The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  TERENCE: It’s one of those things that, if it wasn’t there, you’d feel like something was wrong, but when it is there, you accept it for the reality. Actually, the very first shot of the Russian, Valery, being marched in the woods, if you see the snow, that was the last flakes of snow from the blizzard the morning we shot that. It had just stopped snowing for that shot, and then we shot the rest of the episode, so that blizzard had taken place over several days, I guess, December into January 2001.

  S: And it wasn’t written for snow.

  DAVID: We were so lucky it snowed, and we thought at first it would be a disaster because we thought, “Oh, they’ll just be able to follow their footsteps back.”

  S: And you thought you had to rewrite.

  T: Yes, you said that, and I made the convincing case that you could take me a block away from here, spin me around, and I wouldn’t be able to find my way back. Footsteps or no, there’s no way. You get that disoriented, you start to retrace, and we thought, “That seems logical, I buy that.”

  S: That happens all the time. You read stories in the news about people who get lost in the woods and then they die and then they find out they were like, a mile away from the road, you know?

  M: So for Terry and David, do you recall what exact position in the story of season three this was supposed to occupy? What were you trying to do? As a moving part, what was this episode supposed to do? Where was it going to get you?

  T: Well, originally it was pitched as a part of season two. I was sitting with Todd Kessler, one of our writers at the time who went on to create Damages for FX and Bloodline for Netflix. Todd and I . . . were kicking around story ideas, and Tim Van Patten, who’s one of our regular directors, happened to show up and just sat down and asked, “What are you guys doing?” and we said, “Oh, we’re just bullshitting, talking about ideas for stories.” And Tim said, “Oh, I had an idea for a story, but it’s really stupid.” “Oh, it can’t be any dumber than what we’re talking about, what is it?” “Nah, I don’t wanna tell you.”

  We finally cajoled it out of him, and he said, “I had a dream that Paulie and Christopher got lost in the woods after taking a guy out there to kill him.” And I said, “Timmy, that’s great! Go pitch that to David!” and he said, “Nah, I’m embarrassed.” David was in his office and I said, “I’m gonna pitch it to him right now.” I knocked on the door and said, “You gotta hear this! Timmy had a great idea!” I pitched it to him and he said, “Great, let’s do it.” I think we were somewhere in the middle of season two, and it just didn’t fit anywhere, so David said, “Let’s put a pin in it,” and when we came back for season three, we said, “Let’s do that.”

  I don’t remember exactly why it made sense later in the year. I guess things were coming to a head in terms of Tony and Paulie going head-to-head, Tony and Gloria’s relationship, so it just sort of fit there.

  M: David, how did Steve come to be a part of the show as a director?

  D: He came to be a part of the show as a director because he had done a movie—a great movie, I happen to think—called Trees Lounge. I loved that movie. I thought it was so well-directed and clear, and not baroque or anything like that. From that movie, we got our casting people, Georgianne Walken and Sheila Jaffe. They were the casting directors on his movie, and that’s how come I hired them . . .

  M: Everybody thinks of this as one of the funniest episodes of The Sopranos. How much of that humor, those jokes, those gags were on the page, and how much of those came about when you were on location?

  S: They were on the page. The point I remember, reading the script and just laughing so hard, was, “He killed Czechoslovakians and he’s an interior decorator!” [Laughter] At that point, I just laughed so hard and I went, “Oh my God, I’d better not fuck this up. This is the funniest thing.” I don’t know if anything was made up, it was all written.

  T: Despite what was on the page, when you get those guys out there doing it, you can describe Steve Schirripa walking out in a hunting costume . . .[Laughter] Dickens couldn’t describe that, it wouldn’t be as funny as when you see it! And Michael Imperioli and Tony Sirico together are one of the legendary comedy teams. You were always lucky to get a scene of them together, and then to put those two guys in that circumstance, where they’re at each other’s throats—for me, that’s the funniest situation you can put two people in, is when two people are under pressure, literally, in an enclosed space, and have them go at each other.

  M: And I think that’s maybe one of Tony’s finest moments, is this episode, because of the madness in his eyes.

