I had written scripts for small films that I made, but I can’t remember the name of this first one I wrote. I was inflamed by Jean-Luc Godard and stuff like that, not knowing what the hell I was even talking about—or what Godard was talking about. [Laughs] Stanford Film School had a documentary department, and I was there because I got in, and because I got a fellowship, so I went there because it was open to me. So over a period of two years, you could either write a thesis about . . . I don’t know, what’s that famous thing where they show an impassive face and then a baby crying?
M: The Kuleshov Effect.1
D: Yes. The Kuleshov Effect. You could write about something like that, or you could make a film. I decided to make a film. It was called The Rise and Fall of Bug Manousos. It was about a grad student who has a fantasy of this alternate universe where he’s a mobster. It wasn’t very good. [Laughs] Although I did get $600 from a student film distributor! My father loaned me the money, about a thousand [dollars], and then I got the $600 and he never let me pay him back!
A: What was the first thing you sold on a more adult, legitimate scale?
D: An episode of a TV series called The Bold Ones: The Lawyers. The producer was a guy named Roy Huggins.2 Our teacher had sent him our script . . . and he read it and wanted to hire us. So he hired me, but by that time, the friend I wrote it with had given up and gone back to Chicago, so I wrote this episode, and that was the first thing I did.
A: Huggins then went on to create The Rockford Files. Was that how you wound up on Rockford Files?
D: No, it was more circuitous than that. I was under contract at Universal almost that whole time.
A: So you had gone to film school, wanted to be a director, been into Godard, and now you’re writing episodic hours of TV for Universal. How did you feel about that at the time?
D: I was excited by it. I was actually inside a major studio. I went there every day, I had a parking spot, and I got to work with really talented people. I then became terrified of directing, and didn’t want to do it anymore because I saw how they were treated—“Hey asshole, look what you did!” So I thought, “I could never do that.” I had worked [on TV] before The Rockford Files, but that wasn’t as stirring to me. The Rockford Files, to me, had a feeling of real place and real time, and I felt it was taking place somewhere other than its time slot, that it was really Los Angeles.
A: You wrote a couple episodes late in the run of The Rockford Files, both with Greg Antonacci: one where the two Jersey guys come to LA, the second where Jim goes to Jersey, with a Mob boss named Tony who has a son named Anthony Junior!
D: The son was a drummer, he took drumming lessons.
A: And in the episode before that, there’s a reference to a Carmela.
D: That’s right: “Say hello to Cousin Carmela.”
A: Was the second Mob episode conceived as a backdoor pilot?
D: Yeah. [NBC president] Fred Silverman in action. It was ahead of its time. In fact, how could they have possibly made a TV series at that time like that? I didn’t expect it to get picked up.
A: Around when would you say you went from that excitement you felt before, when you were going to Universal every day to work on Rockford, to your later feelings of being done with TV, and wanting to get out and make movies?
D: Well, I had always wanted to make movies. When did the thrill of TV wear off? I don’t know. I think after enough network meetings. I can’t stand talking to these people. I can’t stand what they want to do. What a paucity of entertainment.
M: What kind of notes did they give you?
D: Just . . . the worst. I had worked on a show before that that I had liked a lot called The Night Stalker. I was very excited by the medium at that point. But that show was kind of absurd. If there was anything in an episode that could possibly have disturbed anyone, you’d get a note saying “Take it out.” And I guess it was a good thing, because it taught you to find another way to do what you wanted to do.
A lot of what I disliked about the job was broadcast standards, not the people in programming so much, but what you could say or couldn’t say, and how long you could hold a shot.
A: You told me back in the day that The Sopranos, as an idea, started more as you telling your friends stories about your mother, and them saying, “You should do a show about that.”
D: My wife was the one who told me. She didn’t say what kind of show it should be, but she said, “You should do a show about your mother. She’s hysterically funny.” I agreed with her, but I didn’t know how to do it. And given what we’re talking about now, what TV network back then would do a show about David’s mother?
A: The Sopranos premiered in January ’99, so it was in development for a long time, but do you remember when you started getting serious about the idea of, “Oh, it should be a Mob boss”?
D: I changed agents, and I signed up at UTA. When I went in to meet them, they said, “What kind of ideas do you have?” I told them the idea that was The Sopranos and my agent said, “Forget that. It’s never going to happen. Not going to work.” But I pitched it as a movie then, and he said Mob movies were out of date, especially Mob comedies. I think maybe . . . what’s the movie with Alec Baldwin?
A and M: [Simultaneously] Married to the Mob.
D: I think it had not done too well. Because of that, he said a feature with the Mob wouldn’t work. I was going to cast De Niro as the character who became Tony, and Anne Bancroft as Livia. I think it could’ve been very interesting, but he told me to forget about it as a feature. And then, when I went over to Brillstein-Grey on a development deal, they suggested doing The Godfather as a TV series. And I said, “Why would I want to do that? It’s already been done.”
Then I was driving home that night, and I started thinking about the fact that the guy had a wife and a son and a daughter, and the shrink could be a woman, and that network TV drama was very female-oriented, so I thought, “Maybe that feature idea could work as a TV series.” It had home life in it, it had . . . women’s points of view, kids, all of that.
