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"You might have heard a fair bit of hype about Boardwalk Empire. The show, which is set in Prohibition-era Atlantic City, picked up the &amp;#039;Best Drama Series&amp;#039; and &amp;#039;Best Actor&amp;#039; awards at this year&amp;#039;s Golden Globes, and now it&amp;#039;s coming over to the UK! The series has a pretty good pedigree, too - Martin Scorsese, Steve Buscemi and The Sopranos producer Terence Winter were all on board. We gave Terence a ring to find out more... Can you tell us what Boardwalk Empire is about? &amp;quot;Boardwalk Empire is set in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1920 and chronicles the life and times of Nucky Thompson, who was the treasurer of the city. Basically, he was equal parts politician and gangster. Nucky ran the town for decades. In 1920, when we meet him, Prohibition is enacted in the United States, making alcohol illegal. And as a corrupt politician that runs a city that is located on the Atlantic Ocean, this is an incredible gift from the criminal gods. Nucky begins to start rubbing elbows with leading criminals of the day including Lucky Luciano, Arnold Rothstein and a very young Al Capone.&amp;quot; Nucky was a real person, wasn&amp;#039;t he? &amp;quot;Yeah. Nucky was actually named Nucky Johnson - we fictionalised him as Nucky Thompson in the series because I wanted to have a little creative licence to take our Nucky in slightly different directions from the real person. But he&amp;#039;s very much based on the real guy.&amp;quot; Why did you choose Steve Buscemi for the role of Nucky? &amp;quot;We realised early on that most people hadn&amp;#039;t heard of Nucky and didn&amp;#039;t really know what he looked like anyway, so we weren&amp;#039;t really beholden to having an accurate depiction of an historical character that everybody knew. When Mr Scorsese and I started to cast the project we just decided to try to get the most interesting actor. We started throwing names around and I think it was me who suggested Steve, and Martin responded immediately. We agreed to continue to think about it and a couple of days later he called me up and said, &amp;#039;I can&amp;#039;t stop thinking about Steve Buscemi&amp;#039;. And I said, &amp;#039;You know, I can&amp;#039;t either&amp;#039;. He said, &amp;#039;Right, let&amp;#039;s cast him&amp;#039;, and that was it. We did. I&amp;#039;m thrilled, thrilled, thrilled [with him]. I can&amp;#039;t imagine anybody else doing this role.&amp;quot; You mentioned working with Martin Scorsese and the cast is great - what was it like working with all those people? &amp;quot;Really a dream come true. Martin Scorsese was really one of my idols and it&amp;#039;s true to say that he was the reason I got into this business in the first place. When I was a teenager I saw Taxi Driver and it was the first movie I ever saw that really made me start thinking about cinema... It got me interested in who made it, who wrote it, how did they do this, and that&amp;#039;s what set me on the path towards ultimately becoming a writer. So to find myself working with him years later was beyond anything I could have imagined.&amp;quot; Did you feel pressure to make the show historically accurate? &amp;quot;We take great pains to be as truthful to the history as we can but then inhabit that truthful historical world with fictional characters. For example, I won&amp;#039;t change the course of history... I don&amp;#039;t know if you saw Inglourious Basterds, the Tarantino movie where Adolf Hitler dies in a fire in a movie theatre? I won&amp;#039;t do anything like that. But if it&amp;#039;s true to the spirit of who our characters are I&amp;#039;ll take some creative licence in terms of the dates things may have happened - just slide things slightly to accommodate ourselves artistically. For example, the real Nucky did know the real Al Capone, so that relationship is true and the spirit of that relationship is true. What their conversation may have been like is really up to us to create. For me that&amp;#039;s the level of fiction we veer off into.&amp;quot; What was it about the Prohibition era that particularly interested you? &amp;quot;Well, it&amp;#039;s really very rarely been depicted in film and almost never on TV. There was so much going on in 1920 in this country and in the world it was almost irresistable. Such a time of great change. Obviously World War I had just ended, it was an election year in America, women got the right to vote that year, Prohibition of course was enacted, broadcast radio was introduced that year - just a wealth of change going on. It was a really young society, where young people were really coming to the fore. Add that to the backdrop of Atlantic City, which was like Las Vegas before Las Vegas was even invented. Just such a colourful time, and popular music was great. There&amp;#039;s just so much to choose from and such an enormous palette of colours to play with. It really became a no-brainer in terms of deciding when to set the show.