The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  “I’m the number one fan of gangster movies,” he says. “Martin Scorsese has no greater devotee than me. Like everyone else, I get off partly on the betrayals, the retributions, the swift justice. But what you come to realize when you do a series is, you could be killing straw men all day long. Those murders only have any meaning when you’ve invested story in them. Otherwise, you might as well watch Cleaver.”

  One detail about the final scene he’ll discuss, however tentatively: the selection of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” as the song on the jukebox.

  “It didn’t take much time at all to pick it, but there was a lot of conversation after the fact. I did something I’d never done before: In the location van, with the crew, I was saying, ‘What do you think?’ When I said, ‘Don’t Stop Believin’,’ people went, ‘What? Oh my God!’

  “I said, ‘I know, I know, just give a listen,’ and little by little, people started coming around.”

  Whether viewers will have a similar time-delayed reaction to the finale as a whole, Chase doesn’t know. (“I hear some people were very angry and others were not, which is what I expected.”) He’s relaxing in France, then he’ll try to make movies.

  “It’s been the greatest career experience of my life,” he says. “There’s nothing more in TV that I could say or would want to say.”

  * * *

  1 Due to a bad phone connection, I misheard David saying “fifty years” rather than “fifteen years,” which was close to the length of time elapsed between the release of The Godfather Part II and the debut of The Sopranos, so “fifty” is the number that made it into the paper, prompting a flood of angry mail from Italian Americans who wondered if he’d lost his mind. David subsequently wrote a Letter to the Editor saying he’d been misquoted and apologizing for that particular sentiment, as Italian Americans obviously had been discriminated against during the preceding half-century, and I ran a mea culpa. Fortunately, he continued to speak to me after that.

  2 Most of our predictions about the show during its run turned out very wrong; a decade later, The Many Saints of Newark is going to prove this one right.

  THE EULOGIES

  A tribute to James Gandolfini: Matt Zoller Seitz’s obituary and account from the funeral from Vulture.com, and David Chase’s eulogy, as transcribed by Alan Sepinwall.

  Seitz on James Gandolfini, 1961–2013: A Great Actor, A Better Man

  BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ | 6/20/2013

  * * *

  JAMES GANDOLFINI was real. He was special. You could feel it.

  Friends felt it. Colleagues felt it. People who talked to him for five minutes and never saw him again felt it. People who never met him in person and knew him only through his performance on The Sopranos felt it.

  It was real. It was deep. It was true.

  James Gandolfini had an authentic connection with viewers. Everyone who watched him perform, in a starring role or a bit part, came away feeling understood. You watched him act and you thought, “Yes. He gets it. He understands.”

  He wasn’t one of them. He was one of us.

  “I’m an actor,” he once told a reporter. “I do a job and I go home. Why are you interested in me? You don’t ask a truck driver about his job.”

  In the wake of James Gandolfini’s death—of a heart attack, at the appallingly young age of fifty-one—I keep coming back to that realness, and the source of it, his goodness. I got to know him a bit as a reporter, and I can testify that what you’ve heard is true. He was a good man.

  Gandolfini’s goodness was, I believe, at the heart of the powerful connection he forged with viewers. You could sense the goodness in him, no matter how tortured and tormented his characters were. It was there in those sad eyes and that radiant smile.

  I covered The Sopranos for the Star-Ledger, the paper Tony Soprano picks up at the end of his driveway. I kept in contact with members of the production staff after I handed the beat to my colleague Alan Sepinwall in 2004. I wasn’t buddies with Gandolfini or anything. Not too many people in the press were, I don’t think, except maybe people Gandolfini knew before he got famous.

  I did one of the only one-on-one interviews with him, way back in late 1998, before The Sopranos premiered on HBO.

  Two days before our scheduled interview, he called my house. My wife answered the phone.

  “Yes?” she said.

  Then her jaw dropped. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and whispered, “It’s James Gandolfini!”

  She loved Gandolfini. She’d had a crush on him ever since she saw him play Geena Davis’s boyfriend in Angie.