A: Do you remember the first network you took The Sopranos to?
D: Fox.
A: They wanted Anthony LaPaglia to play Tony?
D: That came later. They had nobody in mind. They got the scripts and maybe a month or two [passed] . . . I hadn’t heard from them, and then I got a call from a woman who’s still in the business. She said, “Listen, we’re getting to the time now when we’re going to be making our pickups, and I want to get in touch with you and tell you before you talk to anyone else that I liked your script a lot. It was really, really good.” And I said, “Great, when do we get started?” And she said, “Let me think about this for a while, because I’m not sure this is something we still want to do. I’m not getting the feeling we may do this for a certainty. But I want to tell you as one human being to another, I really liked what you did.” So I knew I was dead. [Laughs]
M: Did you ever get a sense of why they didn’t want to give you a green light?
D: Anything that would offend anybody was not wanted on network television.
A: At that point did it go to CBS, or other places first?
D: I think it went to CBS, and then the other usual suspects.
A: And you told me once CBS wanted to take out all the psychiatry.
D: Yes.
A: Did they say why?
D: They didn’t have to. I knew why—“Psychiatry, yuck! The lead goes to a psychiatrist? That makes him weak!”
At that point I said to the people at Brillstein-Grey, “Why don’t we take it to HBO?” My deal at Brillstein-Grey was just about up, two years of it. . . . Brad Grey called my agent and said, “David’s deal is about up here, and he did what he said he was going to do. He wrote two really good pilots, and we couldn’t get them on. But I’d like permission to extend the thing, maybe, and take it over to HBO to see if they might be interested, because I think they might be.” I met with [HBO president] Chris [Albrecht] and that was good.
M: So then you get the green light to do the pilot of The Sopranos for HBO. How did you [cast it]? What was the process? Did you have particular people in mind?
D: I never write with people in mind. We hired Georgianne Walken and her partner, Sheila Jaffe. What happened was, I saw Steve Buscemi in Trees Lounge and thought, “Who cast that? That’s an amazing cast.” I found out, called them, and they said they wanted to do The Sopranos. In the process of meetings, they would say to me, “Have you heard of that person? Do you know who this person is?”
It was a two-people casting process, and they were the ones who introduced me to Gandolfini.
A: You talk all the time about Steve Van Zandt being in the running for Tony. How seriously was he ever considered for that part?
D: To my mind, he was pretty seriously in it. It was a completely different show. The whole show changed—I saw it as a live-action Simpsons, and I was pretty serious about it. Once Gandolfini showed up, it was pretty obvious that his face and his words helped direct me to what it should be.
M: That’s quite a compliment to him.
D: Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Then I recognized him from Get Shorty, but in that he’d been a sweetie pie, holding the baby.
M: Can we back up for a second and talk about James Gandolfini’s audition, or his reading? Can you put yourself back in that room and describe what you were seeing and feeling?
D: He came in and he started to read and he was very good. All of a sudden, he stopped, and said, “I have to stop. I can’t . . . I can’t focus. Something’s up here. I’ll come back in Friday.” So I said, “All right,” and then Friday came along and he couldn’t come in. I swear this is what we were told: his mother had died. It turned out his mother had died years before!
A and M: [Laughter]
D: So he never came back, but he’d done so well, and [the casting people] were really pushing him, too. He finally came to my house in LA and we went to my office at the house there, and we taped him doing it. He did it and it was great. After that, I had to bring the three of them over to HBO to read for Chris and Carolyn and I forget who else. And Cathy Moriarty as Carmela. I remember Jim reading with Cathy. It was great.
A: Did he read with Lorraine Bracco as Carmela, or had she said by that time she didn’t want the part?
D: Lorraine never said she didn’t want to play Carmela. Maybe she said it to her rep, but she never said it to me. I said, “I think she’s really good . . . but I’ve seen her do this role. I might be interested in seeing her do Dr. Melfi.” Lorraine might have been amazing as Carmela, too, but you would’ve had this feeling of, “I’ve been here before.”
A: One of the most important scenes in the pilot, from your perspective, was Tony grabbing Christopher. How was it written, what did Jim do that was different, and how did you react?
D: It was written that Christopher says something like, “Hey, what are you talking about?” Then Jim would go [jabbing a finger]—da da da—like a love tap. I wouldn’t call it a love tap, but hey, just like that: Wake up!
But when when we shot it, Jim grabbed him by the collar, yanked him up out of his chair, and I remember Christopher had a bottle of beer in his hand, and it fell accidentally. While Tony was talking to him, you heard the bottle skidding along the concrete, and it was great! It was the bottle that sold me on this. I thought to myself, “Yeah, that’s the real Tony. He’s not love-tapping anybody.
That’s the real guy.”
M: Right before I think season four or five, when everybody was renegotiating their contracts to come back, I said, “Do you want to come back?” He said, “I want to come back, because it’s the greatest part I’ve ever had, but I also don’t want to come back because no matter how long I spend in the shower, I can’t wash the stink off me from this guy.” How much of that stink came from the character as written, and how much was the darkness he dredged up for himself as he played the guy?
