A: What percentage of the characters were on the show more because you liked the character or the actor than because they were essential?
D: A lot. As actors, they were all just so good. All the writers had the same feeling: they loved writing for those characters.
Session Two:
“I never knew whether we were coming back or not.”
On Janice, Richie, Furio, Italy, renewal, and painting yourself into corners.
ALAN: Did you have any trepidation about doing a second season? Or once the show was on the air, did you want it to come back?
DAVID: You don’t like to sound self-pitying, it sounds ridiculous. But it’s really hard work. With that show, when I heard it had been bought, I was almost destroyed. I said to my agent, “Oh my God, they bought the show.” So every time we were picked up—and you can talk to any showrunner and they’ll tell you the same thing—it’s mixed emotions you’d feel.
A: So, you had this whole idea of the arc of Tony and Livia for years. Now you’re coming back and you have to start over from whole cloth. How terrifying was it? Or wasn’t it?
D: I recall I jumped in with both feet and just got to work. I don’t think I was terrified. That’s from all those years of episodic television: that’s the job, so you just do the job.
MATT: You went from not knowing if they would make a pilot, not knowing they’d pick it up and let you make a whole season, and not knowing how the public would receive it or whether audiences would respond, to having the hottest show on TV. That’s quite a change in fortunes.
A: The New York Times was saying, “It just may be the greatest work of American popular culture of the last quarter century.”4
D: Exactly, right. That’s crazy.
M: The New York Post columnist Jack Newfield did a sit-down with you.5 I remember thinking, “Oh, it’s official, David Chase is a big deal.” It was like reading an Esquire interview with Francis Ford Coppola in about 1979.
D: I remember doing the Jack Newfield interview. Yeah, it was a real kick, and I began to warm to the whole idea of doing serious television. Then I did get to the point where I wanted it to go [away], and by the time the last season came around, that was enough.
A: Each year when a season ended, there would be speculation on the outside: “When is it going to be the last season?” and “When does David want to end it?” Were you not sure of when you wanted to end the show, or did you have a better idea?
D: Here’s what would go on: I got into the frame of mind that unless the show was going to be done exactly the way I wanted it done—and that includes money [to make the show], and my money, too—it would be okay if we were canceled.
A: So if the show had ended with season four, with Tony and Carmela separated, and the last image was Little Paulie blasting Dean Martin at the lawyer on the dock, you’d have been okay with that?
D: Yeah. That’s a great ending, actually.
A: Besides Big Pussy being a traitor, the other big idea that year is Janice and Richie. Where did those characters come from, and who did you look at other than Aida and David to play them?
D: The only one I remember is Annabella [Sciorra], who we looked at for Janice. As far as Richie’s concerned, there were quite a few guys.
M: What was it about Aida Turturro that made you think, “This is Janice?”
D: She’s just a miraculous actress, she really is. She gets so deep into it. Like, if there’s a sad thing, Aida can get to crying and it’s just not a problem. And it’s so believable, because she really is crying!
M: Offscreen, is Aida like Janice at all?
D: She’s not mean like Janice at all. In fact, she’s very effusive and she laughs a lot.
You know what it was, though? In talking to her, and seeing her read and everything like that, I saw my Italian aunts. I saw my father’s sisters, who weren’t really like that, but they were like that enough.
A: Janice had been mentioned a couple times in the first season. We’d seen her in the flashbacks to the 1960s as Tony’s older sister. Why did you bring the character into the present and add her to the regular cast?
D: I don’t know. Maybe she was there because we didn’t know how much we could push our luck with Livia, and we needed another thorn in the family. I think that’s how it came about.
With every one of those new actors, there was just no doubt about it once we read them. David Proval is not a big guy. He’s a small guy, and obviously no threat to Jim Gandolfini. But there was just something so threatening about that guy on-screen, where there isn’t at all in real life.
A: Some people look back on season two and think, “This is the season of Richie Aprile and he comes in and he’s the antagonist.” But he dies in the second-to-last episode, and he’s not even killed by Tony, whereas Pussy is reintroduced right after the Sinatra montage, and the finale is all about him. Did you view Pussy as the more important threat to Tony that year?
D: I’d say a different kind of threat. I probably saw him, in a sense, as the more important story, whether he was the bigger threat or not. Having one of your best friends go through that change was really low-hanging fruit, and we went for that a lot. I mean, that story was very, very important—especially because Vinnie was such a good actor. I just loved working with him and letting him do his thing.
A: Janice shooting Richie is a famous Sopranos moment because it was so unexpected in the timing of it, who did it, and how it happened. Where did that idea come from?
D: We were sitting in the writer’s room one day and I said, “How about if Janice does it in episode twelve?” I was thinking about their relationship and the whole thing. That makes me sound gimmicky—like, “Oh, they’ll never see this coming.” It wasn’t about that. It was about, “Oh, this will be really good. If Aida does it, this will be really good.”
M: What would’ve happened to Richie if Janice hadn’t shot him?
D: I guess he would’ve gone another season or something. I don’t know what he would’ve done in that season. I didn’t think about it that way.
