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" David Chase, who worked for a long time as a TV writer before becoming cherished for The Sopranos, is embarking on a new sort of project. His first feature film, Not Fade Away, which just played at the New York Film Festival, is a personal look at youth, rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll, and New Jersey in the 1960s. We talked to Chase Monday at the festival about all that, along with The Sopranos, the new state of HBO, The Twilight Zone, and Hitchcock. ESQUIRE.COM: Not Fade Away is sort of a perfect time capsule. It doesn&amp;#039;t indulge in nostalgia. It looks back on the past as everyday stuff.  DAVID CHASE: That was the goal, really. Some people have taken issue with the movie because of that. That it depicts the sixties, but you never see any of the real turmoil. How many times have you seen that? What do you want me to do, shoot a demonstration? Another war protest? Woodstock? You know all of that stuff. What has interested me since my days on I&amp;#039;ll Fly Away \u2014 I like when you deal with the time, but you deal with the backwater of it. Not all the stuff that&amp;#039;s happening in front of the cameras in the world, but ordinary people. Most people are not even touched by historical events. The majority of people in America did not go to Vietnam. The vast majority of people in America did not march in a civil-rights demonstration. The vast majority of American people never took LSD. The vast majority of American people didn&amp;#039;t even have long hair. ESQ: If James Gandolfini is the kind of parent an artist growing up in New Jersey has to deal with, is it a success when artists make it out of Jersey at all? DC: I&amp;#039;m not sure I understand you, and I&amp;#039;m not sure I agree with you. But it wouldn&amp;#039;t just be Jersey. It would be anywhere. It would be Columbus, Ohio. What did I just read yesterday? As far as Americans are concerned, no one cares about the city anymore. That it&amp;#039;s all small-town America now. What happens in New York doesn&amp;#039;t really interest Americans like it used to. SA: The character in Not Fade Away is selfish about making his own path, but it&amp;#039;s not treated as a bad thing. DC: I think for anyone who follows the &amp;quot;artistic life,&amp;quot; a certain amount of selfishness and self-involvement is part of the package. You&amp;#039;re probably already disregarding a certain material life you could have. And you&amp;#039;re stepping out of your community and your family. I think people are intolerant of artists. They don&amp;#039;t want to hear about it. SA: The Twilight Zone is big background noise in the movie, and Rod Serling on that kind of made the artist visible. DC: It was very radical. I think they used to have other hosts of shows, but they weren&amp;#039;t the people who wrote them. It was very radical, the more you think about it. He was lucky, because the camera liked him. Why would they let him do it? I guess he had a reputation already, right?  SA: He had paid his dues, in a way, which was also true of you when HBO picked up The Sopranos. Do you think that helped? DC: Certainly, timing is everything. I don&amp;#039;t think it mattered so much to HBO that I had a track record. What kind of track record does Lena Dunham have? And the guys who made Carnivale or Big Love? It&amp;#039;s the idea that people really value. ESQ: But could those newer shows have existed without The Sopranos? DC: I think that the difference between The Sopranos and the shows that came before it was that it was really personal. There had been a lot of dramas, a lot of really good ones, a lot of really bad ones, but they were always franchise shows about cops, or doctors, or lawyers. They weren&amp;#039;t about the writer himself. The Sopranos was the first show about the life of the writer. I never made any secret about the fact that it was about my mother. HBO invested in that, and that was different. ESQ: On IMDb, it says what everyone is &amp;quot;known for.&amp;quot; I was humored because it says you&amp;#039;re known for Grave of the Vampire. Do you know anyone who knows you for that? ESQ: It&amp;#039;s funny because I did another Q&amp;amp;amp;A yesterday, and the writer dug up a clip from Grave of the Vampire and showed it. No, most people do not know it. There are some people who know that I did it, and they find it very funny.  ESQ: You can watch it on Netflix Instant. DC: I was totally rewritten on that one. ESQ: Do you think it&amp;#039;s gotten better for writers and artists in Hollywood now than it was then? DC: I think it has. During Hollywood&amp;#039;s Golden Era, most of those directors, writers, producers toiled anonymously. Alfred Hitchcock \u2014 see, I didn&amp;#039;t think about that. He introduced his show before Rod Serling did. ESQ: Alfred Hitchcock Presents. That&amp;#039;s true. DC: Hitchcock was one of the few people in Hollywood who had a brand. Every movie he made was an Alfred Hitchcock movie, couldn&amp;#039;t have been anyone else. ESQ: But Serling didn&amp;#039;t have any pre-existing brand.  DC: Right, but he convinced somebody. If he couldn&amp;#039;t have pointed to Hitchcock, he probably wouldn&amp;#039;t have been able to do it. Somebody must have said, &amp;quot;Well, if it worked for Hitchcock...&amp;quot; Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/interviews/a16183/david-chase-interview-13542659/>