D: I had questions myself about Jim Gandolfini. I’ve always asked myself, he’s such a big guy, and yet he’s such a sweetie-pie. But he could really be nasty and unpleasant if he had to be. I’ve always asked myself, is Jim such a sweetie-pie because there’s a tendency there to be a bully, and the ability to be one, because he’s so big? Does he overcompensate and be this nice guy everyone loves so he won’t come off like a bully? I never got an answer.
M: He was a big guy.
D: Huge.
M: And he seemed even bigger. Something about his physicality was almost overwhelming. He reminded me of Zampanò, Anthony Quinn’s character in La Strada, or King Kong.
A: And other than when he’s incapacitated by something else, there’s not a single fight in the run of the show that Tony does not win.
D: Well, that’s probably true. There were none that he lost?
A: He may have been sucker-punched once or twice,3 but physically he could not be beaten, and that was a part of the legend of the character as he goes along.
D: Seemed realistic to me. That guy was enormous. Even when he was in high school. What do you think his sport was?
A: Football?
D: Basketball.
M: Really? [Laughs]
D: Everybody says football. He was thin and tall.
A: What do you remember of Edie [Falco] coming in? Had you seen her on Oz, or did casting people bring her to you?
D: I didn’t see her on Oz until after she read for us. She came over on skates [Laughs] at HBO headquarters out here in NY, and that’s all she wrote. I felt so lucky all the way through, for however many years it was. I felt so lucky with that cast. I can say that without feeling I’m being sentimental or anything. There wasn’t anything they couldn’t do.
A: What was it like writing for Edie and watching her work over the years?
D: Watching her work was great. You could stay down there on the set twenty-four hours, just watching what she did. Never missed a line. Not one. I don’t know how somebody does that. She didn’t hide herself or do anything like that. She was there, she came in, did her work and went home, and it was always faultless.
A: There’s not a lot of Carmela in the first few episodes. Had you planned for the role to be as big as it became?
D: Yes. That’s what I said from the beginning; the reason I thought this whole thing might work as a family show. Family shows were a women’s medium, and this was a family show. I thought this might be successful, or at least keep its head above water, because it would attract, unlike most Mob pictures, a female audience because of the family show aspect.
A: Can you recall the first time you realized what she was fully capable of?
D: The thing that comes to my mind is the audition. She was just so good! I mean, there couldn’t have been anybody else. In the audition, she went pretty seamlessly between comedy and drama, or the mixture of the two.
A: Did you know Nancy [Marchand] before this?
D: I knew her as Margaret Pynchon [the publisher on Lou Grant], so when I saw her show up, I thought, “What the fuck is this?” [Laughs] Then she started, and that was it. That was really something, because the character was my mother, and it was like looking at my mother all over again. And she later said to my wife, “Honey, I trust that this entity that I’m portraying is deceased?” She channeled it, I’m telling you. I can’t explain it.
A: At what point did Nancy tell you that she was sick?
D: She was coughing when she came in for the initial reading. Coming up the stairs. We were on the second or third floor of this little building on 79th Street or something, and she was coughing then. She was very straight up about it. She didn’t say, “I only have a year or two to live,” but it was passed on to us that she was ill.
A: Did it give you any pause?
D: No, because at that time I had no belief this thing was going to go anywhere but the pilot.
A: Knowing what you know now, would you have thought about somebody else?
D: There was nobody else. I think over 200 wo
men came in, and they all did this crazy Italian mama thing, but when she came in, she did what you see . . . she got my mother’s inflections right, she got everything.
M: I’ve seen season one so many times, but I’m still not sure how much of her malice in manipulating Tony and Junior is conscious and how much of it is simply instinctive. There are times I don’t even know if she’s aware of what she’s doing, and I wonder how much of that is in the scripts and how much of it is in the way she delivers the lines.
D: I don’t know, but I do know that if I was to think about my mother, my mother did not consciously manipulate anybody. She was incapable of having a plan. But I will say that it’s more like that than it is that she’s a conscious manipulator, or an evil person.
A: In the third episode, where Brendan dies, there’s a scene where she’s talking to Junior, and Junior is basically asking her without asking her if it’s OK to kill Christopher and Brendan, and she says that she likes Christopher, because, “He put up my storm windows one year,” but she tacitly gives her approval for Brendan. And Junior goes and kills him. Is she conscious of what she’s doing there?
D: I believe that’s the kind of thing that comes right from my mother’s mouth. “I like him because he put up my storm windows one year.” She was always getting cousins to do things for her, coming to adjust the antenna on her TV . . . Her relationship with Junior . . .
M: It seems like there’s a little connection happening between the two of them even when Johnny is still alive. There’s something about the way he looks at her, the way he talks to her. And then, when they’re elderly and Johnny’s no longer in the picture, he is constantly coming to visit her. There’s talk, and it’s kind of semi-scandalous. There’s a sense in which the brother is moving in on Johnny’s woman!
D: Right, right.
M: And yet it’s an entirely platonic relationship?
D: Completely. He’s also asking for her advice.
A: She becomes his consigliere, certainly more than Mikey is.
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