The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  MATT: Wegler accuses Carmela of withholding sex to get him to intervene academically on AJ’s behalf. Do you think there’s any truth to the charge?

  D: Yes.

  M: Do you think the manipulation is intentional on her part?

  D: I think she’s been around that kind of behavior so much, where everything’s a transaction, that it comes naturally to her. And that brings up a lot of questions: Why is she married to Tony? What did she see in him? It must’ve been stuff like that.

  M: Periodically, throughout the show, it feels like the writers are speaking directly to the audience. One [point] I flagged is when Carmela is talking to Mr. Wegler about Madame Bovary and she says, “The story’s really slow. Nothing really happens. I think he could’ve said what he has to say with a lot less words.”

  A: And then Wegler responds, “Outside, nothing happens. But inside, she has these extremes of boredom and exhilaration.”

  M: Is that you saying to the “Less yakking, more whacking” contingent in the audience, “What is wrong with you people?”

  D: Yes! Me and Matt [Weiner], I mean. Matt wrote that episode.

  M: What did Matthew Weiner bring to the show that wasn’t there before? What did he amplify?

  D: Humanity. There was humor in places you would not have expected, expressed in certain ways you wouldn’t have expected.

  A: This is also the episode where Tony B gives up on being a massage therapist and rejoins the Mob. What do you think the show has to say about the possibility of human beings to change both themselves and their circumstances?

  D: I know a lot of people said the show was about how people never change, but that was never the intention. To me, people do change, but it’s a long process. People always think, “Well, people have trauma and then they change.” But I don’t know if that’s true.

  A: Is there a character you could point to over the show who very significantly changed between when we met them or when the show either ended or they were written out?

  D: Paulie’s arc is kind of an interesting case. Paulie was not a religious person. In fact, he had his troubles with God. And yet Paulie’s the one who saw the Virgin in the Bada Bing and reconciled with his mother, out of religious feelings. Tony and he discussed religion in the final episode. And I don’t know if it changed Paulie’s behavior, but Paulie was also getting older, too. I think Paulie was a softer character than when it started. He had a little more feeling, I think.

  M: How loyal do you think Paulie really is to Tony? Is he loyal to him, or to the organization?

  D: I don’t believe those guys are loyal to anything, really. There must be some people who are, but I don’t think it’s a big feeling with them. I mean, the whole RICO system is based on mobsters ratting somebody out to avoid their own punishment.

  I don’t think Paulie is that loyal to Tony. I think he’s loyal to the idea that he’s loyal. He likes that idea. And as with anybody, it depends on what day you talk to him. I was thinking about “Remember When” and I thought that was really mean, what happened in the restaurant. When [Tony] said, “Remember when is the lowest form of conversation,” it was meaner than what happened on the boat! And this was after Paulie had a picture painted of him. And you know, at the end of season six, in the last show, Paulie looked upon the promotion he was getting as a burden, not as a good thing. He told him Tony didn’t want it. So I think Paulie’s head was changing in certain ways.

  A: Where did the idea for the bear come from?

  D: Newspapers. At that time, there were a lot of bears in Jersey. They were crawling into people’s cabinets and stuff like that, and busting their refrigerators open! I was like, “We have to do this!” [Laughs]

  As I’ve said, there was a whole thing about The Sopranos and me with nature. Having grown up in North Caldwell, it was kind of distressing to see what had become of the place. When I lived there, there were not so many developments. There’s a ridge of mountains that goes through that part of the state, and North Caldwell is on one side, and Cedar Grove is on the other side. Most of that mountain was wooded. We got back there to shoot in the year 2000 or so, and in the intervening years since I’d left, the housing had crept up, and there were no more woods. I found that very sad. There’s a lot of natural imagery on the show, like trees, and the impulse of the bear came from that, and also hearing that the bears were on the rebound.

  To me, the bear was about nature. It was about America, about the commercialization and monetization of America.

  A: So you’d read a Star-Ledger article that inspired the Class of 2004, right?

