03/03/04

David Chase, creator of The Sopranos

David Chase: The Real Boss of The Sopranos
February 29, 2004,
New York Times
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Next Sunday, after a hiatus of 15 months, "The Sopranos" returns to HBO for its fifth season - led, as ever, by David Chase, the show's creator and executive producer. Mr. Chase recently spoke with Virginia Heffernan about the show's legacy, the pitfalls of therapy and the horror of network television.

HEFFERNAN: How is "The Sopranos" different from the rest of television?

CHASE: The function of an hour drama is to reassure the American people that it's O.K. to go out and buy stuff. It's all about flattering the audience, making them feel as if all the authority figures have our best interests at heart. Doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists: sure, they have their little foibles, some of them are grouchy, but by God, they care.

HEFFERNAN: So what's "The Sopranos" about?

CHASE: It's not about that.

HEFFERNAN: What, then?

CHASE: If I could tell you, I wouldn't have to do it.

HEFFERNAN: What are the formal distinctions between "The Sopranos" and network shows?

CHASE: Network television is all talk. I think there should be visuals on a show, some sense of mystery to it, connections that don't add up. I think there should be dreams and music and dead air and stuff that goes nowhere. There should be, God forgive me, a little bit of poetry.

HEFFERNAN: Why do you think network television can't pull that off?

CHASE: Television is a prisoner of dialogue and steady-cam. People walk down a hall, and the camera follows them around a corner. It looks like they're off to some important thing because they're walking 15 miles an hour and they're talking and handing papers off. It's the modern style.

HEFFERNAN: And what do you prefer?

CHASE: I prefer sitting in the therapy office for a 12-minute scene. There's one rule on the show: the camera in the therapy office does not move - forward, backward or sideways. I've been in a lot of therapy, and I never saw a camera move in to my face. I didn't think we should say, "O.K., this is the important part. It's all about his father, and the time he didn't come home on Christmas Eve." I wanted everything to be just flat. I wanted the audience to have to figure out what was important, to actually do the same work that Dr. Melfi was doing. I wanted to present therapy scenes as they are. Because a lot of therapy - let's face it ? is [expletive].

HEFFERNAN: Therapists love this show, though.

CHASE: They understand a lot of it's [expletive]. I'm sure they know that most of what we, as patients, present is filler.

HEFFERNAN: So you've lost faith in therapy.

CHASE: It's been very beneficial to me. But long-term therapy? You go over and over and over the same story. I mean, there are people who are shattered by their childhood or by something else in life, and I'm not talking about that. But the average middle-class therapy session - how much introspection is necessary? We've said it on the show. People who need therapy are in Afghanistan. They've seen horrible human cruelty and degradation, but they don't have time or the money for therapy.

HEFFERNAN: Tony Soprano seems like he needs confession and absolution as much as therapy. Does Tony believe in God?

CHASE: That's complicated. A person could only answer that by asking whether they themselves believe in God. Do I want to get into all that?

HEFFERNAN: Are questions about Tony questions about you, then?

CHASE: No. No, they're not. But for some reason when you said that I found that hard to separate from myself. I guess he was indoctrinated with it as a young boy, and some of it's still there. But his rational self, his 21st-century self, has to ask himself, "Do I believe in miracles and God?" It's hard to say yes.

HEFFERNAN: Do you ever write gags for "The Sopranos," scenes that don't further the narrative but are included only because they're funny?

CHASE: You mean do we veer off from the plot? Do we take the security of the show and rest it all on a single joke and maybe blow everything? Yes, we do that, what you're never supposed to do.

HEFFERNAN: You also do a lot of one-liners. Some are funny, but some - like Tony's joke, in the new season, about a "Boring 747" - seem to have another function.

CHASE: Well, I don't know. I might smile at that. There is a question to be asked about that joke. We're seeing the people laughing from Tony's point of view. Did they really laugh that hard? Or is he saying: "My God, look how much they're laughing. Carmela was right, I have no friends." That comes about, frankly, because I'm the chief executive producer of the show and created the show. Sometimes people laugh at everything I say. So I find myself thinking: "Part of the reason they're laughing is because I'm the boss. Gee, that's sad."

HEFFERNAN: I'll tell you a moment I thought was funny. Tony is urging Christopher to avenge his father's killing. Christopher is reminiscing about his dead father, saying he got shot down when he was bringing home a crib. And Tony says: "It was a stack of TV trays, actually. But it could have been a crib."

CHASE: I wrote that. What that's really about is - it's really very easy to write "The Sopranos," because everything that everybody says is untrue. Complete falsehoods, self-justifications, rationalizations, outright lies, fantasies and miscommunication. For that reason, I think there's always sort of a joke going on, which is that these people aren't communicating at all. These people are kidding themselves, and lying to themselves and to each other all the time. So when you talk about Christopher and the crib, did he make that up? Who told him the father was carrying a crib?

HEFFERNAN: I assume his mother did.

CHASE: You think his mother did? I think he embellished it himself. I think once he began to hear that his father was a criminal, and when he heard his mother complaining about his bum father all the time, he - somewhere along the line, not even consciously - added the crib himself. He gets all blubbery and his eyes start to water when he's talking about this crib. Like that makes it more tragic. This guy was a hoodlum and he got gunned down on the street. Period.

