The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  M: That final close-up of Tony . . . do you think he’s worried that he’s going to die at that moment?

  D: No. No, I don’t think so.

  M: I’ve watched that scene so many times and there’s tremendous dread and suspense in the scene itself, but I don’t sense any from him necessarily.

  A: What direction did you give Jim?

  D: I don’t think I gave him any direction. I don’t think he needed it.

  A: We’re paranoid, but he’s not playing it as if Tony is paranoid.

  D: Not at all.

  M: It’s just so fascinating to me, David, that originally there was this implication that you were going to kill Tony, and you backed away from that.

  D: I said he was going to a fatal meeting. But you didn’t see the meeting. In that scheme for the end, he was in the Lincoln Tunnel going to New York toward a meeting, but you never saw him at the meeting and never saw him get killed.

  M: But again, I’m not trying to be Dr. Melfi here, but you just said, “fatal meeting!” It could have been a “fateful” meeting, but you said “fatal.”

  D: Maybe “fateful”’s the better word. I never thought of that.

  M: That theoretical Lincoln Tunnel ending feels like a mirror image of the opening credits.

  D: It is. It was supposed to be the credits turned around.

  M: And there you have an image that anybody who was raised on a diet of gangster movies would interpret as, “Oh, Tony is going to his death—it’s the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s what happens when you die. It’s a way of saying ‘we killed him’ even though you never show him being killed.”

  D: I don’t see it that way. Light at the end of the tunnel means a solution to a problem.

  A: Salvation. “I can see it at the end of the tunnel,” his problems going away.

  M: That’s true, but people who have near-death experiences . . .

  D: They describe the bright light?

  M: Yeah, a tunnel of light, like the end of All That Jazz, where they literalize the idea and add music, you know?

  D: Right, right. I mean, I never had an ending where you saw him dead or saw him get killed. It was never on the menu.

  A: I remember one of the things I’d read all the time were these conspiracy theories from readers like, “This must’ve happened, that must’ve happened,” and I’d say, “No, that’s not how the show works. If something important is happening, we see it,” which I think is one of the reasons I wound up getting so hung up on the last scene. The storytelling mode is pretty omniscient most of the time.

  D: It was, you’re right. I was a big believer that people should have all the facts. The audience should have all the facts.

  M: Except when it’s not important that they have them.

  D: Right, right.

  M: You said you had this original idea where Tony goes through the Lincoln Tunnel to meet Johnny in New York, and it’s not explicitly intended as a death scene but some people might interpret it that way. You kind of Freudian-slipped it there when you described it, but you said you pulled back from the idea later. But I wonder, is it possible that the tendency of people to want to describe the Holsten’s ending as a death scene is a product of you having grown up watching gangster movies where they kill the guy at the end?

  D: Yeah.

  M: In other words, even if you don’t want to do the standard gangster movie ending, you’re still subconsciously doing things that suggest, “We killed him”—you know what I mean?

  D: It’s possible! I do know I was always thinking about James Cagney on the steps of the cathedral in The Roaring Twenties, whenever I was thinking about what we were not going to do at the end. I thought about it a lot, so maybe the toxin was in there.

  M: The end of this show is one of my favorite endings of anything, because it forces people to tell you who they are when they talk about it.

  D: Like a Rorschach? Give me an example.

  M: I think that my fascination with the formal properties of film and TV makes me inclined to think that that ending is about the relationship between the audience and the show, and that’s something that may not have been foremost in your mind. That tells you something about me, that my mind would immediately go there.

  D: And it could tell you something about me: that I wasn’t thinking about that, and maybe I should have been.

  The fact of the matter is, so much of this is just instinct. It’s not forward-thinking. It’s not like, “Oh, I’ll plan this, and it will mean this, and it will do this.” It’s just instinctual. Maybe that’s why art works!

  Why is the Mona Lisa considered the greatest painting in the world?

  A: Because people can’t decide what her expression means.

  M: Yeah. And the painting inspired one of the great pop songs, “Mona Lisa,” which doesn’t offer any answers, either.

  D: No, it doesn’t.

  M: The lyrics to the song “Mona Lisa” are a series of questions with no answers.

  D: Right, right. Interesting.

  A: When you were editing the scene, did it ever end on a different point in the Journey song?

  D: No.

  A: It was important for it to stop on “Stop?”

  D: “Don’t stop.” Yeah.

  Session Seven:

  “It was very emotional.”

  The end of the road for Christopher, Bobby, and The Sopranos itself; life after “death.”

  ALAN: When you reconvened the writers for these last nine episodes, what did you think was still important to tell about the story?

  DAVID: I felt it was a good idea to concentrate on characters other than Tony and Carmela: Paulie, Johnny Sack, AJ—and the last episode is really about Junior, in a way. They were all about a particular character.

  A: You start the year with “Soprano Home Movies,” which, like “Whitecaps,” is another small and theatrical episode. Why did you want to kick things off that way?

  D: I was thinking it wouldn’t cost too much. [Laughs] We thought it was going to be a bottle show! It ended up costing us a fortune.