  D: Yeah. It talked about a number of guys getting out of prison, a bunch of pretty heavy-duty wiseguys getting back on the street.

  A: One of your new ex-con characters was the legendary Feech LaManna. Why did you decide Robert Loggia was the guy to embody him?

  D: What I remember was the movie with Jack Nicholson, Prizzi’s Honor. Nicholson, in whatever he does, is really great, but Loggia was the only one who really felt Italian in that movie, and that’s what I remembered.

  I also remember watching Loggia in a show called T.H.E. Cat when I was a kid, in which he played a cat burglar who also solved crimes! [Laughs] And at the age of eleven or whatever, I thought he was great. He was still great when I worked with him.

  M: Why did you send Feech back to prison instead of killing him?

  D: I just thought we should do something different for a change.

  M: All the stuff related to Feech and Paulie’s battle over territory with the landscaping businesses reminded me of how almost every extremely violent scene in this show has an element of slapstick to it.

  D: Absolutely! I was just going to say that.

  M: Do you have a particular aesthetic when it comes to violence?

  D: For this show I do.

  M: Can you talk about it more detail? I think this is important, because there were accusations that you were getting off on the violence, that it was sadistic and cruel. But at the heart of it, you’re saying it’s more Three Stooges or Laurel and Hardy?

  D: It’s interesting you say that, because I am a huge Laurel and Hardy fan. They did a thing on The Sopranos at the Musum of Modern Art, and I was interviewed by Larry Kardish16 and he asked me about my influences. I said Laurel and Hardy, and I guess it’s probably still true! Terry Winter is a Three Stooges guy, and Terry is one of the best at depicting violence.

  M: Even the emotionally intense violence that’s not supposed to be funny has elements of slapstick, like the fight between Tony and Ralphie resulting in Ralphie’s death. They use a frying pan and a can of bug spray, like a characters in a cartoon.

  D: Ilene [Landress] used to tell me all the time that I should make a slapstick feature. But I don’t know that they work anymore.

  M: I can’t deny that a lot of the violence is funny.

  D: How did you feel about Lorraine Calluzzo being chased out of the living room with the towel snapping?

  M: That was too much for me. It’s hard to describe why that was too much for me.

  D: That’s why I asked you.

  M: Maybe because I didn’t find her humiliation funny, but I felt like you wanted me to. Whereas Richie Aprile running over Beansie is not funny, and seemed like you didn’t want me to think it was.

  A: About Lorraine Calluzzo: she’s styled in a very particular way, and there’s a scene outside Shea Stadium parking lot where Johnny complains to Tony, “All she ever wants is whack, whack this, whack that,” and at the time, there was some speculation that she was specifically modeled off of Linda Stasi, the TV critic at the New York Post who had written a screed at the end of season four about how the show wasn’t violent enough for her anymore.17

  D: I remember being really angry at it. I thought it was a stupid comment.

  What did happen before that was that [Stasi] came in to read for a part. I never should’ve agreed to it. She read, didn’t get the part, and then she turned negative after that.18

>   A: I found in some of the archival Star-Ledger material a quote you gave me at the start of season five: “There was one woman writer back then who was saying, ‘Whack somebody! Whack somebody, for god’s sake!’ So this year, we decided to whack somebody who looks like her.”

  D: Right! I’m glad I said it!

  M: I want to get back to this slapstick thing. Certain types of screen violence are acceptable and other kinds are not. Some kinds are controversial and problematic, and others are not. Why?

  D: I’m not sure. All I know is none of us want to see violence against an animal. A dog, a cat, whatever. It’s outré.

  M: Why?

  D: Because they’re really innocent, I guess. Same as a baby or a child.

  And . . . I guess maybe the reason a lot of the violence on this show seems funny is because of a notion that we’ve all done bad things, we’re all jerks in some way or another, but here you see somebody get their comeuppance. Of course I can only talk about it in The Sopranos. For instance, Beansie had it coming in some way.

