D: Well I think he saw something in her, that she had an ability to—this is an interesting question. Do people do things with intention or not? I mean, was John Gotti a really intelligent guy who thought everything through, or did he just do it out of something innate in him?
A: You’d wanted to direct forever, and you got to direct this pilot—what did you have in mind in terms of what you wanted it to look like, to sound like, to feel like?
D: I wanted to open it up. I wanted it to be expansive, to be wide. I didn’t want it to feel indoors-y and TV-ish. All I remember wanting to do was, I’d always been completely taken by the Meadowlands, and I wanted it to have that feeling. That’s as far as I took it.
A: One thing that struck me was when they’re outdoors, the weather is such a present factor: the sunlight outside the pork store is so harsh; when Tony’s by the water, the wind is so harsh it’s like his shirt is almost floating. The weather in the show is always very severe, even when it’s a nice day.
M: There’s an awareness of the elements that’s unusual.
D: Part of that was just the desire to do something different than any typical downtown New York gangster movie: put it out there, with the trees and wind and all that stuff, in New Jersey. I think most people in America would not think of New Jersey as a Mob place. And part of it was wanting to give a kind of a spiritual feeling of the woods, because I remember that’s what it was like when I lived there. We used to play in the woods all the time as kids. There were a lot of animal sounds out there.
Clifton, New Jersey, where I grew up, is sort of urban. Then we moved from there to North Caldwell, which was a lot of woods, and I spent a lot of time in the woods, playing in the woods. So that figured into my feeling for the show before it was written. When I was in college, I took a year-long course in American literature: Hawthorne, Poe, a lot of James Fenimore Cooper, woodlands stuff. I just love that. I kept thinking about New Jersey as a lost paradise.
M: I want to detour here and talk a little more about that experience of nature as a kid, because that’s important to the show.
D: I really grew up in Clifton in an apartment complex, and there weren’t a lot of woods around there, but my father and his business partner used to take me and his son to this cabin out in the New Jersey woods somewhere. It was owned by the Boys Club of Newark or something. My uncle, who was an officer in that club, also used this cabin for bringing boys up to get them to nature. I went there several times. It had no water, no nothing, but it was a cabin. I just really loved it. I loved camping out and I loved all that stuff.
When I moved to North Caldwell, New Jersey, as you know, it was woodsier. It was right across the street from my house, and I was always tramping through the woods. I had muskrat traps and a .22 rifle.
M: Do you know how to shoot?
D: No. My mother had my father pull the firing pin out of that because she was afraid I was going to kill him.
M: By accident or on purpose?
D: On purpose! She told me that at his wake.
M: Wow. It’s a good thing you never ran into any bears carrying that .22!
D: Yeah! I went to a lot of summer camp, Boy Scout camps and stuff like that in New Jersey. The woods are very mysterious to me, both spooky and beautiful. They inspire me quite a bit.
M: The first time you saw Twin Peaks, you must’ve thought, “Oh my God, somebody understands me.” There’s so much of the woods in that.
D: Yeah, something like that. I always felt to myself that there’s something about David Lynch—we’re born, like, six months apart—that made me think to myself, “Somebody understands me,” or “I understand that.” I know that feeling he’s going for.
A: So you finished making the pilot. At that point, you didn’t want HBO to pick it up, correct? You just wanted to be able to take it and [get] some funding and complete it as a movie?
D: Yes.
A: What would the second half of the movie have been? There’s twelve more hours of plot that ended up unspooling on TV.
D: There would have been a couple more incidents of violence. It probably wouldn’t have had as much family in it—as much of the kids or Carmela.
M: It would’ve still included Tony putting a pillow over his mother’s face?
D: No. I had never gotten that far when I was thinking about it. The original story, the Anne Bancroft–De Niro version, he was going to go up to her and smother her with a pillow. But [Nancy] worked out so well. And she said to me at the end of the season, “David, just keep me working.” She was pretty sick by that point, but she was so good [that] I just couldn’t kill Livia, so we had to invent this whole thing where she was left alive, and “Look at her, she’s smiling!” That had to go in. And then she really wasn’t as germane to the second part of the second season.
A: A year passed between when they picked up the pilot and when you started making episode two. Robert Iler’s a foot taller, there’s a new pork store, a new Father Phil . . .
D: Silvio’s part of the gang now! He really wasn’t in the pilot!
A: In that year, what did you see, looking at the pilot, that made you go, “We should do more of this,” and “These other things need tweaking?”
D: We had to figure out what the permanent sets would be, how to do it economically, who had worked out really well in the pilot. Almost everyone in it was pretty good.
M: How open were you to actors adding or changing lines?
D: Not open at all.
M: You never let something through?
D: A couple times I did, especially a little bit more toward the end. But I felt that if we started having actors changing lines, we couldn’t let it go on like that. Those guys were so, so desirous of getting their faces in front of the camera, telling each other what to do—all the guys in Tony’s crew, especially. Tony Sirico was a part-time director all the time. “Stay, stay, stay over here! Come on over here with me!” [Laughs]
A: Dreams were obviously a big part of the show, as much as certain people wished they weren’t. When you first started doing them, were there certain stylistic rules or ideas that you wanted?
