How the ‘Sopranos’ prequel reimagines some of your favorite characters — and introduces new ones
As the creator of HBO’s seminal Mafia series “The Sopranos,” David Chase is keenly aware that heavy lies the head that wears the crown. It was mob kingpin Tony Soprano himself who told his consigliere Silvio, “All due respect, you got no f—ing idea what it’s like to be number one.”
Revisiting the series many consider the greatest of all time wasn’t a decision Chase made slightly. He actually resisted it entirely, until conceiving of a feature film prequel — “The Many Saints of Newark,” scheduled to hit theaters and HBO Max on Oct. first.
“A lot of well-meaning people said to me, ‘Aren’t you afraid you’re going to s— all over the show, this great thing you created?’” Chase, 75, says recently over Zoom from his office in Santa Monica. “Of course, I said, ‘I hope not.’ But you feel like punching them in the face. What are you saying that to me for?”
Arriving nearly 14 years after “The Sopranos” finale’s smash-cut to black, the film — directed by series veteran Alan Taylor — is set in the late 1960s, as Newark, N.J., is corrupted by racial and rival gang violence go to war for dominance. Against that turbulent backdrop a young Tony gets an early education in a life in crime as he follows in the footsteps of his mentor, Dickie Moltisanti, a soldier in the DiMeo crime family.
“When I first started ‘The Sopranos,’ what I really wanted to do was to make a really good gangster movie,” Chase says. “And that’s what we wanted to do with this more than anything else.”
The Times spoke with Chase and his producing partner, Nicole Lambert, about how the film’s ensemble reimagined familiar characters beloved by diehard fans and ones that are new to the “Sopranos” universe.
“We could have gone a million ways for a prequel,” says Chase. “But as [co-writer] Lawrence Konner and I were sitting down, thinking, ‘What should we do?’ Dickie Moltisanti came up.”
A Mafia soldier and the father of Michael Imperioli’s pivotal series regular Christopher Moltisanti, Dickie was always a somewhat mysterious figure in “Sopranos” lore. On the show, Tony spoke of him being a mentor, a friend and “a legend.” But details of his life were scanned, and fans have long debated whether the story Tony told Christopher of how he died in the 1970s — gunned down outside his home by a police detective — was true.
In centering the prequel on the story of Dickie (the name Moltisanti translates as “many saints”), Chase and Konner see the opportunity to fill in those blanks and create a portrait of the man who set Tony on his path to becoming a crime boss .
“We knew that we wanted a really tough, dangerous, credible guy — another Tony if you will,” says Chase. “I wrote the episode where Tony tells Christopher [how Dickie died]. It was just interesting for me to expand on that. In a way, the purpose of writing [the prequel] was to find out what happened.”
Nivola has been on Chase’s radar since he’d seen the actor in the films “American Hustle” and “A Most Violent Year.”
“He’s Italian, number one,” Chase says. “That really counts. It shouldn’t — they’re actors — but East Coast Italians have certain details about the way they talk, the way they think, and if that’s missing it’s not as entertaining for me. I thought he was great.”
