The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  D: Really?

  M: Yeah, because on some level, they all want out and they can’t get out. Even Tony. I think that’s what a lot of his coma stuff is about: his realizing he can’t get out of this life he’s in. Even Carmela’s trip to Paris has a touch of that. None of these folks can escape.

  D: Well, sadness is definitely a part of it for sure. Intentionally. It’s not like I said, “Let’s do something really sad,” but that would be the feeling. There is something sad about Tony Soprano. For one thing, there’s something sad about Jim, a big guy with those eyes. I think in real life, there was something sad going on there. I think that’s maybe why people liked him so much—he was like a big child or a big puppy dog, in a way. There was something sad about him, period, and something sad about Tony Soprano because you knew he was a gangster, and an efficient gangster, and yet he wasn’t happy. In fact, he was very unhappy. He was depressed. Of course it would be sad. The depression was also used for comedy. I think most Mafia movies would not have that be part of it.

  A: In terms of what Matt’s saying about people’s inability to get out, the season opens with the Eugene story and his escape is at the end of a noose because it’s the only way he can help his family. That informs everything that follows.

  M: And Vito makes a physical escape, but then he comes back both because of his family and because the Mob is the only life he knows.

  And Paris is a part of this idea, too. Carmela gets out of that life for a bit, and just for a moment, it gives her perspective.

  I remember hearing from viewers who were really, really not happy about that whole Paris trip. They didn’t understand what it was about.

  D: I don’t understand why that was. They didn’t say that when Tony went to Italy, right? I always wonder, what did people want? [Do] people not understand it? Or is it that they just don’t get it? People will accept that stuff in a horror movie, a ghost story, a supernatural thing. Some people who don’t like it here, they don’t like dreams. I don’t know why they don’t like that.

  A: I think the show was so many different things in one show, but there was definitely a segment of the audience who just wanted a Mob show. They wanted whacking of the week, asshole du jour, just that. Any time you steered too far away from that, they said, “This is not okay. This is not what we signed up for,” even though the very first scene of the show is him in a psychiatrist’s office.

  D: You know what it must be, about the audience’s resistance to dreams and stuff like that? It’s like, you’re presenting to me a fictional world, and I buy into that fictional world. It’s not real, and I know that. And you’re now telling me that there’s a world beyond that? If I buy into that fictional world, the Sopranos universe, now you’re telling me I have to go to some other level? Then it means what’s gone before is not real, and I want to think what’s gone before is real. I’ve got to get to the verisimilitude portion of everything, otherwise what am I watching this for? I’ve got to believe it.

  M: I hear that a lot. The fictional representation of the character is the reality that the audience decides to accept. When something is revealed to have been a dream, they think, “Oh, then it didn’t really happen.” And they feel like you wasted their time.

  But I’m not sure I understand the resistance, considering how many scenes, sequences, and entire storylines on The Sopranos have a dreamlike quality—where, for a moment, you may question how real something is, and the show doesn’t necessarily resolve it. Almost the entirety of “Pine Barrens,” with the stuff in the woods, feels that way.

  D: Dreamlike.

  M: Right. Sometimes what’s happening on the screen is not a dream, per se, but there are several points where you think, “Is this really happening to these characters, or is it somebody’s dream?”

  D: Yeah. I think if we didn’t have dreams, as a species, we wouldn’t bother with the movies. I think they’re so related. And movies don’t have to have dreams in them to be dreamlike. Movies are dreamlike! That’s the great thing about them, and TV. Citizen Kane, if that’s not a dream . . . like, Denise and I watched Vertigo the other night. Those movies aren’t dreamlike? I mean. . . .

  A: Speaking of dreamlike, when Tony B appears—or Steve Buscemi, if it’s not meant to be Tony B—in the alternate reality at the end, why did you choose him to be the one who tries to get Tony to put down his briefcase and enter the house?