  T: That was maybe the biggest negotiation we’d ever had in the middle of our lives. Tony Sirico is standing in the middle of the woods, and his character is so well put together. By design, the episode opens with him being manicured, in his pristine state, and then we were going to take him and destroy him by the end of the episode.

  So when we shot the episode, we were out in the middle of the woods and the stuntman did the tumble down the bank of snow, and he had a wig but his hair was completely askew, so that was our opportunity. We got Tony Sirico in, and he never lets you touch his hair, ever. This is completely true. He does his own hair. We said, “Tony, you’ve got to mess up your hair.” He said, “I’m not touching my hair.” “But this is the reality. Look at the stuntman. His hair is sticking out!” So, he very reluctantly went like this [mimes barely touching his hair], put a couple of hairs out of place, and Steve got involved! We were like, “Tony, come on!” The one way to appeal to Tony as a performer was by saying, “It’s so funny, it’ll be so funny. We’ve never seen you like this.”

  Finally, after fifteen minutes of negotiating in three feet of snow, he was like, “Fucking cocksuckers!” and he messed up his hair and we were like, “Go, go! Get it on film!” It was great, and he was such a great sport about it. He stayed like that for the rest of the episode.

  M: But the whole style of humor, you’re really going in the Wayback Machine to the ’30s and ’40s. This is the Two Stooges, almost, lost in the woods.

  T: Yeah, I’d be lying if I said we didn’t reference the Three Stooges at least once a day in that writer’s room in some way or another!

  M: I also want to talk a bit about Annabella Sciorra. This is one of her big episodes in season three. Can you talk a bit about working with her, directing her, particularly the throwing the meat at the back of James Gandolfini’s head, and then, I’d forgotten about this, the breaking of the vase after he leaves. Was that all scripted?

  S: Well, that was something else that was written, and I think it was important to see with this character, how fragile and violent she is. You mentioned the steak hitting the back of the head: she couldn’t quite get it, so she kept missing him. The prop guy tried, and he kept missing him—he’d hit the shoulder, or the top of the head. So I said, “Gimme that,” and I took it, and—I’m sure [Gandolfini] looked at me and went, “Oh, you’ve been waiting to do this!”—I hit a bull’s-eye!

  M: How many takes did it require to get to the point where James Gandolfini laughed his ass off at Bobby in the hunting outfit?

  T: I don’t know if I’m talking out of school or not, but he had an apparatus on at one point that’s usually used for sexual gratification, from what I hear. [Laughter] He’d walk in with different visuals, and Jim would look. Because after the first couple of times it’s not as funny, Steve would walk in with a different thing protruding from various places—from what they tell me. I wasn’t there that day.

  But it’s funny, when you got Jim laughing. I remember in a different episode, Uncle Junior had a CPAP mask for sleep apnea, and the line was, “How many MiGs you shoot down last week?” Jim Gandolfini could not look at Dominic with that mask on and say that line. It was the night before Thanksgiving when we shot it, and all Jim had to do was come in and say the line, and like, eighteen times in a row, he broke down. It was two in the morning, everyone wanted to go home.

  I remember Tim Van Patten directing
that and he was like, “Jimmy, enough already, let’s do it.” “All right, all right.” And he came in, and ultimately, it had to be done in two separate shots. We had to send Dominic out of the room. It was the only time Jim could not physically do his job. Once you got him laughing, he really couldn’t recover.

  M: I think we need to talk about the Russian. . . . In summer of 2001, HBO did a Sopranos presentation at the Television Critics Association press tour, and everybody was asking about the Russian. What happened to the Russian? Are we going to see the Russian? Is there going to be a gang war between Tony’s gang and the Russian’s? And you [David] got increasingly . . . it was almost like a moment out of “Pine Barrens” because I could see you going, “What does it matter what happened?” You were dyspeptic. Have people ever stopped asking you about the Russian?

  D: No. They never have. [Laughs] What do you want to know?

  M: Why doesn’t the Russian matter? Why is it not important to know what happened?