  Then she held up a silencing finger because Gandolfini was already talking, nervously. Stammering, practically.

  “Okay,” she said to him. “All right. Well, Okay. Well. Well . . . Well, I don’t know about that. Are you sure?”

  Long pause.

  “It might not be so bad,” she told him. “You never know. You know what? I think this is a conversation that you really should have with Matt. Hold on a second, he’s right here.”

  When I picked up the receiver, Gandolfini said, “Hey, listen, I’ve been thinking about it, and I really think it’s better if I don’t do this interview.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “I just don’t see how I’d have anything interesting to say,” he said. “Why would anybody care? I’m just not that interesting. Who cares what some actor has to say about anything? I’ll just come off sounding like an idiot.”

  He was silent for an awkward moment.

  Then he said, “I don’t want to get you in trouble with your bosses, though. So I thought I should talk to you about it, and ask you if maybe there was some way we could not do this thing. And just . . . not do it. Without causing a problem for you. Or for me.”

  Somehow I managed to talk him into doing the interview anyhow.

  My editor Mark Di Ionno asked if he could come along when I visited the set, because he’d gone to Rutgers with Gandolfini and claimed to be personally responsible for the distinctive dent in the actor’s forehead. Apparently a bunch of guys were tear-assing around the dorm shooting dart guns at one another, and Mark surprised Gandolfini by kicking a door open before he could burst through it. The door struck Gandolfini in the forehead and left that famous crease.

  “I can’t wait to see the look on his face,” Mark said.

  When we arrived on the set, Gandolfini saw Mark. His face lit up with one of the warmest smiles I’ve ever seen on anybody. He hugged Mark and clapped him on the back so hard you’d think he was trying to dislodge food lodged in Mark’s gullet.

  This is how James Gandolfini often greeted people: as if he was overjoyed to see them, and wanted to revel in their presence just in case he never saw them again.

  We spent half a day together on the set of one of the Sopranos episodes. He was great. I wish I’d saved the cassette tape. He talked about coming up in Hollywood and in the New York theater scene. He talked about acting and bartending. I vividly remember him talking about how much he loved Mickey Rourke.

  He said, “In the eighties, Mickey Rourke was the shit. If you were a young guy who loved movies and wanted to be an actor and [were] seeing a lot of movies in the eighties, there was nobody better than Mickey Rourke. De Niro, Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, they were all great, don’t get me wrong. But Mickey Rourke was the man. I wanted to be Mickey Rourke.”

  I said, “You wanted to be like Mickey Rourke?’

  He laughed and said, “No! I mean actually wanted to be Mickey Rourke. I wanted to be him. Like, steal his soul, like in Angel Heart, and actually be Mickey Rourke!”

  In the summer of 1999, the Television Critics Association gave Gandolfini an award for his work on the show. Nobody warned him that the cocktail reception after the awards show was a press event and that he’d be swarmed by reporters with notepads and tape recorders. He thought it was an off-the-books type of deal, just one professional group appreciating another. I was already at the bar when he sidled up ne
xt to me, ordered a beer and said, “One of these days, you’ll have to explain to me how this thing works,” and waved his hand, indicating the media piling onto the hotel balcony where the bar was located. When the tape recorders and notepads came out, his eyes filled with panic.

  When the cameras came out and the flashbulbs started going off, he stayed a couple more minutes, then fled. A friend later told me that the moment reminded him of the scene at the end of King Kong, right before the ape breaks his chains and goes berserk.

  He got better about seeming comfortable talking to the press and in public forums. In time he was comfortable enough to do an hour-long conversation with James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio.

  But I think it’s fair to say that none of this is proof that he’d “gone Hollywood.” More likely he was just giving a different sort of performance, as convincing as his others.

  Every time I spoke to him between 1998 and 2006—the last time I had any contact with him—he seemed like the same guy I’d met that first time, but with more money. I took my brother Richard, a big Sopranos fan, to the season six DVD release party. When Gandolfini saw me, he acted as if he’d never been happier to see anyone. He grabbed me in a headlock, gave me noogies, and crowed, “Hoah! What happened to all your hair?”