D: There were, and I’m sure we talked about this before: no moving camera. Just recently I read that there were two rules, but I forget what they are.
M: Why no moving camera?
D: Because if you push in on somebody it means, “This is important,” especially in TV.
That’s why there were no music cues in the shrink’s office, because in a typical network TV show, when patients start to get down to business and reveal themselves about why he’s so happy or what the truth really is, they’d push in really slowly and you’d hear a synthesizer, you know?
I hated that stuff. And I didn’t want to punctuate what was important in the scene and what wasn’t.
M: Did you have a model for the Tony–Melfi relationship?
D: Yeah, a shrink that I’d had in LA.
M: What was your relationship with that therapist like?
D: It was like a re-mothering. She’s probably dead now, and I haven’t called her. Yeah, it was mostly kind of a re-mothering. She was very good at making me feel better about myself.
A: Melfi does some of that with Tony, but a lot of their relationship is her calling him out on his behavior to varying degrees. Sometimes she dances around it and sometimes she can be confrontational.
D: There were things Tony did that really offended her.
A: How did you figure out, over time, what those boundaries were, and where she’d be more willing to say, “What you are doing is bad?”
D: You know what’s odd? To a certain extent, and this is only a slight bit, but it’s there—with certain issues, it would be hard to tell the difference, in my head, between Lorraine Bracco and Melfi. If I felt “Lorraine would probably hate this,” a little bit of that would seep into Melfi. I tried to avoid that, but I couldn’t always do it.
M: Was it just a matter of knowing Lorraine as a person and her val
ue system?
D: Yeah.
A: Let’s talk about “College.” At what point did you become conscious of the fact that Tony hadn’t killed anyone yet?
D: When we were trying to write the fifth episode. I had shied away from it when I wrote the pilot the first time, when I handed it in to Fox. I was thinking, “Network TV won’t let you do that kind of thing anyway, so don’t put in any murders or bombings or anything like that. Just do gangster tropes.” Then, once Fox turned it down, I thought, “You stupid asshole, that’s what people watch these things for.”
M: “Less yakking, more whacking.”
D: Right! So when HBO bought the show, I knew that we had to get to it sooner or later. But I also didn’t want to be dependent on that stuff. I’ve said it a million times: The Sopranos, in one season, had more gangsters in New Jersey than there had been in twenty years, and more whackings! And when it was time to do “College,” I was starting to get bored with [the killing]. I was bored being there in New Jersey all the time. I said, “Let’s take them out of town, on vacation,” which turned out pretty well.
A: One of the reasons it hits us as hard as it does is that Febby’s not a threat to him, he’s just a guy living his life.
D: That was intentional. The network didn’t start complaining about that episode until after we’d shot it, and it was because that murder was really great. I don’t think a lot of TV actors would’ve done that, or given their all for that, the way Jim did. He had spit coming out of his mouth.
When HBO read the script, they didn’t see any of that. Once they saw it and he was schvitzing and everything like that, that’s when Chris Albrecht called. He said, “We gotta do something about this,” and I said, “If he doesn’t kill that guy, he’s a scumbag. He’s a traitor and an informant. He has to be killed.”
Then I came up with the stupid idea of the guy selling drugs to kids in high schools, which was, to me, a terrible cop-out.
A: Junior is a housebound adviser and is increasingly senile in the later years, but he’s very proactive first here as a captain, and then as the on-paper boss. Did you miss that in the later years when you couldn’t do that anymore—because if he was active, Tony would’ve killed him?
D: No. I was always very satisfied with the stories about Junior, what Junior became and how it started. He was everybody’s favorite character to write.
A: Really? Why?
D: I don’t know. Well, first Livia was. I guess it’s because they’re so outspoken. They’re senior citizens, so they just say whatever’s on their mind. They never pull their punches, they’re always very direct and outrageous.
Christopher was another one we had a soft spot for, even though he was monumentally stupid. The characters who were the most fun to write were the ones who took themselves very seriously.
The line people always quote to me is Livia’s, “Psychiatry? That’s just a racket for the Jews!” [Laughs]
A: Speaking of psychiatry: the idea of doing this long bit [in “Isabella”] where Tony’s hallucinating and we don’t know it, and it ends up being a big part of the plot—where did that come from?
D: I don’t know. I just dreamed it up, I think.
M: It’s the first instance of Tony having a dream or fantasy that leads him to a conclusion about his waking life—with Melfi’s help, of course. There’s a chain of realizations that leads him to figure out that his mother never loved him and wants him dead. I feel like “Isabella” and “I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano” are two halves of a two-parter. You have this psychic eruption in the first one that is analyzed and resolved in the second one.
D: Yeah. You might say that Roman Polanski’s Repulsion is kind of a precursor, although I suppose people have done psychotic episodes, breakdowns, in movies and TV before where you didn’t know if it was the real thing or not. I think it was just sui generis.
A: Was there ever a point where you wanted to leave the question of whether Isabella was real unresolved?
D: No.
M: Okay, because later on you do leave things unresolved.