  D: I don’t know. I felt that was more in keeping with a Russian folktale or something, that the guy just disappears. Now, we didn’t do folktales every week, but it seemed appropriate for this.

  M: Terry, do you share that interpretation about why we don’t care what happens to the Russian?

  T: I do, but I have to confess that ultimately, it’s hard for me. We all grew up watching TV and expecting closure. I think I fought for it. And even over the years, I lobbied for it, saying, “It’d be cool to finally pay it off.” I think at one point, I almost had David agreeing with me, and I made the cardinal [mistake] of saying, “People will love it!” He said, “Fuck it! We shouldn’t do it for that reason!” [Laughter]

  This was absolutely the right way to go, and we never should have known what happened.

  D: That was the other thing—we didn’t want to do a thing where Tony fought the Russians. There just isn’t any combat between the Italian and Russian Mobs. They just don’t have any overlap.

  M: When I wanted to do a Sopranos-related panel, my first thought was, of course, “We’ll show the finale.” And then I thought, “We can’t do that, because David will never come out for that.” You’ve explained what you were trying to do in that finale—generally, not specifically—so many times that I didn’t want to inflict that on you again.

  But I kind of feel like we got to do that here tonight, in a way, because this, for me, is the first blatant example in The Sopranos of that kind of thing—the thing that most people would fixate on, the obvious, linear narrative thing like, “What happened to the Russian?” or “What happened after the cut to black?” You said, “That’s not what this is about. This is not important.” You’re not just being obstinate about it. There’s actually a reason.

  D: Yeah, there’s a reason. [Pause] I should’ve had the Russian walk into Holsten’s!

  T: One thing we talked about was that at some point, Christopher, way late in the game in the series, would walk into Slava’s club and the Russian guy would be there mopping the floor and they’d just meet eyes, and then the camera would come around to the back of the Russian’s head and you just see that a big chunk of his head is missing and he can’t communicate. They’re like, “Yeah, kids found him, they sent him to Russia and nursed him back to health, but he can’t really talk.” All through the meeting, he’s just kind of looking at Christopher, and you feel like he knows but he can’t communicate it. That was it.

  My proposed ending for The Sopranos was that a very elderly Nucky Thompson walks in and kills Tony Soprano! [Laughs] That was how we were going to end Boardwalk Empire, but it didn’t work.

  D: I’ll tell you what Matt Weiner said: he wanted to end Mad Men with Don Draper at age ninety-two, he’s watching the end of The Sopranos, and he takes his beer bottle and throws it at the TV!

  S: We lost a location.

  T: That’s right, for this episode!

  D: We were going to shoot “Pine Barrens” in Essex County and the commissioner—

  T: Who was an Italian American, who was a staunch opponent of defamation—

  D: Who later went to prison for corruption—[Laughs]

  T: The greatest punch line ever! He said he wouldn’t let us shoot there because this gave a black eye to Italian Americans, and then he himself went to jail for accepting bribes! [Laughter] You couldn’t write this stuff! But yeah, we had that location scrapped so we had to scramble, and then we ended up in Harriman Park, up by West Point.

  S: I can’t tell you how intimidating it was—even though I knew, I’d worked with Michael and Tony before, but I hadn’t worked with Jimmy, and it was really surreal walking onto that set the first day, because I felt like I was directing Tony Soprano, not Jimmy. And I didn’t know how to do it! It’s like, “How do I say to this guy?” But Jimmy’s a sweet guy. He wanted direction. I just had to get over myself! It was so much fun, so much fun to do.

  M: What was it like acting on the show after directing it for two seasons?

  S: When I acted on the show, I was very nervous and intimidated again! But they just made me feel so welcome. I loved acting on the show. I mean, with directing, directing always makes me a little bit more anxious and nervous because there’s so much that you have to keep in your head. But as a director, I also get to act every part in my head, you know? As an actor, I got to work with the other directors, and that was just great. It’s hard to say which one I liked more.

  M: You got a hell of a send-off. They played a nice, big piece of Van Morrison and Tony shoots you.

