Interview (Written): Terence Winter (“Boardwalk Empire”)

An Indiewire interview with TV writer, “Boardwalk Empire” show creator and executive producer Terence Winter.

Rewinding a little, because we’ve never talked to you about the show before, after “The Sopranos” [Winter was one of the head writers] the world was sort of your oyster. What drew you to “Boardwalk Empire”?

One sentence, “Martin Scorsese is attached to this.” They handed me the book and said, “Why don’t you read this and see if there’s something there,” and I said, “I don’t even have to read the book, I’m interested. I want to do this.” That was pretty much it. I mean the book was essentially a history of Atlantic City, and they said, “Why don’t you look at it and see if there’s a TV series in there somewhere.” And I landed on the prohibition years and this guy Nucky Johnson and we fictionalized it as Nucky Thompson, of course. But really, you know the idea that I would get to work with Martin Scorsese was the big carrot for me. I’d been in the gangster genre for a while, this was the way to do it in a fresh way and than to do it with him was just irresistible.

Were you concerned at all about repeating yourself? You had just done mobsters and here you are doing mobsters from another era.

That was an initial concern, and it was something that was on my mind when I was reading the book looking at the different eras in Atlantic City. And the ’70s were interesting, gambling came in, but it felt a little too close, it felt like Tony’s Dad’s world and even the ’50s felt familiar, not really a ‘Sopranos’ thing but it just felt like I’ve seen a lot of the ’50s. But Prohibition in the ‘20s — I mean I haven’t really seen aside form the Warner Brothers gangster movies…so it just felt like it was an area that was far enough away from what I had been doing that it felt fresh again. Also, you got the idea that you know “The Sopranos” was about the end of organized crime, this was about the very beginnings of it. That was appealing to me to sort of bookend those two ideas.

Does the book cover all that time span period?

It’s literally a history of Atlantic City, it’s not fiction. It’s really from when Atlantic City was a mosquito infested swamp up until the present day. Just literally how Atlantic City came to be. It originally started as a health resort but it was the most unhealthy place. Swarming with mosquitoes, it was horrible. But than once the railroad came in it became a tourist destination, it was a way for people to get there from pretty much a lot of major cities on the East Coast within a day, you could take a trip to the shore. That was a huge thing for people, for a nickel you could get on a train and end up at the beach, just within a span of a couple of years just blossomed into this incredible carnival town and by the 1870s it became sort of a version of Atlantic City that we know today.

So then you just zeroed in on the prohibition-era in the book because that’s the stuff that appealed to you?

Yeah, the character Nucky was really interesting. He was a low level politician, essentially, who’s kind of the guy who ran the town and suddenly alcohol is illegal and overnight this guy, this corrupt politician who runs this town right on the Atlantic Ocean, became the friend of every gangster in the country, immediately. He sort of trafficked alcohol in right off the ocean into the city and brought it anywhere to the East Coast. Nucky got really popular, really quickly. He went from being a fairly low level corrupt politician to a major, major player in the alcohol market.

For more of the interview, go here.

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