Nearly two decades after The Sopranos ended, David Chase is finally returning to television, and he says the wait was not by choice.
"Well, I wrote a lot of things, and nobody bought them," Chase said during a career Q&A at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. "I wasn't that lucky, and that's the reason why. There was something at HBO I really wanted to do, and then they didn't want to do it. That fell apart because of money, and then nobody else wanted to do it."
Chase is now in development on Project: MKUltra, a limited series at HBO that will chart the story of a secret CIA mind control program operated in the 1950s and 1960s. It will be his first series since The Sopranos.
In between, Chase produced The Many Saints of Newark, the 2021 Sopranos prequel film. At Karlovy Vary, he acknowledged that the project did not come together the way he intended. He said he originally envisioned it as only partially an origins story, but that the origins element took over. He called it a mistake.
"I can tell you, we just made a mistake," he said. "There was the character of Dickie, who was Chris's father. We had talked about him all through The Sopranos, that he was a drug addict and an alcoholic and insane. And then when we made the movie, he wasn't in it."
Chase explained how it happened. "I don't know how we forgot that, but we did. The problem was we didn't want to cross him with Tony Soprano. We thought, well, he looked like the same kind of guy, some kind of rage-filled idiot, so we didn't do it."
The Many Saints of Newark underperformed theatrically but was successful on television, Chase noted.
On the broader film and television industry, Chase was direct about why he believes studios resist creative risk. He said networks want what has already made money and what will earn awards season recognition.
"I know that I write outside of what they want," he said. "They want everything they've seen before. They want things they've seen make loads of money before. It's very simple really. And they want the Oscars and to go to the parties."
He also questioned why executives enter the business at all given its historically thin margins. "I'm not a businessman, but the profit margins in the motion picture business have always been around 6%, from the silent era to the present day, so I'm not sure why anyone would get into that business if you're afraid of taking risks. You're better off selling running shoes," he said.
Chase cited filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie, who wrote The Usual Suspects, to illustrate the problem. "He left the Town for a long time, and he said the whole thing is run by only two things, greed and fear, and he's absolutely right," Chase said.
Project: MKUltra remains in development at HBO.
