Don’t Stop Believing: With Many Saints of Newark, David Chase returns to The Sopranos

David Chase revolutionised tv together with his monumental mob opera led by James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano, ushering in a brand new period of ambition on the small display screen. But what Chase has actually at all times wished to do is make motion pictures.

“That was my whole goal. It’s been that way my whole life,” says Chase, who nonetheless spent his profession in TV (The Rockford Files, I’ll Fly Away) earlier than creating The Sopranos. “Film, cinema. Film, cinema.”

“There’s something about TV that will always for me have this kind of cheesy image,” he continues. “It’s all about advertising, I guess. That’s really all it was for how many years — a machine to deliver sales pitches. It will always have that feeling. But theoretically, the television apparatus can beam anything to you. Great stuff. Things people haven’t even dreamed of yet. But what it was used for was Pampers commercials.”
Since The Sopranos reduce to black, Chase made one earlier movie, the underrated 2012 rock-and-roll coming-of-age story “Not Fade Away,” a film that made specific the connection music has to his filmmaking. Now, he’s again with The Many Saints of Newark, with the added irony that due to Warner Bros.′ technique shift in the course of the pandemic, the film will likely be enjoying on HBO Max along with theaters when it opens Friday. It’s tempting to cite The Godfather Part III: “Just when you think you’re out.”
“When I was in film school in 1969, ’70, my friends and I would sit around getting high,” says Chase. “We’d talk about: ‘You know, someday, man, movies are going to come into your house. Wouldn’t that be cool?’ Well, it’s not that cool. You’re better off seeing them in the theater.”

But large display screen or not, why would Chase, 76, return to the world he so emphatically concluded? He appeared to go away The Sopranos behind for good at Holsten’s restaurant, an ending Sopranos co-writer Matthew Weiner known as the TV equal of smashing your guitar.
“I needed it,” Chase explains over Zoom. “I guess I personally needed it. I don’t mean financially. I just needed it. I wanted to work on something that I knew was going to get produced.”
Fourteen years after Journey sounded the ultimate notes of The Sopranos, Chase has returned to North Jersey — partly out of necessity, partly as a result of he nonetheless likes writing these characters. The Many Saints of Newark, although, rewinds The Sopranos to late ’60s, early ’70s Newark and a unique era of New Jersey mafiosos.
Michael Gandolfini, left, and Alessandro Nivola in The Many Saints of Newark. (Photo: Warner Bros)
There are many acquainted, if youthful faces: Corrado “Junior” Soprano (Corey Stoll), Livia Soprano (Vera Farmiga), Silvio Dante (John Magaro) amongst them. But the lead function is a recent one: Alessandro Nivola as Dickie Moltisanti, the mythically spoken of father to Christopher Moltisanti (right here only a child). Dickie takes a teenage Tony Soprano (Michael Gandolfini, son of James) underneath his wing.
“David’s one word of advice for me when we started shooting was: ‘Don’t pay any attention to what anyone says about Dickie in the series because they’re all liars,’” says Nivola.
While there are numerous connections and callbacks to The Sopranos, followers will doubtless be shocked how a lot of The Many Saints of Newark uncovers new narrative territory. It’s set towards the fiery backdrop of racial unrest in Newark, and the tumult of the period. Leslie Odom Jr. co-stars in a pivotal function.
“Lawrence Konner and I wanted to make a gangster movie. We didn’t want to make an origin story,” says Chase. “In truth, I didn’t know what ‘origin story’ meant. I hadn’t heard the time period till we acquired into the advertising and marketing of this film. “
The Many Saints of Newark has acquired constructive opinions. (Photo: Warner Bros)
After writing the movie with Konner, Chase meant to direct earlier than well being points pressured him to enchantment to Sopranos veteran Alan Taylor. Since helming a variety of “Sopranos” episodes, Taylor moved on to exhibits like Game of Thrones and the big-budget spectacles Thor: The Dark World and Terminator Genisys. He was wanting to return to a extra acquainted fiction world.
“It’s a certain mindset, a certain set of questions, a certain attitude toward human psychology. It feels like all the same things that drove the show are driving this movie,” says Taylor. “The way I understand this whole movie is that every character is trying to rewrite their destiny. Every character is trying to not be the character they’re told they have to be.”

What’s maybe most fun about The Many Saints of Newark is how a lot it rekindles the storytelling grammar of The Sopranos: household sketched towards an American backdrop; an outdated film (Key Largo) enjoying momentarily within the background; the generally shattering music queues. Chase and Taylor elected for a soundtrack with out rating, with Gil Scott-Heron figuring prominently.
And whereas the movie, just like the present, is filled with violence and style conference, there may be once more, in Dickie Moltinsanti and others, the existential melancholy of attempting to interrupt freed from household DNA, of attempting to outrun your personal demons, of attempting — possibly vainly — to search out one thing value clinging to.
“I’ve read things that said ‘The Sopranos’ got darker and darker,” says Chase. “Did it? I don’t know. 9/11 had happened, so I guess it got darker. I was talking with someone the other day who said Jim may have gotten darker as things went on. All of that may be true. But what the show was about is: There is always a human connection and a humane connection, even if it might be terribly thin.”

Chase had for years resisted entreaties for a Sopranos sequel, one thing that turned a near-impossibility when James Gandolfini died in 2013. He’s by no means been one for nostalgia. (Tony Soprano himself as soon as mentioned: “‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.”) In shaping a prequel, although, Chase struggled to solid a younger Tony Soprano till he remembered that Gandolfini’s son, now 22, had begun devoting himself to performing.
After three auditions, Chase solid Michael Gandolfini to play a youthful, softer model of the character his father made iconic. By then, the choice appeared fated.

“Being in this world, playing this character, it connected me to my dad as an actor — actor to actor,” says Michael Gandolfini. “Guessing what he went through and understanding a little more went he went through for nine years, and being really proud of him for that.”
For Nivola, the challenge’s scope solely unfolded after he auditioned. His preliminary scenes have been cloaked in typical Sopranos secrecy, with names altered and no sense that Dickie was even the principle character. That solely dawned on Nivola a couple of weeks after assembly with Chase and Taylor, when the script was emailed throughout a flight.
“By the time I landed, I realized this was a much bigger deal than I thought,” says Nivola. “That was the moment I realized this was potentially the role that I’ve been waiting for the 25 years of my film career.”
Michael Gandolfini performs the function of Tony Soprano, a personality that his late father James Gandolfini made immortal. (Photo: Matt Licari/Invision/AP)
The Many Saints of Newark might spawn sequels of its personal. “Will it? I don’t know” says Chase. He now finds himself surrounded and a bit overwhelmed by the small-screen panorama he helped construct. Mostly, he doesn’t sustain. He preferred “The Queens Gambit” however most exhibits don’t hook him, he says. Chase as a substitute watches outdated motion pictures on the Criterion Channel. Contemporary mainstream motion pictures, he sees as a lot “dumbed down.”
“Yeah, it’s fine to see superheroes and that, but we’re living in a cartoon universe. Except we’re not,” says Chase, who says he spent the Donald Trump presidency glued to tv information. “There’s something else going on that we’re not seeing.”
But it’s additionally clear that Chase nonetheless yearns for the massive display screen, even when his possibilities have been few and much between. He’s engaged on a script he’d prefer to direct. He hasn’t fairly made his peace with being endlessly recognized with tv. But he’ll take it.
“I mean, yeah. What are you going to do about it?” says Chase. “It’s not the worst thing that ever happened.”