The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  D: I just loved the music from that era, and I had what I felt were some interesting events that happened in my life that I wanted to show. Also, Stevie and I would talk a lot about the fact that bands in that day were like gangs in a certain sense. A band was something that was like a religion. They all thought the same, dressed the same, hated and loved the same things.

  The experience of making the movie was great. The reception of the movie was not great. It was not by any means like the reception of The Sopranos. But the making of it was great. It was a great cast, they were wonderful to work with, young people. The crew was good. I learned a lot, and I think I finally got over my terror of directing.

  M: For somebody with a terror of directing, you didn’t make things easy on yourself with this project. For example, a lot of directors would’ve had the actors lip-sync to playback and pretend to play their instruments, but a lot of the music in this film is either performed live or staged in such a way that it could plausibly have been performed live. That’s much harder.

  D: Stevie put them through boot camp, so they actually learned to play. We were thinking of having them play at the wrap party and all that, but it never really happened. They did really, really well.

  M: Were they musicians?

  D: None of them. The bass player was, who wasn’t one of the principals. He was quite a musician.

  M: Why was it important to you that the actors all seem like they were musicians?

  D: I care about all that stuff. I’m very, very obsessed with details, and I love that music so much. To have somebody climbing their way through it . . . was just not working. I think it shows, quite frankly. I just didn’t want that. And Stevie would’ve quit.

  M: You have numbers that play out at full length, or that stay in the moment longer than other films might. Why?

  D: It was a musical. It was about that music, and I thought they were good. They sold it. And I found it interesting to watch, so if I did, I had to assume other people would, too. Steve was great. He did more than consult, he was executive producer. He taught the cast everything about playing. He taught them what to do on stage.

  M: What about the fear some directors of musical numbers have, that when characters are performing, the drama is stopping? I think that’s why in so many musical numbers, they cut out as fast as they can because they want to get to the next plot point.

  D: Well, I think maybe we picked the right songs. It was dynamic. I just thought that those songs helped the plot, that they were part of the plot. It never occurred to me that the drama would stop if they kept playing. I just thought they were really good, and that if you liked rock ’n’ roll, you’d like it because there’s something interesting about watching people play. Everybody has their favorite band, but they always want to go see them live.

  A: How did Jim end up playing the dad?

  D: He was on a list, and either he called me or I called him. There weren’t that many candidates for it. Maybe he called me to say he wouldn’t be able to do it, I should go elsewhere, it wasn’t his cup of tea, and I said, “All right, that’s that.” Then we hung up or something, and I still hadn’t cast it. I think he called me and said, “How are you doing?” and I said, “We still haven’t cast it yet, I haven’t gotten to that role yet,” and he said, “Who are you thinking of?” and I named an actor and he said, “Oh, I can’t let you do that!” [Laughs] “I’ll do it!”

  A: The dad in the movie is not Tony, but he does have a couple of violent, angry outbursts at different points in the film. We’ve talked about how Jim struggled playing that on the show. Was that your experience in making the movie, too?

  D: No, it wasn’t. He didn’t beat anyone up or kill anybody in that movie. But you’d have to ask him, and you can’t. He was a pleasure to work with. He seemed happier. I think he was married at that point, he had a new wife and a baby on the way. Yeah, he seemed happier, more relaxed. He was rid of that cross he had to bear of playing Tony Soprano. So I think he was more mellow.

  Nobody even knows about this movie. I got an email last week from the former head of Paramount, who was writing to me about another subject, but he said to me, “The movie business is funny these days. I talk to people all the time and they love your movie and they quote it and just think it was terrific. It’s too bad. I wish it had been that way back when.” I wrote back and said, “There’s no mystery as to why it wasn’t—nobody knew it was there.”

  A: Jim had played not exactly you, but a guy on the show who had a mother much like your mother. And now in this movie he’s playing someone who’s somewhat, I assume, like your father, or the father figure to a character based on you. What’s that like for you seeing him in these two different roles that were so heavily influenced by your own life?

  D: I don’t know what to say. I mean, Jim can do no wrong. I thought he was just great. But that’s not really an answer.

  See, he reminded me of my father sometimes during the making of The Sopranos, too. So that wasn’t a new experience. And the father’s story in the movie—what was my father’s story? He did have this disease, and he did get into this sort of affair in the hospital. That was his story, and . . . I don’t know, they weren’t separate to me.

  My father would always make fun of me or say that I thought I was a big shot because of show business. I remember my parents coming out to see me in LA one time. I took them to my office at Universal. It was a brand-new building, I had a patio and all this stuff. I was a story editor in this brand-new building, and I had this great new office with all these antiques. I took my parents to lunch, I took their picture in Clint Eastwood’s parking spot, we rode up in an elevator with Charlton Heston. My mother was completely flabbergasted. And then my relatives came out the same night and my dad said, “We saw David’s pretentious office today.”

  My father had a hardware store, and people told me that he would raise me up and then he’d put me down. They’d walk in the store and ask, “How’s your son doing?” and they could see that he was proud, but he couldn’t give it up.

  M: Was it a class resentment thing? The son exceeding the father in some way?

