Vikram Jayanti's previous films include When We Were Kings (co-producer) and James Ellroy's Feast of Death (director). He spoke to us about Gary Kasparov's conpisracy theories and the challenges of making a film about chess.

BBC Four: How did you approach making a film that non-chess players would enjoy?
Vikram Jayanti: It's a fight movie - you get a face-off between man and machine - but it's also a thriller. Kasparov is Russian and Russia's a nation with a talent for conspiracy theories. I thought if I could dramatise Gary's paranoia about what was going on then we'd have a film that anybody would be riveted by - it's like watching gladiatorial combat: you daren't look away.

Kasparov was the first Soviet sportsman to break with the old regime. He came to America and thought that the capitalist system and the idea of open societies were somehow benevolent. What he realised after IBM beat him was, metaphorically, that Wall Street was a much tougher enemy than Stalin. As he says in the film, you knew who the enemy was with Stalin.

BBC Four: Kasparov clearly believes that IBM cheated in some way. How much credence do you give his theory?
VJ: I don't think it really matters what I believe but there's a huge body of opinion in chess that Deep Blue made two moves that could not have been made by a computer. These moves are the fulcrum of the film - when they happen you watch Kasparov collapse, you watch a man fall apart because either the fix is in or the machine is capable of things he isn't prepared for. I think there's ample ambiguity to think that the fix was in. Definitely IBM played hardball. They mastered the psychological warfare that's part of championship chess and they deployed all the resources of a giant corporation to break Kasparov. I'm not sure he'll ever be the same again. He was like a finely tuned clock that got stamped on. Ultimately, whether they cheated or not, the breaking of Kasparov was an act of enormous cultural vandalism.

BBC Four: Why?
VJ: Kasparov's brain represents one of the greatest achievements of 20,000 years of the human experiment. At 40 he still dominates the sport as he did at 22 and that in itself is unparalleled. He's the greatest player that ever lived. Deep Blue never lived. Breaking him turned out to be of limited scientific purpose, limited humanistic purpose, but had a lot to do with share value. IBM's shares rocketed in the month they beat Kasparov at a time when nobody thought of IBM as being at the cutting edge of computers. IBM's publicity department actually analysed the public relations dollar value of all the editorial coverage during that match to be worth $2 billion.

BBC Four: Do you think that was IBM's intention from get-go?
VJ: I think the first match really was just about a guy playing a computer but when IBM saw how big that was they realised if they could beat him then here was an amazing public relations event.

BBC Four: There's a great scene after Kasparov lost, of the IBM team not celebrating.
VJ: It's amazing that they'd been told not to smile after they'd won. When we found the archive footage of that final press conference I thought, "Yes, that's the money shot!" They're all good people, they're not cheats. They are really good scientists, they love chess, they love chess computers and they were in there genuinely for the science and for the thrills. I think they too got betrayed by the whole process.

Dr Hsu, the scientist who developed the chip, quit IBM because they wouldn't do a rematch. They dismantled the machine. He was broken-hearted. He felt he won fair and square but there was so much cloud around the match - partly because of Gary's accusations, partly because of IBM's secrecy - that he felt that no one really recognised that he had beaten Kasparov with his computer. He actually raised the money to buy back the chip from IBM for $1 million and then he challenged Gary. That's when Gary the businessman kicked in because there wasn't any sponsorship or anything. He wanted to play IBM. That really mattered to him because until Deep Blue he had never lost a match. So even the IBM team were broken. Everyone got hurt except the IBM shareholders.

 GAME OVER HOMEPAGE