The Sopranos creator David Chase held court during the 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) in the Czech Republic on Tuesday.
A day before appearing at the expanded and broadened KVIFF Industry Days program of the festival, the seven-time Emmy winner was in much demand but took time to chat with groups of reporters about his work and the state of the industry.
Of course, much time was dedicated to The Sopranos. But Chase was also asked about his new project at HBO, which was unveiled in the fall. He optioned John Lisle’s nonfiction book Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA and the Tragedy of MKULTRA to adapt it as a limited series. The drama project, entitled Project: MKUltra, should it go to series, will be Chase’s first HBO effort since his Sopranos prequel film.
“I’m in the story stage,” he shared before outlining key elements of the story: “LSD was invented in Switzerland, developed in Switzerland and our CIA bought millions and millions and millions of dollars of it because they wanted to weaponize it,” Chase said. “They said maybe we can [do that so] that people won’t have to get shot anymore in a war; they’ll just go crazy. That’s what their excuse was, but that was not what they cared about. So, there was a very large famous program called MKUltra in the United States, where they tested LSD on people. People have said that Charles Manson was probably given LSD somewhere.”
HBO has described Project: MKUltra as “a dramatic thriller centered on the infamous chemist and spymaster Sidney Gottlieb, often known as The Black Sorcerer, who headed the CIA’s MKUltra Psychedelic program which conducted dangerous and deadly mind control experiments on willing — and unwilling — subjects during the height of the Cold War. Gottlieb is also known as the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture.”
Asked about global audiences’ lasting love for The Sopranos, Chase shared on Tuesday: “Obviously, my heart explodes. It makes me feel so good,” before adding: “At the same time, you have seen the show, so you know what my mother was like. So, at the same time, feeling good like that is not allowed. So when you say, ‘I’m so happy people like it,’ I say to myself, ‘You sound so conceited.’ And if it has an effect on people and how they live, or on the politics, or the socioeconomic situation, sure, but that’s not why I did it. My main goal was to be entertaining. But yeah, it’s the high point of my creative life.”
However, Chase is not convinced that the show will remain popular forever. “I’ve always been worried about Sopranos,” he shared with reporters. I thought for sure that a lot of the references wouldn’t work after a while, especially the comedic references, or when you mention a real person. I thought that’s going to fade away.” Concluded the creative: “It’s going to happen, right? It hasn’t happened yet, but we know it’s going to happen.”
Chase doesn’t have major regrets, but he acknowledged that there is something that he would change about The Sopranos now. “We did a show where they went to Italy, and I would change that,” he told reporters. “I think we made the woman in the show too sexy and too hot. It just didn’t seem real when I saw it” again.
One reporter asked about how, in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance recounts that his grandmother was a big fan of the HBO mafia family drama. How does that make Chase feel? “It doesn’t surprise me. The particular details surprise me,” he replied. “One of the things about The Sopranos is that a lot of people in it were depressed, and this is going to sound so bad, but there’s a lot of unhappiness in the United States. There’s a lot of unhappiness everywhere, but … [traditionally,] America is supposed to be a happy country, and everyone wants to go there. So, we’re not used to thinking of ourselves as unhappy. We don’t like to deal with that, or it used to be that way. Now, I think, it’s changing.”
In the streaming age, the willingness to take creative risks may also be on the wane, the legendary creator suggested on Tuesday. “If HBO hadn’t sought that out, it wouldn’t have been there,” Chase said about The Sopranos. “I don’t have much to do with it anymore, but it feels more like network television again – [there are] just things you can’t do. ‘Don’t say this, don’t do that!’”
The Sopranos premiered in 1999 and went on to become one of the most celebrated works in the history of cable television. The mafia saga and pop culture phenomenon ran for six seasons (1999–2007) and won 21 Emmys.
Chase made his feature film directorial debut with 2012’s Not Fade Away, a musical tale about growing up in a U.S. suburb in the 1960s. In 2021, the Warner Bros.-produced The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel to The Sopranos that Chase wrote and produced, opened in cinemas.
Chase had actually initially conceived the series as a movie. “I wanted to do it as a movie at first, and my agent said, ‘The mob is finished. People don’t care anymore, forget it!’ So I had that in my pocket for three years, and then HBO wanted me to do a series, and so I brought that back. … The mafia was kind of overused, but people who knew me told me that my mother was such a wild person and very funny that I had to do something about her. So I did.”
In fact, film was his first focus. “I never wanted to be a TV writer. I wanted to be a filmmaker,” Chase explained. “But I just couldn’t break out of [TV].” Creatives didn’t move between film and TV as naturally as today back in the day. “I was telling somebody the other day that in the 1970s when I got into Hollywood, it was like apartheid. If you were a TV writer, you couldn’t jump across. You couldn’t get a meeting with people in the movie business, and I happened to start out in TV, but that was never what I wanted. So, The Sopranos was a chance for me to do something that was as movie-like as I could.”
The late and great The Sopranos star James Gandolfini had to come up in Tuesday’s discussion, and he did. “He was just a great actor,” Chase told reporters in Karlovy Vary. “I’ve said it before: I think it’s all about his eyes. One of the things about him was that you could see the little boy in there. Even though he was 40 years old, you could feel in his face that little boy — kind of mystified by the universe and the world.”
Asked if there are any actors he’d like to work with, Chase responded: “Yeah, plenty. I’d still like to work with [Robert] De Niro.”
The creator doesn’t have any plans to return to The Sopranos universe but he shared something that interests him that has to do with Americans with an Italian family background living in New Jersey and beyond. “I’m interested in Italian Americans,” Chase said. “People are buying a lot of property in Italy because they sell these houses very cheap there — in these towns that are emptied out and everybody has gone to the city. I’m interested in that – Italians going back and trying to get back to the way it was, and having a rude surprise. I mean, I would do mob movies again, but I just don’t have one right now.”