  D: That’s probably true . . . it was probably that. But if I had been a lawyer, he wouldn’t have felt that way. This was moving away from them so much, even philosophically. Nobody in our family is an artist, let alone in show business. And show business—movies—everybody goes to the movies. It’s Hollywood! It’s really big! And for me to be part of that was too much of a threat. If I had been a lawyer, that would’ve been fine, because I could’ve been their lawyer.

  M: Was your father as much of an influence on your art as your mother?

  D: I can only say it must be the case, yes. I mean, there was a lot of him in Tony. But I guess he was not the same. My father thought he was funny, and he wasn’t. My mother didn’t think there was anything funny about anything she was saying, but it was always very funny!

  A: Speaking of your interest in music: I remember only one time in talking to you over the years where you didn’t seem happy with a musical cue you used: the doo-wop piece when Tony chases down Mahaffey in the pilot. Did you realize it when you were watching it, or was it only later on when you figured out what the sound was?

  D: It was Stevie Van Zandt’s suggestion. I like Stevie a lot, and of course, he’s Stevie Van Zandt. At first it appealed to me, but as I kept listening to it over and over, it started to grate on me, and I thought, “This is just what I don’t want to do.” I don’t want to do a lot of Italianate music at all. I wanted to leave it open. Stevie often didn’t agree with my choices. My first thing I thought about was, I wanted the music to be the kind of music Tony would have listened to in high school—and that music is not that great! So I ventured out from that. But there was still quite a bit of it.

  A: How long did it take you over the course of that first season, or longer, till you instinctively knew, “This is a song to be on The Sopranos,” and “this isn’t”?

  D: That
never happened. It was kind of like found objects. Toward the end, people were sending us music and I’d sometimes use it. Those decisions got made, I would pick out interesting jazz songs I thought would be good, or other songs I thought would be good, or remember a song I always wanted to use, and tried it out against the picture to see, time after time after time after time, what really worked well.

  A: Carmela’s aria, the Andrea Bocelli piece that recurs in season two: Do you recall why you decided to make that her theme for a while?

  D: Oh yeah, it’s because you just heard that all over the place. Any time you went to an Italian restaurant, you heard that song over and over and over again. I was just trying to make it lifelike, realistic, you know?

  A: First episode ends, closing credits are “The Beast in Me,” it’s the first hour of the show you’re doing where you lay things down, and that song is telling in a lot of ways about who Tony is. Did you know that song? How did it wind up in the show?

  D: We’re both Nick Lowe fans, and I think he wrote that song for Johnny Cash, actually. There’s a Johnny Cash version. It just seemed perfect for him. Lyrically it was perfect for it.

  A: When I asked you years ago about using “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” after Tony upset Janice in “Cold Cuts,” you said that one was obvious enough you didn’t need to explain it. In general, how did you figure out when a song was, lyrically, too on the nose? Was that not a concern of yours?

  D: Of course it was, there were some songs I wouldn’t use. And I didn’t do that on-the-nose business very much. I tried not to, anyway. But the quality of the song came first. “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” is a really good song . . . and it seemed like a funny comment. “The Beast in Me” . . . I don’t know, it just felt like nobody else in TV would use that song.

  A: Another Kinks song, “Living on a Thin Line,” sets such a tone of dread for that episode [“University”] in a way I’m not used to hearing from them. A lot of Kinks stuff I like is a little more playful. Was that one you knew pretty well?

  D: No, it wasn’t, and it was by Dave Davies, not Ray. Most of their hits are Ray Davies songs. That song is about England, of all things. Denise and I had a CD of some kind of amalgam of Kinks songs, and that was on there. We were living on 57th Street and listening to it, and I heard it and thought, “That’s great.” For some reason, I made the connection with that and “University.” Don’t ask me why, I just did.

  I don’t particularly believe that is a Bing song, but it was just too good to pass up. It worked really well.

  M: You have a number of songs that you used more than once in an episode. “Living on a Thin Line,” you’ve got “My Lover’s Prayer”; Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.” Was there a particular reason why you wanted to do that in a certain episode as opposed to another?

  D: I think usually what that was about was that I would be demo-ing the record. I’d let them hear it in the beginning because they may not have heard it, or may not have heard it enough. They may think it’s just another song, but if you do it twice, they’ll see it’s thematic, remember it from the first time, and it’ll be a callback. Usually we’d demo it first and play it later.

  A: Were there any groups you couldn’t get over the years either because of expenses or other reasons?

  D: The Beatles.

  A: What did you want to use and where?

  D: “I’ll Follow the Sun.” I think it would’ve played when Tony wakes up in the hospital after the alternate-reality state he was in. I think it would’ve closed that episode. I didn’t want to devote that much money to it.

  A: The morning after the finale aired, I asked if you’d ever see yourself returning to the world of the show. You said maybe either something where it was an event earlier in the series, like something that happened between seasons three and four, or doing Johnny Boy and Junior in the 1960s. Were those things that you ever really seriously thought about?

  D: Yes.

  A: How seriously?

  D: Real serious.

  M: Like, to the point of writing a treatment or outline?

  D: Yes.

  M: Really? So these things are sitting in a drawer somewhere?