  “What happened to all your hair?” I shot back lamely, pulling free of his grip.

  “Look at this fuckin’ guy, with the banter,” he said to the room at large.

  “When’s the last time you saw him?” Richard asked me afterward.

  “I don’t know. Maybe three years?”

  You wouldn’t have known it.

  You could tell he really got a kick out of people: experiencing their personalities, their idiosyncrasies; hearing their stories.

  I think that’s why, when he’d won some awards and made a ton of money and had enough clout to get his own projects made, the first thing he threw his weight behind was an oral history documentary about recently returned veterans. He was oncamera interviewing. He listened more than he talked. He had no political agenda. He just wanted to give the soldiers a platform to talk about what it was like to go through whatever they’d been through.

  It wasn’t about him. Even if he was the star of a TV show or a movie, it wasn’t about him.

  It was about them.

  It was about you.

  It was about us.

  When my wife died suddenly of a heart attack in 2006, he sent me a condolence note. It read, “I am sorry for your loss. I remember talking to your wife on the phone that one time. She seemed like a nice lady.”

  It was signed, “Jim.”

  Anybody who had even the slightest contact with Gandolfini will testify to what a great guy he was, how full of life he was, how extraordinary he made other people feel. Yes, absolutely, he had problems—with drink, with drugs, with women, probably with lots of other things, for all we know—but so does everybody, to one degree or another. But whether he was feeling well or poorly, or living smartly or stupidly, there was always something about the guy that you wanted to embrace.

  You could feel it shining through the screen, that warmth and vulnerability, that broken yet still-hopeful humanness.

  That’s what made Tony Soprano, a bully and killer and cheater and disgusting hypocrite, so likable. The decent part of Tony, the part that stood in for the tragically wasted human potential Dr. Melfi kept trying to tease out and embrace, came from Gandolfini. His humanity shone through Tony’s rotten façade. When people said they sensed good in Tony, it was James Gandolfini they sensed.

  He was Tony Soprano. He was James Gandolfini. He was us.

  We lost a friend today.

  Publicly Mourning a Private Man:

  Seitz on the Funeral of James Gandolfini

  BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ | 6/27/2013

  * * *

  FUNERALS ARE FOR the living. James Gandolfini’s was beautiful and wrenching and right. Given what an earthy guy he was, it seems appropriate that it was open to the public and that people started crowding the streets outside the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Harlem early in the morning to claim a seat and pay their respects.

  I can’t help thinking, though, that if he could have seen all the people in suits and dresses, the immense church with its vaulted ceiling and 1,800 pews, and the news vans and cameras and fans lining up at dawn, he might have thought, This is silly. I’m just an actor . . .

  The James Gandolfini portrayed by eulogists this morning matched that perception of a man grateful for his talent and his opportunities, yet uncomfortable with the attention he got, as if he believed his contributions were too small in the greater scheme to bear mention. They weren’t small—the outpouring of grief over his premature death of a heart attack at age fifty-one is proof. But the fact that his mind worked that way is one of the reasons people responded to his acting, and to Gandolfini the man.

  A who’s-who of actors, filmmakers, and media personalities were packed into the front section of the church. There were Sopranos producers and costars: David Chase, Michael Imperioli, Dominic Chianese, Lorraine Bracco, Tony Sirico, Edie Falco, Steve Buscemi, Annabella Sciorra, Aida Turturro, Vincent Pastore, Michael Rispoli, Vincent Curatola. There were performers and media personalities who knew or worked with Gandolfini: Alec Baldwin, Julianna Margulies, Brian Williams, Chris Noth, Dick Cavett, Marcia Gay Harden.

  Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who played Tony Soprano’s daughter Meadow on the show, was an especially poignant sight, very pregnant, and like so many other guests, red-eyed from crying. I overheard a guest saying of Gandolfini’s thirteen-year-old son, Michael, “He’s a really strong kid, but he looks so lost.”