  D: You say there were a whole bunch of deceased characters we could’ve used? Why not his cousin, his boyhood friend? We had a hard time settling on that and who it was going to be and why. I remember that was difficult. We knew it had to be somebody from the Land of the Dead, and Tony had killed him, for one thing. Also, Steve was one of the seriously better actors we were working with, a great actor.

  Plus, I don’t know. It’s just like, if you’re close to Heaven or the afterlife and you see Steve Buscemi coming toward your car . . .

  A: It’s not good!

  D: No!

  A: If Chris Albrecht had not come to you and said, “You need to start thinking about wrapping it up,” would you have gone on a number of more years past what you did?

  D: No, I probably would’ve ended it sooner.

  A: Really?

  D: I think so. Once he said that, in a way, I was being given an alternative: “Do you want to do this or not?” So I said “Yes.” If he hadn’t come to me and said that I probably would’ve ended it some other season and said, “Let me go off and make movies now, that’s my dream.” His statement kind of gave me a structure, an endpoint that I could see.

  A: But you said you didn’t try to plan too far ahead. When you said there was an endpoint, you don’t mean Tony at Holsten’s, you just meant, “I think I have two more years’ worth of stories in me.”

  D: Yes. I think I had that death scene around two years before the end. I remember talking with Mitch Burgess about it, but it wasn’t—it was slightly different. Tony was going to get called to a meeting with Johnny Sack in Manhattan, and he was going to go back through the Lincoln Tunnel for this meeting, and it was going to go black there and you never saw him again as he was heading back, the theory being that something bad happens to him at the meeting. But we didn’t do that.

  M: You realize, of course, that you just referred to that as a death scene.

  [A long pause follows.]

  D: Fuck you guys.

  [Matt and Alan explode with laughter. After a moment, Chase joins in for a good thirty seconds.]

  D: But I changed my mind over time. I didn’t want to do a straight death scene. I didn’t want you to feel like, “Oh, he’s meeting with Johnny Sack and he’s going to get killed.” That’s the truth of it.

  M: I’m stunned. . . . my brain just blew up.

  A: Well, in the Director’s Guild of America magazine story you did a couple of years ago, you come almost to the point of saying that anyway. You talk about how the feeling of the scene is “death could be coming for us at any moment.”

  D: That’s the truth. That’s all I ever wanted to say.

  A: So the point of the scene is not “they whacked him in the diner?” It’s that he could have been whacked?

  D: Yes, that he could have been whacked in the diner. We all could be whacked in a diner. That was the point of the scene. He could have been whacked.

  M: Since we’ve gone down the rabbit hole here, I’m curious about what you meant to say in the ending, and what you were able to articulate.

  D: What did I mean to say? I meant to say that time here is precious, and it could end at any moment, and somehow, love is the only defense against this very, very cold universe. That’s what I meant to say.

  M: You originally had him going through the tunnel, and if you’d shot it that way, the implication would’ve been that wherever he was going, he got killed. Clearly the diner is an extension of that idea in some way.

  D: No, it’s not, because I went away from that.

  M: So the initial impulse was to kill him,
but then you pulled away from that impulse?

  D: If you were producing that [tunnel scene], you’d say, “Well, obviously he’s a gangster, and his death means the end of the show, so he should die. Anyone would, so he should go through that.” But in the end, I decided I didn’t want to do that. Otherwise I would’ve filmed him going to the meeting with Johnny.

  M: You know there are people who analyze the ending like it’s the Kennedy assassination. If somebody sits looking at the last four minutes of the show, within the totality of the seven seasons of the show, and says, “Okay, Tony got killed in the diner, I’m going to show you the math that proves it,” what do you say to that? Do you say they’re wrong? Are they incorrect?

  D: I don’t know if that’s my job. They’ve interpreted the scene that way. That should be a good thing, that there’s different interpretations.

  M: So, if somebody says Tony got killed in the diner, they’re not wrong? They’re not incorrect?

