- I set out to make a really respectable,
a really solid gangster movie.
- Antonio Soprano.
- What made Tony the Tony we know?
And that's one of the main questions in our movie,
one of the main storylines in our movie.
We don't answer it too explicitly
because that's not what David Chase does for a living,
but you see the nudges that would lead him on the path
that he's going to go into.
Well, we start in '67, and there's a time cut,
and we pick up the story again in '71.
We go from Tony played by William Ludwig as a 10-year-old,
and then we jump ahead to Michael Gandolfini
as more of a teenager.
- He's kind of a nerdy, sensitive, bell-bottom-wearing kid,
sort of navigating a really complicated time in his life,
and historically, in a very divided area of New Jersey,
where he's really just sort of searching
for any sort of guidance, you know,
he really just wants a friend or a father figure
or some sort of parent to take them under his wing.
And that's, it's a very different Tony,
it's a very young, naive, sensitive Tony
that we meet in this movie.
- He only listens to Dickie.
- I want to do whatever I can to help you.
- The key character is Dickie,
and his story is entirely contained in the movie,
beginning, middle and end.
And he's somebody who just gets talked about in the series,
so one of the things that makes this a standalone movie,
that you don't have to necessarily do Sopranos homework for,
is the fact that Dickie is his own character in this movie.
- I play Dickie Moltisanti,
who was Christopher Moltisanti's dad,
who's dead before the show
and had been talked a lot about during the show
as being a formative influence on Tony.
You know, Chrissy wasn't born until well into his forties
and Dickie really longed for a son of his own.
And Tony, you know, he really kind of loved
as a kind of surrogate father,
and Tony's parents were absent a lot in his childhood.
His dad was in jail and his mom was half crazy,
and Dickie was the guy who really took an interest
in his life for better and for worse.
- You've got to do something about Dickie Moltisanti.
- And you see other characters,
they're also not quite formed yet,
like Livia the world's worst mother in the series,
in this, you see her much prior to that,
where she is, she's not locked into that yet.
You see glimmers of her mothering instinct,
you see glimmers of her being sort of sexy
and flirty with her husband.
All the characters, you see the array of things
they might become before they got channeled
into what we know from the show, I think,
and that's sort of the main theme and the main question.
Of course, some people will always be, you know,
Paulie is always going to be Paulie.
He knows who he is and that's part of his charm,
and that's why audiences love him, I think.
- I'm Billy Magnussen, and I play Paulie Walnuts.
- I just got this jacket.
- I think he's actually building up his reputation
with inside the crime family,
finding his own footing within that world.
You know, I think he's at a young level with there,
and the hierarchy, he's trying to build his way up it.
I think, again, he's a fun guy,
he's loyal, he's supportive and you know,
I think that's why they keep him around.
- I'm Corey Stoll, I play Uncle Junior.
Junior is in the awkward position of working
for his little brother.
We're not quite sure, you know, how that happened,
how Johnny Boy surpassed Junior so quickly
and to be sort of at the center of this crime family,
but Junior seems okay with it.
But as we see as the movie goes by,
he's not so okay with it.
- It's about a deeply haunted person involved
with very dangerous things and dangerous thoughts.
I don't know that that's a hallmark or a necessity
for a gangster movie.
That's just what I, the way this turned out, I liked that.