  A: After the fight, Tony sends Bobby to kill the French Canadian guy, knowing Bobby’s never killed anybody, and that his father never wanted this for him. Is Tony doing this to punish him because Bobby showed him up?

  D: Partly that, and partly because in the Mafia, you’re supposed to make your bones, have a killing to your credit. That’s all good for security. If you’ve committed a murder, you’ll be careful about what you say to who, what you tell the police and what you don’t tell them, because it’ll come back to bite you in the ass.

  A: Was Bobby even a made guy?

  D: I never thought about it. Probably not, no. He hadn’t done any of that.

  MATT: Can you talk a little about Steven Schirripa?

  D: He came to casting, and I don’t think he’d done much acting before. He managed a nightclub in Vegas, and maybe he’d done a few things before coming to us, but that was mainly what he was doing. He came in through casting, and he just had a great expression. He’s very calm, but easily touchy as Bobby. Tony gave him a lot of shit. They made fun of him.

  Having Janice and Bobby play off against each other was a great thing, because she was so different from him. I’m sure he was kind of scared of her, in a way. But he never appeared that way. He was a perfect husband for her: big and cuddly. They were great.

  A: “Remember When” has Junior and Carter in the mental hospital as the subplot to Tony and Paulie.

  D: That’s one of my favorite episodes. Terry, again, wrote a magnificent script. All-time. It’s the whole mental hospital aspect of it, and the story of Junior and that kid. It’s so outlandish that he’d become a mentor to Ken Leung, that they’d pal around together and snicker at everybody else. It had this kind of piquancy to it that I just loved.

  A: Junior is first diagnosed with dementia late in season four, then he goes rogue early in season five, and there’s different points over the next few years where
the meds are working or not working.

  D: According to our needs.

  A: How did you figure out when he’d be sharp and when he wouldn’t be?

  D: The stories all interlace anyway, so if he was in a thing and there was something going on with someone else, and he needed to be either opposed to it or unaware of it, it just came according to the needs of the rest of the script.

  A: And then, the last scene of the finale before Holsten’s is Tony and Junior at the mental hospital. It’s so sad and so beautiful. Tony gets a lot of farewells in the finale: one final scene with Junior, one with Janice, one with Paulie, but that one in particular—how important was it to have a final reckoning between the two bosses?

  D: Really important. More so than just two bosses, that was really a father-son relationship, so you really needed that.

  A: In addition to killing off Johnny Sack, “Stage 5” has the premiere of Cleaver. How closely did you want it to resemble the show itself?

  D: We did, quite a bit. . . . We were watching Born Yesterday, and with the bathrobe and the bellowing, I thought, “This is amazing.” I thought there was a story to be told where they make fun of Tony about Born Yesterday.

  M: There’s a lot of what academics would call “intertextuality,” where the text of the TV show talks to these other texts, particularly movies and TV shows that inspired it. . . . Cleaver is particularly fascinating because it’s like a dream—

  [A restaurant patron passes our table on the way to the bathroom door, which is located directly behind Matt’s seat.]

  PATRON: [to David Chase] I was just thinking, this reminds me of a scene from a movie—your movie!

  [Everyone laughs. The patron enters the bathroom and closes the door.]

  D: Talk about intertextuality.

  A: That guy’s going to come out and shoot Matt in the head.

  M: My daughter’s outside, parking the car.

  A: There’s a lot of Christopher this season up until “Kennedy and Heidi.” At what point did you realize that death was where this was going for him?

  D: Before the season started. Not every season, but there was a point where I was thinking, “What does Tony put up with this guy for?” We like him, and he’s a great character on the show, but he’s such a risky proposition.

  A: How much money does Tony actually have?

  D: We asked Dan Castleman, our technical advisor, and I think he figured $1.5 million or something like that.

  M: That’s less than I would’ve thought.

  D: It is.

  M: Are there any Mob guys who were known to be good at handling their money?

  D: I think there were, yeah—like, they invested it well.

  A: When Tony assures Carmela that there’s money in overseas accounts to care for her if he dies, was there actual money for them?

  D: Not much. Overseas accounts means like the Cayman Islands or something.

  M: Did Tony always have a gambling problem, or was that something he developed late in the show’s run?

  D: All those guys have gambling problems. Well, I don’t know about every one of them, but it’s really, really common. John Gotti had a gambling problem.

  M: How many of the Mob characters on the show do you think have a gambling problem?

  D: Probably all of them.

  A: Why did you kill Christopher off the way you did? He’s trapped in the car in the ditch, and all Tony’s got to do is reach out and pinch, and he does it, like it’s almost too easy for him to do.

  D: I’ll say one thing about that: I was always surprised that most people didn’t get the fact that Tony saw the baby chair in the back and he said to himself, “That’s enough. This guy’s gonna kill his own kid, or my daughter could be in the car with him and he’s gonna kill her.” It didn’t just come from anger or enough already with this wacko.

  But why the pinch? Because when we were on Rockford we talked about this all the time. Legally, there are three things that constitute murder evidence: motive, weapon, and opportunity. In that case, we had motive, no weapon because he could’ve shot him but didn’t, and opportunity, and that opportunity was too great for him to pass up. He was dying anyway, so why not speed it up a little bit?