  [Chase doesn’t answer that question]

  A: One of the reasons that I, for a long time, was very ardently, “Tony’s obviously alive,” is the idea that in the narrative of the show at that point, nobody wants him dead. Did you think through this idea much of, if Members Only Guy is actually there to kill him, who is he and why, or was that not a concern?

  D: Not a concern. There’s always someone out there who hates a guy like this.

  M: So, in theory, somebody else could kill him. There’s always somebody who could kill Tony.

  D: There you go. There’s always somebody who could kill us, any of us.

  A: In hindsight, do you think the cut to black wound up being counterproductive to the larger point you were trying to make? Is there anything you could’ve done differently?

  D: I don’t think it was counterproductive. Of course I could’ve done things differently, but I don’t think it was counterproductive, no.

  But I will say this: it was not my intention to create a ten-year long puzzlement about this. I never thought it would create that much of a stir. I thought people would be excited like the rest of it: they like this show, they’ll get excited by it, they’ll like this. I never thought, “Oh, they’ll be talking about it for ten years because I want them to talk about it for ten years.” And the other thing about it is, as a corollary, no matter what I say about it, I always dig myself in deeper.

  M: What does it feel like to have a show that runs eight years, and then you’re watching the very last episode?

  D: You become very aware of it, like, “Am I really going to miss this thing?” But at that time, I was never fed up with The Sopranos, but I’d had enough. So that’s kind of what I was mostly fed up with—I just didn’t want to do it again. And you’re always just wondering what people are thinking as it’s going on. But I wasn’t there [in the United States], I was in Paris, six hours ahead.

  A: When you and I spoke the day after the finale, you didn’t want to explain anything.

  D: You were the only guy I talked to.

  A: Right, and you didn’t want to do that interview, and you said, “I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there.”

  D: That’s what I said and that’s what I should’ve stuck to! But as people have continued to argue about this whole thing, I’ve tried to . . . they’ve asked me, “What did you mean by this?” and I’ve told them, but it’s not enough! They ask me, “What did you mean by this?” and I tell them, and that doesn’t satisfy them. I really realize they only want one answer: Did he die or not? I’ve had people say, “Come on, you can say that! Yes or no? It’s really simple, that’s all we’re asking you. Did he die or not?”

  A: But I think part of that is also because, with all due respect, it lingered for so long. You went quite a while without saying anything, and when you started saying things, it was in the wake of this whole Zapruder-ing of the final scene and all these obsessive analyses. People in a vacuum had developed these theories, and they were committed to them.

  But reading that DGA article22 was the first time I felt, “Okay, this is clearly what it is.”

  M: When Alan and I watched the finale again together, I said, “Oh, it’s interesting that the two repeating sounds in that final scene are the Journey song and the ringing bell,” and one of the most famous poems in the English language is John Donne saying, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls.” I felt like it was saying, “You, the person watching this show, your number’s going to come up sooner or later.”

  D: Well you know, the bell was introduced at the lake. And what is the purpose of a bell? In the Buddhist religion, the bell calls you back to being here now. “Bing!” Oh yeah, that’s right. “Bing!” Here we are.

  A: The first episode of season six is called “Members Only.” Vito makes fun of the jacket that Eugene’s wearing. Was it an explicit callback to have the guy in the diner wearing the same jacket, or did that just seem like a guy who could be in the Mob?

  D: Yeah, a guy who could be in the Mob, or not.

  A: I remember that guy we’ve talked about who wrote the 20,000-word essay which he insists proves once and for all Tony is dead and you cannot convince him otherwise.23

  D: I never read the whole thing.

  A: Well, he goes on to say that one of the key pieces of evidence is the way you break point-of-view in the scene. You see Tony in the doorway, he’s looking at the diner, then he’s in the booth.