&amp;quot; Do you think people can relate to the show even though it&amp;#039;s set in a very specific time period? &amp;quot;As I was writing, I realised that even though this is 90 years ago it feels enormously accessible. You look at this era and you say, &amp;#039;Alright, they spoke on the telephone, they drove in cars, they ate in restaurants, they went to the movies, they listened to pop music, they dresed in nice clothing, they do all the things that you and I do&amp;#039;. Obviously it looks very different but it&amp;#039;s for the most part a very accessible, similar world. It was a very modern age - it was sort of the dawn of the modern age, but a lot of the same things that people did then they do now, just with different technology. I don&amp;#039;t think that would be true if we set this show ten years earlier. I think it would feel like a different planet. But 1920 really feels like now.&amp;quot; You&amp;#039;re well known for your work on The Sopranos, another gangster series - what are the similarities and differences for you with Boardwalk Empire? &amp;quot;The initial similarity is it is partly set in the world of organised crime and it&amp;#039;s also New Jersey. I think the difference is that Tony Soprano was sort of the end of organised crime in this country and this is now the beginning of organised crime, so we get to see the flipside, which for me was really interesting. Nucky Johnson, the actual character, was really one of the architects of what became organised crime in this country, so we really get to see him in his early days putting this all together. Prohibition was the thing that allowed criminals to become millionaires. It really was sort of the economic foundation of organised crime. It was really appealing to me to get to explore the beginnings of that architecture.&amp;quot; You&amp;#039;re working with HBO again - do you like the freedom cable gives you? &amp;quot;Yeah. It&amp;#039;s not freedom in the ways that you might expect is appealing to me, in the sense of the nudity and the language and the violence. It&amp;#039;s much more creative freedom in the sense of how you tell a story. HBO has the courage to put on ambitious adult programming that&amp;#039;s done in a very novel-like fashion. They have great respect for their audience. I think they assume that the people who are going to be watching this are educated, intelligent people who want to see character dramas that take a slower approach to it. Not everything needs to be wrapped up right away. Characters don&amp;#039;t need to say what they&amp;#039;re thinking the minute they think it. Not every single thing needs to be explained to the audience, as is often the case on network TV. It&amp;#039;s like writing without handcuffs on. The difference between writing this and network TV is enormous. They don&amp;#039;t live in fear about offending anybody or confusing anybody. They really just let you do your job and tell intelligent stories. It&amp;#039;s a great luxury.&amp;quot; Boardwalk Empire has already been renewed for a second season - do you feel pressure to keep up the standard? &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s always a certain amount of pressure regardless, just to do a good job. We all hold ourselves to a pretty high standard so it&amp;#039;s just keeping it where it is and trying to do our best and hopefully people will respond to that.&amp;quot; How long do you think the show can go on for? &amp;quot;I can keep doing this as long as they&amp;#039;ll allow me to. I think the backdrop of Atlantic City in the 1920s and our enormous cast of really interesting characters can keep us on the air for years to come and I really hope we have that opportunity.&amp;quot; Finally, how would you persuade people to watch the show? &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d beg them! I&amp;#039;d say if you were a fan of The Sopranos and a fan of the gangster genre and a fan of intelligent adult drama, then this is a show you might want to check out. And certainly if you&amp;#039;ve ever seen a movie by Martin Scorsese this is a show for you to check out. And even if you haven&amp;#039;t, this is one of the masters of cinema at the helm of this thing, and I think for that reason alone it&amp;#039;s worth watching.&amp;quot; Boardwalk Empire premieres on February 1 on Sky Atlantic. Will you be tuning in for Boardwalk Empire? Are you excited about the show? Leave your comments below! "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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