M: This might be a good time to clarify something I’ve been hearing for almost twenty years, which is that Richie Aprile and Ralphie Cifaretto are the same guy, and if Richie had continued, he would’ve turned into Ralphie. Is there any truth to that at all, or is it just something that fans made up?
D: That’s something the fans made up. If that’s the way it seems, I have to plead guilty.
M: So you never seriously considered keeping Richie going until season three, season four, whatever?
D: I never thought about things that way. I thought, “We’re doing this season now.” Partly because of the way HBO conducted themselves, I never knew whether we were coming back or not.
M: It’s so interesting to hear you say that, because there’s this perception of The Sopranos after season one not just as a network-realigning show, but as a medium-realigning show, and one that HBO was willing to back up the Brinks truck to keep.
D: Yeah, that surprised me, and maybe I’m wrong—maybe I’m hot-headed and I have to be pissed off at somebody, it could be that—but it always seemed that it took forever for them to push the button. People would ask me if the show was coming back, and I’d say, “I don’t know.”
A: You’ve said you weren’t satisfied with how the Italy episode turned out. Why not?
D: I wasn’t happy with the cast. It just didn’t seem real. Annalisa did not really seem like a Mob housewife, or a Mob wife, and in the end, she was just too sexy, too young.
M: Too much of a fantasy?
D: Yeah, another one of those. That was basically it.
A: I remember when I heard they were going to Italy I thought, “Oh, this will be epic, the Mob show goes to Italy,” and the episode is, by design, not that at all.
D: Yes. In reality, those guys don’t really travel. They don’t really leave their neighborhoods. Maybe they go to Florida or Vegas. I wanted to do more what their trip to Italy would be like. Ma
ybe it’s because we had too much fun making it, that’s another thing it could have been.
I should look at it again, maybe it’s not what I think it was.
[Pause] Nah, I don’t want to look at it again.
A: What made you want to add Furio to Tony’s crew?
D: I believe it came about because we saw him in that episode and we wanted to bring another guy into the crew, someone who was a tough badass, and we remembered him.
A: But Federico wasn’t even an actor, he was an artist.
D: Incredible, yeah. I mean, I bought everything he did. I had a lot of luck with people who weren’t actors. I’m marveling to myself that we had such good non-professional actors on that show.
A: You also got a lot of mileage out of Peter Bogdanovich, who I think had done some acting before.
D: He studied with Stella Adler. We had used him in Northern Exposure, which is why I remembered him. And Joe Gannascoli, whatever else you believe about him, was really something as Vito. I wonder what it is. Maybe Italians are just natural thespians.
A: In season two, Christopher’s screenwriting ambitions started giving you an excuse to do episodes like “D-Girl,” where he interacts with Hollywood people playing themselves, as well as the Alicia Witt character, and Tim Daly as the writer who they paired him up with. Was that fun to be able to take the piss out of the business?
D: Oh my God, it was delightful! My favorite bit was when Tim Daly tried to turn in his Emmy for money at the pawn shop! They were like, “Well, an Oscar, maybe—but fifteen bucks!” [Laughs]
A: [The Webistics pump-and-dump scheme] introduces us to Matt and Sean, the only people lower on the totem pole than Chris at that point, and probably the only people dumber than him. Sean has to keep going to the bathroom every time they’re on a heist! [Laughs]
D: It’s a phenomenon! You know that, right? There’s guys who’d go in for a robbery and they’d have to take a shit!
M: Any theory as to why that happens?
D: More than just nerves, or having to leave a talisman? I’ve heard both of those theories. But it’s a thing.
A: “From Where to Eternity” is the first Sopranos script by Michael Imperioli. How did he end up becoming an occasional contributor to the show?
D: We were always looking for new people, and I saw Summer of Sam, which he cowrote, so I thought, “Well, let’s give him a try.” He’s a smart guy. We all liked him.
A: That’s a memorable episode just because it’s one of the first times the wiseguys are really confronted with these questions of Hell and evil and what do they do, and Melfi just comes at Tony about it.
D: You know, that storyline was based on a true story from my hometown. It was the second time that I used it on a show. I used the basic story in The Rockford Files for “Jersey Bounce.”
There was this guy in my hometown in Caldwell, Michael, a house painter who was one of those Johnny Boy types from Mean Streets, only worse than that—just a fucking asshole. He would get in fights with people. Like, in a nice restaurant, a crowded restaurant, he’d look at a guy across the room and be like, “What the fuck are you looking at?” And the guy would just be eating. If he said something, he’d go over to him and start trouble. Even if the guy looked away, same thing would happen. He was just a bad, bad fucking guy. There was a concert at Montclair State and he got up on stage in the middle of the concert and was fucking around, took an instrument away from somebody.
But he had a girlfriend and he beat her up, and the girlfriend was the sister of a really low-level mobster. There was another kid in the town who knew him—two other guys knew him, and they wanted to get the attention of the Mob and become mobsters. So they got Michael to come over and give a bid about painting the garage while the parents were out. They were going to kill him to win the love of this low-level mobster.
So he came over to the garage. And they shot him in the back of the head, put him in the trunk of the car, and took him to Newark Airport.
