Why Director Alan Taylor Felt Intimidated By ‘The Many Saints Of Newark’ And Scorsese Looming

Director Alan Taylor is no stranger to the world of The Sopranos. Having helmed several episodes, his command of it landed him an Emmy in the show’s sixth season.

Now, the filmmaker is back in New Jersey, and the Sopranoverse, with The Many Saints of Newark, Tony Soprano’s origin story. It simultaneously lands in theaters and on HBO Max.

I caught up with Taylor to find out why his director friends are jealous of this particular job, his hopes and fears for the project, and what he’d do with a Director’s Cut version of the movie.

Simon Thompson: Was it key to you that is a movie accessible for people who have never seen The Sopranos as much as those die-hard fans of the show?

Alan Taylor: I know the hope going in was to create something that would make the fans very satisfied and really engaged, but it would work as a standalone for a new audience. I mean, just for practical reasons, you want the biggest audience you can get. I think also David Chase, the creator of this whole world, has always been in love with the feature format and wanted to do something that was its own movie. I think we’ve done that. The feedback I hear, at least to my face, is that there are things that resonate bigger for people who know the show, but people who don’t know the show do follow it and do get it. They don’t know that they’re getting a hefty dose of the tone of the show. The tone and the worldview that David created for the show were the most important things to try and carry into the movie.

Thompson: Because you and David have a close relationship with the show, were there pros and cons and fears about returning to the world?

Taylor: I equivocated a little bit, partly because I was scheduled to do something else at the same time that I had to drop out of, but partly because it is a really intimidating thing to take on. It was the combination of not wanting to let David down, not wanting to let the fans down, having a lot of respect for the show, and being intimidated by the reality of the question, ‘Can you do a Sopranos thing without James Gandolfini in it?’ Here’s the way I tortured myself over this the most. David’s brilliant idea was to take the classic gangster film, make it contemporary, and put it on TV. What we’re doing here is going back in the period and putting on the big screen, so in a way, you sort of yanked the carpet out from under one of his most creative leaps. I worried about all that stuff, but no, I had to do it. It was too exciting to have a chance to go into this voice again. You don’t get many opportunities to do this kind of story. Many of my director friends were expressing envy that it was a way to do a family, psychological, dark American story because the Sopranos IP justified it. Many of my director friends would love to be telling stories like this, but we’re sort of priced out of the marketplace. Thank goodness the show has a following, and David has a following, so that let us do it. I tortured myself in saying yes to it and making it, but it was more just the challenge of it than thinking it would be like a backward step. It did feel like a new thing.

Thompson: How did you avoid the more cliched tropes of gangster movies, especially with Ray Liotta in there, who is so closely associated with some of the best examples of the genre?

Taylor: First of all, you know, you can’t make anything in the American gangster world without Martin Scorsese looming over you, and certainly that gets more intense if you get involved with Ray. I was excited about the plan that we had for Ray because not to give anything away, but his casting is an interesting device in the movie. Even though it was a kind of classic gangster casting choice, he’s used in a way that ties in with David’s slightly off-kilter voice. Making the movie, I was always trying to focus on those things that made The Sopranos take on gangsterism unlike anything else, and that tended to mean that you had to look out for the moments that were absurd, or dreamy, or transcendent because those are things that you see in the show. Still, you don’t really see it in most gangster movies. There’s a wonderful scene where Dickie tells us about something he does for kids,  the baseball team, and it is like a dream. We used that in the show where you didn’t know there were dreams until people woke up out of them. The baseball scene is one of my favorites in the movie because it’s that chance to capture a tone that you don’t see in gangster movies. It’s David’s take on sort of America. Also, in covering the violence, just being honest and truthful about it, rather than pumping it up. It’s funny because my storyboard artist, who is also my girlfriend, had to make an adjustment because she comes out of the Marvel world and out of violence for fun, and it took her a while to get into the language of violence for not fun. My daughter saw the movie and was affected by the violence because I think she’s not used to seeing violence portrayed in that way, the Sopranos way, violence that has a kind of bitter reality to it, instead kick-ass quality to it. Anyway, that’s a long rambling answer, but that’s because it’s an interesting topic to me, so I’m glad you asked about it.

Thompson: You know as well as I do that sometimes what audiences want doesn’t always turn out exactly how they had it in their mind’s eye. It isn’t easy to recapture that uniqueness and the zeitgeist of The Sopranos. How do you make sure that you captured everything that you need to capture and that it worked?