  I don’t mean just with the Mob. For example, if we’d had Mr. Wegler fall down some stairs and break his collarbone, we’d all be hooting about that right now.

  M: Why, because he’s a bit of a pretentious person?

  D: He was.

  M: That’s an interesting idea—that, to quote Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, “We’ve all got it coming.”

  D: Yeah, yeah. I don’t mean in Mob-speak, either.

  M: You think we’ve all got it coming? In what sense do you mean? Cosmically?

  D: You know what it is? We all have this image we want to portray, that we’re in control. Control is a big issue in human life. Falling down, or having violence arrayed against you, is a lack of control, and all your pretenses, your image—that all goes down the toilet, who you’re trying to project yourself as.

  A: But some characters don’t suffer on camera. Arguably, the most memorable bit of violence in season five happens off-camera: Adriana crawls away from Silvio, he raises the gun, and you don’t see her death. Why did we not get to see that, yet you were happy to show us other stuff in detail?

  D: Part of it was, I liked the whole image of her crawling through the leaves, and the sound it makes, and how autumn is so cozy, and you don’t see her killed for those reasons, aesthetic reasons having to do with the architecture of the shots. And then later on, when Carmela and Tony are sitting together in the woods, it’s a callback to that.

  But I really wonder why I didn’t show Adriana getting it. I’ve thought about it a lot, the fact that you don’t see her get shot.

  I guess it just felt wrong. It’s probably something that I didn’t want to see. I liked that character too much. She’d suffered enough. And she wasn’t pretentious. She was not a phony intellectual. She was just trusting, sobbing-prone. She was innocent.

  M: She always wanted to believe the best of people.

  D: She really did, and she fell into this trap of the FBI’s that wasn’t really her doing, and she didn’t even really understand it.

  A: You’d set the Adriana-FBI story up at the end of season three, and we followed it all through season four and most of five as well. Was that story always meant to end in her death?

  D: No.

  A: When did you realize the character had to die?

  D: Well, at the beginning of the season, we started talking about what was going to happen to her and Christopher. That relationship had been up and down. “We’re gonna get married/we’re not gonna get married.” And I guess at that point, I’d already had my conversation with Chris [Albrecht], maybe, and we started to think, “How are we going to deal with all these various people?” I don’t know when I actually decided she had to go, I just knew it was going to be a great episode. There’d be a lot of emotion in it, and the audience would be really affected by it. I knew that her leaving was going to be hard.

  A: In general, what was the atmosphere on the set like when someone got whacked and it was going to be their last scene?

  D: I don’t know what you’d call it. It wasn’t nervousness. Those guys would bust people’s balls. Jim would sometimes do that. In the end, they’d make it up to them, but that was their way of handling what was stress, I think.

  M: What would they say to them?

  D: Well, the one that I remember was the read-through for the show where Mikey Palmice dies. That actor campaigned vigorously to stay on the show: he really didn’t want to go. We were gathering for the read-through and Sirico came in, and I forget what the comment was, but Al Sapienza said he just really didn’t want to go, something like that, and he made some kind of wiseguy comment, and Sirico went [finger guns] Dat dat dat dat dat. Because he’s the one who kills him! [Laughs]

  A: How far in advance did people tend to find out they were going to be killed off? When did they get the scripts?

  D: At the beginning of prep, right before the read-through. I’m sure they were frustrated by the secrecy, but there were too many people trying to find out what was going on!

  A: You were the first HBO show to turn off the screener tap for critics before the show was over.

  M: How would fans try to find out what was happening next?

  D: They’d pile through garbage cans for script pages. People would circle around the set, find discarded pages and take those. That was mostly how it happened.

  M: Were any plot twists spoiled by people doing that?

  D: I don’t remember any spoiler having an effect, but we were really paranoid about it. There was also suspicion about people within the crew that somebody was a quisling . . .

  M: A rat?

  D: Yeah! [Laughs] It was ugly.