  A: After Christopher’s funeral, Tony goes to Vegas, hooks up with Christopher’s girlfriend out there, they drop peyote. They wind up in the desert, and the episode ends with the two of them watching the sun rise and Tony screams out, “I GET IT!” What did he get?

  D: He got the fact that Christopher was a negative influence in his life. Christopher spiritually corrupted him. He started to win after he was dead. That’s what he “got.” But it’s psychedelics, so I’m sure there’s a lot of other stuff he was getting at the same time.

  M: That’s fascinating, because one of these recurring motifs in the show is Tony being close to a breakthrough and the audience understanding what that could be, and Melfi not only understanding what that could be but pushing him toward it, but the epiphanies he comes to are smaller and much more self-centered ones. That even happens in the pilot.

  D: It’s all about him. It is, it’s his therapy, but you’d think it would have something to do with him in relation to other people: his children, his wife, but it wasn’t. It was just about, “I’m a victim.”

  M: And also, just from a moral, spiritual point of view, it’s like, well, maybe one reason he’s unhappy is that he makes his living killing and stealing.

  D: Exactly.

  M: Can you talk about the mechanism by which you got Melfi out of the show and severed the relationship with Tony?

  D: When we were given an award by the Psychiatrists’ Association at the Waldorf-Astoria, one of them had mentioned this study, or at least one phase of a study. I called him up and verified there’d been a thing like this. I forget the name of the researcher.26

  M: Here’s what I wonder about, though: Do you think that’s true about Tony? When Melfi turns on him, what he’s talking about in that scene, the way he’s talking to her, is actually very open. He’s not lying to her. It seems to me like it’s one of the only times on the show where someone’s accusing Tony of a crime he’s not actually guilty of.

  A: Or at least, not guilty of in that scene. He lies to her all the time!

  M: Does he, though?

  D: Oh yeah.

  M: He withholds certain facts . . . I don’t know, it’s interesting you think he’s a liar, Alan. I think he’s being as honest as a guy like him can be. That’s my take.

  D: That’s probably why he kept coming there, so he could unburden himself.

  A: There’s a line [in “Chasing It”] where he says to her the only reason he keeps coming is that “this is an oasis in my week.” Do you feel he was getting anything out of therapy by the time she kicked him out?

  D: No, I don’t think so. I think he did get some things out of therapy. But nobody else seems to think that.

  A: Besides curing the panic attacks, or curbing them, what would you say were those positive things he got out of it?

  D: He was primed for this, but I think he became a better parent because of therapy. I think he probably had more patience with AJ than he would’ve had otherwise. And even in marriage counseling, his relationship with Carmela was probably affected positively by therapy.

  A: You’ve said you thought many times in the past about having her drop him as a patient, but it doesn’t happen ’til the penultimate episode. Why did you decide that you finally wanted to do it?

  D: Because I wanted to point out that she’d made a deal with the devil, that she wasn’t blameless. I don’t know if I succeeded in that.

  A: You’d previously introduced the idea that AJ suffered from panic attacks, but where did the idea come from of him having the same depressive Soprano gene as Tony, and going into this big spiral after Blanca dumps him?

  D: The sins of the father and all that. It was really pretty simple.

  A: AJ’s suicide attempt is a really elaborate thing that req
uires an almost superhuman effort by Tony to save him. What do you recall of everyone trying to come up with what AJ would do, what it would look like?

  D: Nobody came up with it. Someone we knew—their son did this.

  M: That exact thing? Wow. Did he live?

  D: Yeah. The thing that was interesting to me about it was, if you’re gonna jump in the water with a block on your foot to drown, why would you also put a plastic bag over your head? It makes no sense whatsoever.

  A: I remember at the time there was a lot of commentary about how with the bag over his head and the cover over the bag, he looked like an Abu Ghraib photo. Was that in any way intentional, or did it just wind up looking like that?

  D: Just wound up looking like that.

  People hated AJ, and I just didn’t get it. I wanted them to try to understand what his problem was. I still don’t know why they hated him. Was it because he was entitled?

  I worry about AJ getting a bum rap, that’s all. They say if you’re a writer, all the characters are you. I kind of believe that in the case of AJ. I think I see myself, as a teenager, as kind of a bumbling person. The king of most literary teenagers is Holden Caulfield, and I see a little of him in AJ. To me, Holden Caulfield was this voice going, “Why? What? Why?” That’s the way I see AJ. I think I was probably like that when I was a kid, which is why I stick up for AJ.

  A: How’d you figure out who lives, who dies, or in the case of Silvio, just winds up in a coma? How’d you decide how you wanted them to drop (or not) over the course of the last few episodes? Like, Paulie or Patsy could’ve died, and didn’t.

  D: This isn’t to downplay anyone else, but Paulie . . . I don’t know. He’s like Junior. He’s a character you love to write. He has a strange outlook on life, and you enjoy going there. He’s very entertaining. That’s why.

  A: Three years after the show ends, you finally got to write and direct a theatrical feature film, Not Fade Away [a 1960s period drama about teenagers obsessed with rock ’n’ roll]. Jim plays the hero’s dad. Steve van Zandt is the music supervisor. Why this movie?