  D: They’re not in a drawer, they’re out there.

  M: Really? So did HBO or whoever say no?

  D: They said no.

  M: Really?

  D: They did and then they didn’t . . . it was a corporate complication. But HBO should not be blamed for this. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get close.27

  A: What do you feel is the legacy of The Sopranos at this point?

  D: I don’t think I’m the right person to answer that. I don’t know if its legacy is the same now as it was even five years ago. The show’s gonna be forgotten, like everything. It’s not gonna have a legacy.

  A: Do you think people’s feelings about the show changed as it went on, or five years after it ended, as opposed to now?

  D: I think it’s gotten better. I think more people have embraced the show. I can’t count the numbers up because we obviously had a huge audience, but I think there are people who’ve come to it late and really like it. I thought it would be the opposite. I thought people would say, “It didn’t age well.”

  A: This is a show that’s really obsessed, among other things, with mortality and legacy. With Jim dying so young, do you feel differently about the show in any way?

  D: Yes, there is an extra dimension. There is.

  And I should be the last person to say this, but that’s also multiplied somehow because of how the show ended. Jim didn’t have the death scene on the show, and yet he did have a real one, a surprising one where you thought, “What? Who the fuck died? You’re kidding me!”

  A: This whole idea of the last scene that we’ve talked about, that fragility, that it could happen to anyone . . .

  D: And it did!

  M: Where were you when you heard he had died?

  D: France. His agent told me. I couldn’t believe it. I never heard from those people, and he called me in France. When I heard it was the agent on the phone, I thought, because the show was over and we had no business with each other, knowing Jim I felt, “This doesn’t bode well. Something’s not good here.” By the time I got on the phone and the guy told me, I wasn’t as shocked as you might think. It was unbelievable, but I wasn’t like, “That’s impossible.”

  M: Why didn’t you think it was unthinkable? Was it because he was a guy who lived a hard life?

  D: Yeah. He was hard on his body.

  The family asked me to speak at his memorial. I don’t like speaking in front of people, so I wasn’t happy about that, but I knew I had to do it. I felt it was part of the job description.

  I couldn’t face it. That’s why I decided to make it a letter to him. I couldn’t figure out how else to do it. Like I had to be in character or something. 28

  M: We’re both rewatching every episode to write the critical exegesis portion of this book, and I’m finding it very hard to not have an involuntary emotional reaction to Jim. I always liked him, I always responded to him, in addition to, or apart from, the actual show, I wrote about his acting a lot. It’s great. But beyond the performance itself, there was something about that guy that was very vulnerable.

  D: He was extremely emotional. He couldn’t shut off his emotions.

  M: His son was born shortly before he came out for the [Television Critics Association] press tour. I bought him a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar to read to his son. I had it in my backpack and he was on his way back from a session, surrounded by reporters, and I said, “Wait a second!” and gave it to him. He looked at it, puzzled, and he took it, opened it up—and he fucking read it! He sat there and turned the pages, smiling, and read it! Not out loud or anything—but he wanted to know how the story ended.

  D: Quite a guy. A wild man and also a very . . . very quiet in some way. I think I said in the speech that day that there was something boyish about him, in his eyes, in his expression.


  A: Is there anything else you wanted to talk about?

  D: Just to put it through my brain: people complained about that show as to how demeaning it was to Italians. . . . I think it did a lot to raise the profile of Italians. I know they were gangsters and killers, but I think for the right audience, they were very innocent. I think what people liked about that show was the humanity of it, they were human beings. “This guy’s like my cousin Eddie!” I think it did a lot for Italians. That’s my point of view.

  A: Did the experience of making the show make you feel differently about TV?

  D: Yeah! I think it’s got all kinds of possibilities now. I always did, I just never saw them exercised. Yeah, it made me think differently about TV. It can be a great medium, and it is in so many cases. When I was a kid I loved TV, but as I got older, I went to school and read Byron and stuff like that, so I started to think, “What is this? What the hell is Marcus Welby? If you’re gonna do a doctor thing, why not do something interesting?” I had plenty of those feelings, and I had to work with those people and listen to their bullshit and terrible ideas, as I used to say, “cooking the vitamins out of it.”

  But yeah, The Sopranos changed my mind about TV completely, as so many people have proved since then. Mad Men is a great work of art, I think.

  A: When you look at what TV is now versus what it was twenty years ago, how does it make you feel?

  D: I guess the only way I can answer is that I can say I’m really proud of the work I did. I’m proud of the chances we took. That’s about it.

  Bonus:

  “Pine Barrens”

  The following is an edited transcript of a conversation among Matt Zoller Seitz, David Chase, Terence Winter, and Steve Buscemi, held at the Split Screen Festival TV at IFC Center in June 2017. Chase was given the festival’s first Vanguard Award, honoring individuals who changed television.

  MATT: How cold was it?

  STEVE: It wasn’t as cold as we’d hoped! [Laughter] I mean, it was pretty cold, but I was thinking, the inside-the-van scenes were the problem. We were worried because the inside of the truck was shot in a studio and so it wouldn’t look as cold. When I saw the episode, I was amazed that they actually had the condensation coming out of their mouth, and that was CGI!