  S: Yeah! To me, that was like the best way to go! To be shot in the face by Tony Soprano . . . and he did it out of love, you know? Yeah! He was saving me from a fate much worse!

  D: He wasn’t supposed to die, and we had a lot of discussion about it, because we’d hired Steve for two seasons. And then it became clear, the way the story had taken us, that he wasn’t going to make it till the second season.

  S: So I got a call. You left a voice message, I called you back, and I fully expected you to tell me [you were killing my character], and instead you said, “You want to have lunch tomorrow?” and I said, “Sure!” I convinced myself, “Oh, he wants to have lunch! Maybe he has a great story idea for the next season, or maybe he’s got another idea that he wants to do!” I was sort of in denial because I couldn’t accept it. They’d hired me for two seasons! We sat down at lunch and he told me.

  D: It wasn’t fun.

  S: We still had a good lunch!

  * * *

  1 In 1918, Soviet film theorist Lev Kuleshov demonstrated how editing could create meaning by juxtaposing identical, uninflected close-ups of actor Ivan Mozzhukhin’s face with shots of a child lying in a coffin, a woman on a couch, and a steaming hot bowl of soup, then showed the results to onlookers, who concluded that the man was sad, horny, or hungry, depending.

  2 Creator of TV’s The Fugitive. The show’s last episode became the top-rated single episode ever aired up to that point, and jump-started a cultural obsession with series finales that continues to this day.

  3 In “Soprano Home Movies,” Tony will blame both a sucker punch and his post-shooting physical condition for losing the brawl with Bacala. You make the call on whether either excuse counts.

  4 “Sympathetic Brutes in a Pop Masterpiece.” Stephen Holden, New York Times, June 6, 1999.

  5 “Even Wiseguys Get the Blues.” New York Post, April 4, 1999.

  6 Terence Winter: “My recollection is that we had just begun to write season three when Nancy died, and we were only in the process of mapping out how Tony would get back in her good graces. I also recall that originally David wasn’t set on writing “Proshai, Livushka” himself, since he had just written the season opener. I, along with Todd Kessler, Robin, and Mitch, lobbied and told him he was the only one who could possibly write it, and of course he did. I don’t think anything else we were planning changed significantly as a result of Nancy’s death.”

  7 Terence Winter: “I recall that David came in with the i
dea that Tony would begin an affair with a woman he met in Melfi’s office, and she naturally would have the same traits as Livia somehow, but I’m almost certain the idea of Gloria and the affair predated Nancy’s death. The character was not created in any way to be a replacement for Livia, but we came to rely on her in that way in terms of her relationship with Tony.”

  8 The other is the man who, as Janice is forcing people to say nice things about Livia, appears briefly in the foyer, then slips back up the stairs. He’s not a ghost, per Chase, just a guest “who didn’t want to be involved with that!”

  9 Overhearing a loud, pretentious professor in line for a movie mischaracterize McLuhan’s work, Woody Allen’s character produces Marshall McLuhan, who tells the man, “You know nothing of my work. You mean, my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.”

  10 1980; written by Chase, directed by Lamont Johnson (The Last American Hero), and starring Michael Learned, Mare Winningham, and Hal Holbrook, who would work with Chase again in “The Fleshy Part of the Thigh” twenty-six years later.

  11 “Were you there when Jesus Christ had his moment of doubt and pain?” Father Phil inadvertently paraphrasing “Sympathy for the Devil” to Ralphie in S4/E9, “Whoever Did This.”

  12 1978 book by Peter Matthiessen, recounting his two-month search for the snow leopard in the Himalayas with naturalist George Schiller.

  13 During production, Sopranos cast and crew sometimes met opposition from anti-defamation groups when they were invited to participate in fundraisers, parades, ribbon-cuttings and the like. The highest-profile incident occurred in 2002, when then–New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg invited Lorraine Bracco and Dominic Chianese to march in the Columbus Day parade, and the Columbus Citizens Foundation, which organizes the event and was incensed by the “Christopher” episode, won a court injunction to keep the actors out. Bloomberg sat out the parade in protest, eating lunch at an Italian restaurant in the Bronx with Bracco and Chianese instead.