  M: Did anyone get fired for leaking stuff or for being sloppy?

  D: You should ask my assistant, Jason Minter. He was very much involved with that. He was the security guy tracking down who said what.19

  A: In “Irregular Around the Margins” it seems like something is about to happen between Tony and Adriana, but a car wreck prevents it. Do you think that if circumstances had been slightly different, they would’ve slept together?

  D: I don’t think that Adriana could betray Carmela. I don’t think she’d allow that to happen to herself.

  A: And it would be Carmela, not Christopher, whom she’d be primarily concerned about?

  D: Well, that, too—but Christopher’s not nice to her. People are unfaithful to each other. She would’ve felt terrible about Christopher if she’d [had sex with Tony], but I still think she might’ve done it. But I don’t think she would allow herself to betray Carmela.

  M: Do you remember what plan B would’ve been, if you decided not to kill Adriana?

  D: There was no plan B.

  A: What would you have done with Tony Blundetto if he’d lived into season six? You said to me one time that he was going to be an advisor to Tony, and at another time, you said he was going to be the major antagonist of the final season. Did you really have a specific plan?

  D: No, no. I just knew that whatever we did, it would be really good. [Steve Buscemi] would carry it off and it would be terrific, because he’s such a great actor. And I wanted to experience that and have it. But we just couldn’t justify it.

  A: Frankie Valli and Tim Daly appear in this season after they’d been referred to by their real names earlier in the series. In “Christopher,” Valli’s the final punch line, and Noah Tannenbaum’s father says he’s the real Tim Daly’s agent. In either case, did you think about that stuff when you were casting?

  D: No. And you know, Frankie actually read for the pilot.

  A: For who?

  D: Uncle Junior, maybe? He reached out to us originally, before the show even debuted.

  It turned out that, as we all know now, Frankie Valli is from that particular area in New Jersey, and Frankie Valli had a real-life experience which inspired the “How am I funny?” scene from Goodfellas. Frankie Valli told me that story.

  M: What did Frank Vincent bring to
the role of Phil Leotardo?

  D: Tremendous verisimilitude. When Frank Vincent was in the movies he’s famous for, and on The Sopranos, you felt you were looking at a real wiseguy at work. I think he’s more intelligent than the majority of those guys. There’s something about Frank that’s scary. And also, in The Sopranos, he was foolish. There was a scene between him and one of his guys, Butchie, and another guy, where he’s talking about the death of his brother, and he’s saying, “I can’t forget. I don’t forget.” His use of language was so preposterous. He could play the joke without pointing to the joke. That’s very difficult.

  M: I don’t think he was ever given credit for how good an actor he was.

  D: I think you’re right, maybe because he was often typecast. But he was a terrific actor. I’m thinking now about the scene between him and Vito’s kid, with the milkshake. Very unimportant scene, and not a very long scene, but he’s terrific in it. A Matt Weiner scene—as only he can write.

  M: There’s also the moment where we get that silent close-up, no dialogue, of him remembering his brother’s murder, right after “The Test Dream.” I’d seen Frank Vincent in several films, but that was the first time I’d ever felt bad for a character played by Frank Vincent. It’s a painful moment, and he doesn’t even say anything.

  D: No. He was a very, very great actor. He held that spot there on that show as an antagonist, foil, nemesis for what, three years?

  A: We should talk about “The Test Dream.” That type of dream is one that I, unfortunately, have a lot.

  D: What’s your test dream? How does it work?

  A: Usually I’m back in college, late in the semester, I discover I’m still enrolled in a class I haven’t been to once, the exam is about to start, and I’m trying to get the teacher to let me out of the class and he will not do it.

  M: I tell a friend of mine, “Hey, we should hang out Friday.” He says I can’t hang out Friday. I ask why not. He says, “It’s opening night.” “Opening night of what?” “Hamlet.” “I’m involved in that?” “Yeah.” “How?” “You’re playing Hamlet!” Cut to me going into a bookstore to buy a copy of Hamlet.