HEFFERNAN: But a man carrying a crib: that's exactly what you want your father to be. Giving all his attention to you.

CHASE: Right. Unfortunately, Tony makes it into the worst possible thing he could have been carrying, which is TV trays.

HEFFERNAN: But since everyone's always lying, why does Tony take the time even to correct Christopher on this point?

CHASE: Because something in Christopher's self-pity and self-hagiography is annoying to Tony. He has to deflate him, say: "That's not what happened. And don't make yourself better than me because your dad was carrying a crib, O.K.?"

HEFFERNAN: Does anyone tell the truth on the show?

CHASE: Within Tony and Carmela's relationship, I think they speak honestly to each other. Tony speaks pretty honestly about his feelings. Except for the fact that he's not faithful. And she, out of training, never brings up the fact of what he does. So there are two huge lies at the base of the relationship. But I think on a day-to-day basis they're honest with each other.

HEFFERNAN: One of the most common lies on the show is the way Tony refers to Christopher as his nephew. Does Tony not want to acknowledge what a distant relative his heir apparent is?

CHASE: As it happens, there's no other made guys, or soldiers, or even associates, who are even related to Tony. Christopher's mother is Tony's cousin. And Christopher's father was kind of an uncle to Tony. More than anything else, Tony has this feeling that we are alone in the universe and that the only people who really care are our families. There have been real mob bosses who have relied exclusively on blood relatives to talk to the outside world, because the chance of your relative ratting on you is less than your friend or a stranger. It actually does make sense.

HEFFERNAN: Businesses organized by blood have a built-in hierarchy.

CHASE: During this Parmalat problem, I read that one of the problems with huge corporations in Italy is that so much of it is family structure. Your uncle or your nephew might not be the best man for the job, No. 1; or No. 2, it becomes too muddy.

HEFFERNAN: Maybe there's an idea that people who are related will lie to one another less?

CHASE: I would imagine that the more time you spend talking to another person, the more you're going to lie to them. So if you spend a lot of time with your relations, you're probably lying a lot to them.

HEFFERNAN: If Tony cares so much about being able to rely on family, though, why is his son not being groomed to take over the family business?

CHASE: Tony has said on the show, "My son wouldn't last." But if he were to drift toward criminal life, Tony would not try to stop it. And in fact on some level would probably be happy.

HEFFERNAN: It's something he must worry about.

CHASE: About who's going to run the Soprano family when he's gone? I don't think he cares. Tony talks about the future of the family, and about his place in history, but what Tony wants is stuff. He wants to be successful and get as much as he can out of the family. But I don't think he has much sense of follow-through about it. He would never say that; he would never admit that. But what happens to that family after he's gone doesn't interest him. It's all lip service.

HEFFERNAN: James Gandolfini says he won't miss playing Tony Soprano. Will you miss Tony?

CHASE: I'm one of those people who miss everything once it's gone, no matter how much I've been complaining about it. I'm sure I will miss Tony Soprano and that whole universe. I am nostalgic by nature.

HEFFERNAN: HBO has allowed you a lot of liberties with this show, but it seems like the biggest one would be getting to produce 60-minute hours instead of the 42-minute hour of network dramas.

CHASE: We don't have to deliver 60 minutes. Our shows usually run 52 minutes to an hour. I can tell you from working in networks for a long time: to have to cut something to 42 minutes for an hour show is absurd. It's despicable. We're sold something that's supposed to be an hour, and it's 18 minutes of commercials. It's less than a therapy hour. I'm amazed that we Americans put up with this.

HEFFERNAN: Do you think TV's bad for us? Worse than, say, movies?

CHASE: Television is at the base of a lot of our problems. It trivializes everything. So there's no more mystery, we've seen it all 50,000 times. And in order to make the boring interesting, everything is hyped. I think, for example, terrorism is a television question: what those images do on TV - how they're played and played and played until they have no meaning whatsoever. And the next one has to be even bigger. There is something about a motion picture. I think Bertolucci said a movie is like a cathedral. The faces are 40 feet high. It's a more magical experience. In television you're sitting there in your own home, on your crummy couch, and it takes away - there's something missing.

HEFFERNAN: But there's also something so consoling about it. It's close to family; it's at home.

CHASE: Yeah, but family doesn't really watch it together. There was a four-month period in 1956 where families watched it together. It seems to be very divisive, and I think it's very isolating, actually.

HEFFERNAN: Do you have any moral qualms about working in TV, then?

CHASE: Yes, I do. I never wanted to work in television. I did it for the money. I've always wanted to be working in movies and I never could make that jump.

HEFFERNAN: You could now. Will you take "The Sopranos" to the big screen?

CHASE: I don't know about "The Sopranos" movie. "The Sopranos" has been the best creative experience of my life. None of us who work on the show ever expected to last beyond a season, if that. The whole thing came about because I thought I would be able to take HBO's money and make a pilot, which would catapult me into the very stratosphere of feature-film directing. But it didn't work out that way. It's been - you know, I'm really lucky. People like the show, and I've got a great group of actors, a great group of directors. But I don't want to do any more TV. I'm tired of television. I'm tired of the form. I've always wanted to go into movies.

HEFFERNAN: But before you do - how's the show going to end?

CHASE: We're going to tell you that everything's O.K. And that you should go out and buy stuff.