Taylor: The hard thing about it was that we were having to give up a lot of stuff that was defining for The Sopranos, the fact that it was tacky, contemporary New Jersey, which was a big part of the appeal of the show as the clothes. We had to let all of that go, and we’re going back to a slightly more romanticized period where certainly people dressed better. I tried to remain true to what I think of as the spirit of the show, the tone, and the themes, but the imagery would change. I’m curious to see whether fans recognize that they’re in the same world or whether they think they’ve gone somewhere else. We did try to carry the same visual approach. Even our lens choices and so on were influenced by the show’s look, with the added challenge of trying to get a bit bigger at times, a bit more epic. I wasn’t trying to ape the visuals, but the kind of spirit comes with your lens choice, a sort of way of looking at the world that I think we try to maintain. Kramer Morgenthau, who was the DP, did a beautiful job.

Thompson: A lot of the original show was filmed on location in New Jersey. Were you able to continue that tradition with The Many Saints of Newark?

Taylor: We were totally East Coast-based. We built a few interiors like the Soprano’s household and things like that, but almost everything was on location. We were given license to be a little looser than we were in the show. In the show, it was imperative to shoot everything in New Jersey, so you were either on the stages or went across the river to shoot on location because David wanted to be truthful. With the movie, he lightened up a little bit, but we did wind up shooting a lot in New York, in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn because that’s where the period architecture is still around and available. In all those cases, New York was doubling for New Jersey. The weird thing was that with the one scene we have in New York when they go to meet the ocean liner, we actually shot that in New Jersey. Everything was standing in for something else, but it was all part of that drive to get the reality of it.

Thompson: Did you approach this as a one-and-done project? Did that change when you were making The Many Saints of Newark? Once you knew this worked, did it make you want to take ownership of a potential series?

Taylor: I certainly went into it thinking this was a single standalone movie, but I think everybody has a different set of hopes about that. I never talked to David about there being more. When he first sent me the script, I was surprised to see he was ready to go back into that world. He did say some suggestive things while we were shooting that made me think that there could be more, but when I tried to pin him down, I asked him if he was considering if he were talking about sequels, and he said, ‘Maybe.’ It was as close as he got. Obviously, it’s going to depend on audience reaction to see what might come next, but I’m hearing many people say that maybe this could be the basis for another series. That makes sense. We discovered that Michael Gandolfini, his take on the character of Tony, is something people are really responding to. You certainly could see another movie, and I think it would probably be in some people’s mind is the movie they expected this to be, which is Tony as a young gangster. This movie is a prelude to that.

Thompson: A lot of stuff you shot ended up on the cutting room floor. I’m constantly moaning about the fact that many movies are too long, and they don’t need to be, but this is two hours, and I genuinely wanted more. Would you maybe do an extended cut at some point?

Taylor: I joke about the fact I would love to do my cut, and yes, it would be longer, and it might end differently, but I’m probably not going to get that chance. I was watching the Snyder story with such curiosity because I’m amazed that he pulled that off. So many directors would like to have that chance. We didn’t do anything thinking that we’d let go of it, but it’s a complicated story, in some ways, multi-stranded, with many characters, lots of storylines. I think it was only when I was putting it together that I realized some things had to go. But it was painful. We had Anthony Imperiale riding an elephant down the street in Newark, and that’s gone. We had at least one really great thing between our principals that had to go. It was all painful, but it was necessary to pull it into this shape it’s in right now, which is, to be honest, great shape.

Thompson: You’ve obviously returned to this world; you’ve dipped your toes into other franchises over the years and picked up where others have left off. Is this one that you would want to return to and own, perhaps agree to direct all of any future sequels? Or has this scratched an itch, and you are ready to say goodbye?

Taylor: Well, thankfully, blissfully, that decision would be out of my hands. I have a feeling that David will be picking and choosing who gets that job if it arises, so I don’t even have to think about too much about that. I’ll either get another surprise phone call, or I won’t, but I, like most directors, would jump at the chance to do more in this world. It’s a rare chance in the current marketplace to deal with this rich psychology and deal with things almost entirely thematically driven. It’s also funny and crowd-pleasing at the same time. Me, and a lot of other directors, would like to spend more time with Tony.

The Many Saints of Newark is in theaters and on HBO Max now.