The Sopranos creator announces new project about Italian-Americans

After revolutionizing television, David Chase imagines a new project around Italian-Americans who leave the United States to settle in Italy, in search of a new life in the country of their ancestors.

More than twenty years after changing the history of the series with The Sopranos, David Chase could soon dive back into the world of Italian-Americans.

During a meeting organized at the Karlovy Vary Festival, the creator of the HBO series revealed that he was working on a new idea for a film or series dedicated to Americans of Italian origin who decide to leave everything to return to live in Italy.

“I’d like to do something about Italian-Americans,” explained the seven-time Emmy Award winner. “It’s happening a lot lately: Italian-Americans buying houses in Italy!” The screenwriter is referring to the many Italian villages that offer abandoned homes at very reduced prices to attract new residents.

He cites in particular the case of Lorraine Bracco, the interpreter of psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi in The Sopranos, who allegedly acquired a house in Italy for a symbolic sum:

“A lot of Americans are buying these houses and moving there because things in our country are questionable.”

The project could therefore tell the story of the return to the “old country” of descendants of Italian immigrants, confronted with the surprises and disillusions of a new existence far from America. An idea that echoes the themes dear to the creator of The Sopranos: identity, family heritage and the difficulty of finding one’s place in a changing world.

David Chase also spoke of his desire to reunite with several actors from his film Not Fade Away, released in 2012. The director would particularly like to collaborate again with John Magaro, Jack Huston, Will Brill and Bella Heathcote for a new feature film, without repeating the story of this musical drama set in New Jersey in the 1960s.

This new idea is in addition to another project already announced: Project: MKUltra, a series developed with HBO, dedicated to the famous secret CIA program on mind control (the one which inspired Stranger Things in the first place).