  But you break POV other times in that episode: when he goes to see Junior, and when he sees Janice. And, in “Employee of the Month,” when Melfi has the dream, you break POV in the exact same way—she’s standing in the doorway of her office, and then she’s at the vending machine. And there’s all these references to dreams in the finale itself, well before the song that’s playing when he walks into the diner.

  D: A lot. . . . The influence for that [filmmaking technique] was 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s when Dave Bowman is in the pod, and then the pod lands in that hotel room or whatever, and you hear the whooshing sound, and he sees himself outside—then he’s outside, and then he sees himself in the mirror. That just blew my mind. I was high on mescaline, but it still blew my mind!

  What happens in The Sopranos is there’s less and less time between Tony and his POV, and what I was trying to say was that we put ourselves in these positions. We put ourselves in these scenes. Nothing happens by accident. We are the engineers of our destiny.

  Like, for example, when he came up the stairs and he saw Janice, it took a certain amount of time before he went over and walked to her. There’s less walking with Junior, and then in the last scene, there’s no walking at all. It was all supposed to be about, “We are responsible for our own destiny.” That’s what that was supposed to mean, what I was supposed to get to.

  A: And you played a song about dreams, but then you get to—

  D: “All That You Dream” by Little Feat.

  A: Yes, it’s playing as he walks into the diner for the first time. Then he starts looking through the jukebox and next to “Don’t Stop Believin’” is “Any Way You Want It.”

  D: Complete accident!

  A: Okay! But given the argument over whether he’s dead or alive, it’s perfect!

  You said you wrestled for a long time with what the song was going to be, and also considered Al Green’s “Love and Happiness.” Why one versus the other? What would the scene have been with that versus this?

  D: God knows. I just felt that this was better. What is the thing? “Strangers waiting, up and down the boulevard.” It kind of felt like the show, in a way. Even though a lot of people think that song’s a piece of shit, I don’t happen to agree.

  For people who say, “The Sopranos just got darker and darker,” I would say, “It ended with ‘Don’t Stop Believin’.” I was just reading something from The Atlantic that said, “David Chase Just Ruined the Finale of The Sopranos,” because I’d said some kind of thing about how what I was trying to say was that life is very shor
t and love is the only defense, so don’t stop believing. The guy in The Atlantic said I ruined everything and I was better off when I kept my mouth shut—which he’s probably right about!

  A: What was the last scene of “Made in America” that you shot?

  D: Holsten’s diner.24

  A: What was the overall atmosphere on the set like as you said goodbye to people one by one over the course of that episode?

  D: It was very emotional, and I remember Silvio didn’t die of course, but he was comatose in bed, and I remember when we called a wrap on Stevie, Jim came to me and said, “Well, that’s the end of you and me working with a rock ’n’ roll star.” [Laughs]

  A: How was Jim doing throughout this?

  D: He was pretty good. He knew he could smell the barn, or whatever you call it. He was okay. Who would remember that? Ilene would remember more than I would. Terry, too.25

  A: Do you recall if anyone was particularly emotional?

  D: Somebody was, but I can’t remember who it was. It wasn’t me. [Laughs] No, I was emotional. But somebody was emotional.

  It was weird, when Michael left. That was a weird feeling for everybody. He was so much a part of the show, so there was a feeling of, “How can this be happening?” Also, I think it was a beacon saying, “Okay boys, you’re almost done here.” Just the fact that Michael and Christopher wouldn’t be around was a hard one to take.

  A: And the atmosphere as you were filming at Holsten’s?

  D: It just felt like another average day. It was all about the work, you know? I missed one of the final days. I think I didn’t direct Meadow with the car. I went back to LA to start work on the cutting. Like I said before, I’d had enough of The Sopranos by then. I wasn’t “disgusted” with it like “I couldn’t take anymore,” but I’d had enough of it. I wasn’t particularly sad, but when Jim said that thing about, “That’s the end of you and me working with a rock and roll star,” I felt it then. I felt it then, and I felt it about Jim, because I also felt, “That’s the end of you and me working together.”