny's apartment was interesting
because we shot the exterior in Toronto.
And then Uli designed this basement apartment
that was amazing.
And right away, I started changing the scene
because of so many good things in the set.
- [Anya] I love it. Oh, it's so good.
- The cinematography, the costumes,
the production design, they're all for me,
part of the same thing.
We'd spend a lot of time talking about where Beth
is at in the story.
- We had so much fun coming up with the look for this,
because again, we got to grow up with Beth.
- When I first read the script,
I had in my mind the Beth was a redhead,
funnily enough, Anya also felt this.
- When I first read it, I was like,
she needs to have red hair
because I want her to be completely identifiable,
even if she doesn't want to be,
and he had thought the exact same thing.
So we just started off on a really good foot.
It was all wigs.
I couldn't, I was very happy to dye my hair,
but I just couldn't, you know,
there are days when we were going
between five different ages in a day,
and that's just not possible with your own hair.
So we had baby Beth,
we had sexy kitten, and we had glamor pus.
- To sell the age, the younger, the less makeup.
And then we slowly add very, very small adjustments
until you start seeing her older.
She basically gets more of these eyelashes.
So her eyes become sexier.
- [Man] Wow!
- [Anya] Thanks.
- Beth has a thing for flair.
As you can see in the show,
she likes the finer things in life.
She starts to really, really like clothes.
- With the costume designer, with Gabriele,
her wardrobe is just amazing.
She would have a palette book, and all of the dresses,
and the different wardrobe that Beth would be wearing.
But more than that,
we'd spend a lot of time talking about where Beth
is at in the story.
- In the beginning,
Beth is always determined by other people.
By her mother, or dresses in the orphanage.
And later on she's alone and she discovers more her body.
She has power being feminine.
- As we go forward,
you know, she's more and more glamorous.
There's a point where she dresses up
like a pop musician that she sees on TV
for a brief period of time.
- She experienced it.
Searching for cool is difficult
because the cool doesn't exist.
And her search for coolness,
is actually her search for herself.
- At the very end,
when she's kind of finally comfortable
in the world of chess,
Gabriele found this beautiful long white coat
with this white hat from Moscow.
And you realize she looks like the white queen.
- What's fascinating about watching her grow up
is that she puts on all of these different personas.
- Who the hell are you?
- It is incredibly sad because it's basically just saying
that she just doesn't feel like she's enough without them.
- You are very beautiful.
- I don't see myself that way.
- Then you are blind.
- It's not a physical loneliness that she's suffering from.
It's an emotional and intellectual one.
- I think this is the reason why the mini series
is becoming more prominent,
because you can explore these richer,
more complex stories.
- Having the opportunity to spend time with Beth in this way
and not just see all of the wins,
but all of the hard work and the sacrifices
that it takes to get to the wins.
I think hopefully that just builds a lot of empathy
for somebody who,
I selfishly really, really care about.
(audience applauding)