The film-maker and writer Allan Scott had been attempting to sell his script for The Queen’s Gambit, Netflix’s latest megawatt success, to studios for 30 years before it finally got made.
It may have taken even longer had Netflix’s chosen director Scott Frank – the man behind Oscar-nominated movies Out Of Sight and Logan – not loved the script, as getting into production hinged upon finding the perfect pairing between director and studio. But luckily he fell for it too. “All the things fell into place quite fortuitously,” Allan Scott tells HuffPost UK, as if 30 years of waiting was a triumph of speediness.
Allan says getting chess drama The Queen’s Gambit made was an experience in “perseverance and good fortune,” although such good fortune had been in short supply 12 years ago when the creator, who also produced Shallow Grave and hit musical Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, nearly lost the film rights to the original 1983 Queen’s Gambit novel by Walter Tevis.
Allan had been paying for the rights annually but after almost two decades received a call from “somebody in Hollywood” who said he could either forego them, or buy them permanently. For a short time, Allan’s vision for the show hung in the balance.
“I asked how much it cost, and they told me, and it was a lot of money,” he reflects. “But it’d been a good year so I dug round, put the money together, exercised the option which meant I now had the rights. You have to scratch round, find the money, and pay it.”
It was around the same time that Allan got a call from Heath Ledger, who loved chess and wanted to direct a feature film version of The Queen’s Gambit. “I said that’s fine, how do we persuade a studio to let you direct it?
“He said, ‘I think I can do that,’ and indeed he did. We talked to the studio and they looked at his short films, and they said let’s go. We were working on the script, we’d sort of finished the draft of the script. I was introducing him to the music of the ’50s and ’60s which was a thrilling thing to do, and then he died.”
Allan continues: “He said he would play a small role, we never actually agreed on it. He was going to direct it and was going to be a first time director of some interest, although he’d done a lot of stuff in Australia. Also Heath had been a chess champion in Australia. He was a genuinely interested and committed person.
“He knew for the finance, he would have to play a role,” continues Allan. “There were people willing to finance it, but most of it was [depending on] on Heath playing something... I presume he would have played one of the male roles, whether it be the Russian whether it be one of the Americans, we never really discussed it in any depth.”
Eventually Netflix were on board for an eight-part series rather than the originally planned feature film – but how would the dry-sounding story of a young chess prodigy named Beth get turned into a gripping drama?
“The conventional wisdom in movie circles is chess movies are for very specialist audiences,” says Allan. “I personally never believed that – I’m not sure that any of us did – I think we got into it because we believed the opposite, so it was lucky for us that we were right.”
The Queen’s Gambit is one of a handful of TV shows to boast a 100% score on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. Of course, there’s more to the story than chess. Beth, played by the Peaky Blinders actor Anya Taylor-Joy, is an orphan who gets caught up in drug and alcohol addiction fuelled by a broken family and her obsession with the game.
“It was so clear to me that this was just a cracking good story with a terrific central character,” says Allan, who wrote the script and executive produced the show.
In order to make the highs and lows of chess accessible for viewers that have never played chess before, Allan Scott and Scott Frank had to think creatively, while also authentically representing what it’s like to be a high stakes chess player on the world stage.
First off, they had to work out how to communicate the actual rules of chess for viewers who may or may not understand them. “The audience doesn’t understand, but they need to know she’s losing,” sums up Allan. “How can I go about that? There’s a dozen ways.”
In order to avoid “the audience getting tangled up in the technicality of it,” the aim was to emphasise Beth’s humanity instead of her chess prowess. “I think that like all good drama, the central character is vulnerable, and you follow the vulnerability of the central character, whether it be alcohol or drugs or nervousness or lack of skill: that’s what drama is about: getting the audience to invest in the main character.”
“We had a child who wanted to do well, the child was an orphan, there are a lot of points you could tick and say that will help the audience relate.”
Duly, The Queen’s Gambit isn’t really about chess but the cultures of obsession and addiction that encircle the game – qualities that propel Beth in terms of her game, but also detach her further from reality and harm her mental health.
Rather than tedious lingering shots of wooden chess pieces, The Queen’s Gambit is a succession of drunken evenings, lavishly stylised outfits and gripping relationships unfolding. “It’s extraordinary how clever the book is about making you follow the story without necessarily understanding the game,” says Allan.
How was Allan so sure this was the story worth dedicating 30 years to, pitching into studios? “To some extent it’s based on just the idea catching your imagination,” says Allan. “If you said to me there’s a story out there set in the future, it would either catch my imagination or it wouldn’t. There’s no secret.”
The next project may not take so long: Allan, who also ghost writes scripts for Hollywood films and doesn’t take a credit, says there is “a huge amount of pressure” to do a sequel.
“Honestly, I haven’t even thought about it,” he responds. “There’s so many considerations apart from anything else: have you got a story, have you premise, do you want to do it before she begins or after she begins?
“And then you’ve got all the issues of the contract – does the agent for Miss Taylor Joy wish to do it?”
It’s ironic that the series that took almost half a lifetime to create now has show runners begging for its return less than 30 days after it premiered on the streaming platform.
“I think we were all surprised at how well it was received,” confesses Allan. “But anybody who cares to sit down now and read the book can see that this is an absolutely obvious drama.”
The Queen’s Gambit is streaming on Netflix now.