  The actor’s coffin was wheeled in as the Rev. James A. Kowalski intoned, “I am the resurrection, I am the life, says the Lord.” The pallbearers tried to seem as calm and resolute as they could, as pallbearers always do, but you could see their inconsolable sadness. I will never forget the look on the face of the former Sopranos writer and producer Todd Kessler, the pallbearer near the end of Gandolfini’s casket. A knot of anguish.

  The eulogists drove home that there was a real kindness, empathy, and humility to Gandolfini. These qualities came through even when he was playing larger-than-life characters or succumbing to the darkness and turning into the wild man of early-aughts tabloid scandals—a side alluded to by Gandolfini’s longtime friend Thomas Richardson and Sopranos creator David Chase.

  Gandolfini’s wife Deborah, the mother of his newborn daughter Liliana, remembered her husband as “an honest and loving man. Ironically,” she said, indicating the crowd, “he was extremely private.” She said that he was “always secretly helping someone,” a trait confirmed in numerous obituaries and fleshed out in testimonials at the funeral.

  Gandolfini’s friend Richardson described him as “the most giving and generous person that everyone here has ever known.” He talked about how Gandolfini’s hugs were always a little bit tighter and went on a little bit longer than everyone else’s. Then he asked everyone in the chapel to stand up and put their arms around the people next to them and hug them as tight as they could, “for it is in hugging that we are hugged.”

  There were anecdotes about Gandolfini randomly spending hours with fans he’d met on the street, hiring a sushi chef out of his own pocket to pamper the crew on film sets, and supporting people and organizations for years without anyone in the media knowing he was doing it.

  The Rev. Kowalski remembered first meeting Gandolfini at a fund-raiser for the Tannenbaum Center for Religious Understanding. He talked about how the actor used to keep a notepad and pen with him as he drove; if Gandolfini heard the name of a charitable organization on the radio that he wanted to get involved with, he’d pull over and write it down. “He’d say, ‘I wanna do something to support what they’re trying to do,’” Kowalski recalled.

  Kowalski spoke movingly about Gandolfini’s ability to tap universal fears and longings in such a direct way that it humanized an often monstrou
s character, Tony Soprano. He said that although he did not like the violence of The Sopranos, he watched the show anyway because he felt Gandolfini’s performance gave him insight into where violence comes from.

  “You can’t pay someone enough to do a job like that,” he said, of both Gandolfini’s reaching into darkness as Tony Soprano and of the actor’s personal generosity.

  Gandolfini’s old friend Susan Aston, credited as his “acting coach” on The Sopranos, spoke of the actor as someone who was fully aware of his flaws and worked as hard as he could to understand himself, control his demons, and be a better person. “In a small home office that he referred to as ‘the cave,’ where he and I worked late nights on the next day’s scenes, this other thing he strove for was to be able to accept himself on the occasions when he fell short of his intentions,” she said.

  Chase’s eulogy was presented in the form of a letter to his friend. “I tried to write a traditional eulogy, but it came out like bad TV,” he joked. He said he’d thought about writing a few organizing thoughts on a piece of paper and then winging it, as Gandolfini used to do at awards shows, but decided against it, because “a lot of your speeches didn’t make sense. But it didn’t matter that it didn’t make sense, because the feeling was real. The feeling was real. The feeling was real. I can’t say that enough.”

  “When Jim focused his incredible gaze on you,” Gandolfini’s friend Richardson said, “you felt so important to him.”

  Absolutely.

  We all felt that sense of importance, that feeling of being understood. Even if you never met the actor and knew him only by watching him as Tony Soprano, there was something about Gandolfini that felt knowable and reachable—a directness, a willingness to be vulnerable, to let himself be helpless or pathetic, to allow us to see through him, the better to see ourselves. Those qualities can’t be taught, only harnessed. Gandolfini was born with them, and he worked like hell to transform them into tools that he could use to connect with us.