And then they began to worry about the fact that he might be discovered, so they went back to Newark Airport, and they were going to take the body to Eagle Rock Reservation to bury him. But they went back to the airport like a month later, and they got the car and they were driving it out and they got caught with the supplies to use for burial. And that’s where the idea for “Long Term Parking” came from.
A: You eventually used every part of that story! In season two, Carmela flirts with a house painter!
M: Speaking of Vic: eventually Carmela has sex with a man who isn’t Tony, but it takes her until season five. Did you ever have discuss having it happen sooner?
D: We did have those conversations, but—how can I put this? There were always some sort of personal issues having to do with Carmela and what she would do, or not, or what she was going to do. I was in conflict with Robin [Green] very often about Carmela and what she was doing or what she would be capable of, what she should be, and I would get very frustrated with the whole argument, and finally I was like, “Fuck it, I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
And I began to grow concerned, after five seasons, about that aspect of Carmela. In the same way I got concerned later about how long it took Tony to kill Christopher, I felt that way about Carmela taking a lover. I thought, “This should’ve happened a long time ago, what is she, a dishrag?” or something like that.
M: Was there a sense of whether it would be realistic for a Mob wife to step out?
D: We considered that all the time, and asked everyone we could about it. Most people said “no,” but it’s hard for me to believe that that’s the case.
A: She never actually sleeps with another man until Mr. Wegler, and that’s during the separation, so it’s not an affair at that point, except as far as Father Phil is concerned. But in season four, for instance, was there ever a point at which you were going to have Carmela and Furio consummate their feelings for one another?
D: It came up. We did contemplate it. But we didn’t, and looking back on it now, I’m sorry we didn’t do it. But who knows? What happened happened, and if we’d gone down that road, we wouldn’t have had “Whitecaps.”
M: My guess was that it didn’t happen sooner because she has a very strong guilt about cheating, and she doesn’t want to be like her husband.
D: Yeah, and she’s afraid she’s gonna go to Hell when she dies.
A: Vic Musto might’ve slept with her until he realized how dangerous her husband was.
D: We figured that anybody who knew who her husband was would react like that. Wegler was outside of that world.
A: We talked before about “Isabella” helping Tony come to a revelation about Livia. A good chunk of “Funhouse” is Tony having dreams while suffering explosive diarrhea, and the dreams force him to finally admit to himself that Pussy’s a rat and he needs to go. How confident did you feel, at that stage of the series, that you could build such a big moment out of Tony’s subconscious?
D: Confident enough. I thought about, how are we going to get Tony to find out that it was Pussy? And I said to myself, “I just don’t want to do a procedural, him going around from place to place, asking questions with a pad and pencil.” And then I said to myself, “It’s totally believable that he would know this somewhere already,” and I thought, if things had a reality to them, I never question it. And I believe the psychology of that, and I believe that if it had come up with Melfi, she would have maybe enlightened him about that. If things were based on real dynamics, I never doubted it. And I always felt we were safe. I can’t think of anything else. There were times things were so outrageous, you’d think, “Is that real?”
A: There was no way Pussy could live once Tony found out, was there?
D: No, unless he was sent to prison for some reason.
A: The season was always heading toward his death no matter what?
D: Yeah. Our technical advisor, Dan Castleman, told us about the fact that Stockholm syndrome played a big part in Mob–police
relationships. Mobsters, once they flip, they become real junior G-men, and that’s what we loved.
M: Like in Pussy’s relationship with Skip Lipari.
D: Yeah. Pussy was always going a little bit too far.
Session Three:
“I shout things at them in the privacy of my house.”
Goodbye Livia and Tracee, hello Ralphie and Gloria
ALAN: You had to reconfigure the entire series as a result of [Nancy Marchand’s death]. When you found out, do you remember, beyond the grief over Nancy, what you were thinking about in terms of, “What do we do now with the show?”
DAVID: Sure, I did think that.6
A: In the Livia funeral episode there’s the digital Livia, and I believe her hair is different in every single shot she winds up in, because you had to take bits and pieces from all over. Why did you decide you wanted to do that, and in hindsight, is it something you would’ve done, knowing what the result would be?
[Chase hangs his head and rubs his brow]
D: I would not have done it over again. I would try it again now, but things are different now. I convinced myself it was going to be fine, even after I saw it. And, dare I say it, it was a mistake.
A: Their last significant interaction is at the end of season two where he storms out of the house and trips on the steps and falls and she laughs at him. In hindsight, that’s a very good final interaction between the two of them.
D: That just didn’t occur to me. I thought, “Oh God, I gotta play her off.”
A: How much do you think the show changed as a result of Livia no longer being a physical part of it?
D: I don’t think it changed tonally. None of the relationships were affected by it. Tony was affected by it for a short time. She was an asset, so we lost an asset. But I don’t think it changed the direction of the show at all.
A: With Gloria, Tony realizes at the end of the relationship that she’s the ghost of his mother coming to haunt him. Would that character have existed in a season which actually featured Livia, or was she someone you came up with afterward?
The Sopranos Sessions Page 51