D: I caught that disease. [Laughs] I wasn’t a spoiled baby at that time!
M: Tony has a long history of being in situations where he has to decide whether or not to kill a guy, and the answer is usually, “I’m going to kill him.”
D: And he’s killing people he shouldn’t be killing personally.
M: The failed hit on Tony in “Isabella” is another instance where, in reference to “College,” he seems more alive, more emotionally connected to the world, happier, when he’s killing somebody or fighting for his life.
D: I totally believe that. I think that would happen to any of us. We’d feel elated on some level. Or maybe not—maybe we’d be so blown away by the fact that we just came out of a near-lethal experience. But in his case, on a biochemical level, I believe that whatever those natural drugs are, they’d be kicked in by that happening.
M: You mention drugs, and in this show, a lot of drugs are used and a lot of people have issues with them, or are in recovery and should be, or they go into it, come out—
D: And then they go back in.
M: Is violence a drug for Tony?
D: I guess I’m gonna say yes.
A: The orange juice—is that meant as any kind of Godfather homage?
D: Not that I knew about!
A: That just makes me think of all the theorization of the meaning of eggs in The Sopranos and how eggs represent death, and Valentina makes Egg Beaters so she only gets burned and doesn’t die! Was the egg thing something you were conscious of?
D: Absolutely! [Laughs]
M: So the egg thing in The Sopranos is what oranges are to The Godfather!
D: [Sarcastically] Exactly!
A: Was the entire first season in the can when the show premiered, or was some of it still being made?
D: It was in the can.
A: I ask because there are a couple of episodes, “The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti” and “A Hit is a Hit,” that feel like they were written in response to the anti-defamation complaints you got.
D: I knew that stuff was coming. When I was working on The Rockford Files, we used to get shit all the time. You weren’t allowed to give people an Italian name at that time—anybody who was a gangster had to be “Mr. Anderson” or some shit. That was a constant problem. It was right around the time when Joe Colombo got killed, I think. When I was working on Northern Exposure, after John Falsey left the show, we did one in which there were five families in Sicily, like, not Mob families, but they were “the Five Families,” and they had these conventions and stuff like that, sit-downs and all that shit. Man, that caused a huge, huge uproar.
So I knew this was going to happen. When we first got started, I said to HBO, “Should I change my name back to my father’s name?” and they said, “No, don’t do it. You’re known as David Chase, so let it go.” I thought it would go better if people saw I was Italian, and that it was my right to do what I want with my heritage.
A: The first season ends with the torrential rainstorm. Everyone winds up at Vesuvio. Almost every season after that ends with the family at some kind of dinner gathering, up to the last scene of the show. When you did that first one, did you look at it and say, “This would be a nice way to tie things up,” or was that just how it kept happening?
D: That’s how it kept happening. It was part of my belief—and I think it’s correct, actually—that food is so important to Italians as a subculture.
I had really good cooks in my family. My father’s mother was really good. My own mother was so-so. She did some things well. My father was a good cook. I had a couple of aunts, like, I had a total of maybe fifteen aunts, between my mother and my father. There were three or four in there who were really, really good. Those women would gossip about each other. My Aunt Edie, for some reason, would put sugar in the Sunday gravy, and my mother and her sisters would make fun of her behind her back about that—and not like gentle teasing, eith
er. It was serious business. “Can you imagine putting sugar in that?”
A: Did you know back then, because it’s not really revealed until season three, that meat is one of the big triggers for Tony’s panic attacks?
D: I had no idea.
A: Was Jimmy Altieri also a rat, or did Vin Makazian just confuse the two fat brunette guys?
D: He was a rat.
M: Did you know Pussy was a rat when you were making season one?
D: No. I never thought we were coming back for a second season, so I was in no way prepared for that.
M: So was this a case of, “Oh, we already had a rat on the show and we killed him off, we gotta come up with a different rat”?
D: I don’t think so. We were told a while ago that those guys were all ratting on each other, all the time.
What happened was, in show number eleven, Pussy disappears. Then the season ended after thirteen, and I went on vacation, came back, and I knew the show was liked a lot but I didn’t know whether they’d renew it or not. I knew nothing about anything. And I came back and all I knew was that everyone was saying, “Where is Pussy?” I thought, “Now what?” We had to have a plot, and they’re already going “Where’s Pussy?” so we have to figure out where he is, and then we got interested in the whole question of Stockholm syndrome, and Pussy becomes a junior G-man, inflated by his own stuff. That’s how it came about, because we had to do something, and it was that plus the Richie story.
A: Artie Bucco occupies a unique moral space within the show. He’s not part of the Mob; he’s sometimes tempted to be part of it, but he either resists on his own, or Charmaine talks him out of it. But he grew up with these guys, and his and Tony’s and Silvio’s kids all go to the same school. How important was having a guy like that be a significant part of the world to the show?
D: Not important. We just liked him.
M: The character or the actor?
D: Both, but we liked the character a lot. Johnny [Ventimiglia] was great. When he’d get all emotional and overhyped and teary-eyed and stuff, he was great. But the character wasn’t necessary at all. You could have made the show without him. You couldn’t have made it without Livia, for example.
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