Showing posts with label James Gandolfini. Show all posts
Showing posts with label James Gandolfini. Show all posts
Monday, September 16, 2024
How James Gandolfini’s addictions to alcohol and drugs caused chaos during filming of ‘The Sopranos’
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Francine Prose / Nicole Holofcener's Beautiful Imperfectionns
Nicole Holofcener’s
Beautiful Imperfections
by Francine Prose
Nicole Holofcener’s new film, Enough Said, opens with a shot of its heroine, Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), wrestling a bulky, “portable” massage table out of the trunk of her car. In the scenes that follow, we rapidly become acquainted with the challenges of Eva’s life as a masseuse: the intimate contact with a body one might not choose to know quite so intimately, the necessity of enduring the nonstop, narcissistic chatter of a client who might just as well be talking to herself. At various points throughout the movie, we watch Eva lug the heavy table up a long flight of stairs to the home of a young man who stands at the top of the steps and watches her struggle without any awareness of the fact that it might be thoughtful, or simply polite, to offer to help.
Funny and romantic on the surface, tough-minded and often sharply satiric underneath, Holofcener’s comedies remind us, as few Hollywood films do, that people work for a living; they support themselves and their families, they pay their rent and their bills. They have more or less money than their friends, labor at glamorous or demeaning jobs, live in grander or more modest dwellings—and these differences in salary and status are significant, especially to those at the lower end of the spectrum.
| James Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Enough Said |
In Friends With Money (2006), Jennifer Anniston plays a woman who is barely getting by, a former teacher reduced to cleaning houses, while her close friends live in luxury, writing television scripts, designing clothes, collecting the proceeds from a trust fund, renovating their homes, and attending charity benefit dinners. In the brilliant (and very dark) Please Give (2010)—which takes aim at heartless New York real-estate envy and a culture in which a mother can best express her maternal love by buying her daughter absurdly expensive designer jeans—the most sympathetic character, Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), is a technician at a mammography center, and the opening credits appear over a montage of women’s breasts being positioned for the X-ray machine.
After watching Holofcener’s work, you may find yourself thinking about how frequently characters in movies seem to have been assigned their jobs at random, merely in order to give them something to do. Who can remember what the women in Bridesmaids do when they’re not preparing for the wedding? And though we’re told that the Ben Stiller character in Meet the Fokkers is a nurse, it seems to be mainly for the purpose of getting a laugh and inspiring the scorn of his prospective father-in-law. In a Holofcener film, a character’s job is what she does, and, whether she likes it or not, whether or not she chooses to define herself by how she is employed, it is a major—and a defining—aspect of her identity. InWalking and Talking (1996), Anne Heche is a therapist in training; in Lovely &Amazing (2001), the Catherine Keener character goes to work at a one-hour photo shop.
Lionsgate
Jake Gyllenhaal and Catherine Keener in Lovely & Amazing (2001)
The fact that they have credible (if not necessarily gratifying) jobs is by no means the only way in which Holofcener’s men and women seem more like people we know, or might know, than do most of the one-dimensional figures we have grown accustomed to seeing on screen. She’s not afraid to let her characters be at once flawed and appealing, strong and weak, damaged and healthy, generous and self-centered; even the most clear-sighted must cope with disabling blind spots. They seem like human beings, and if they behave heroically, as they often do, theirs is the sort of heroism that enables an ordinary person to get through an ordinary day without needing to defuse a ticking bomb or save their families from a spectacular, special-effects apocalypse.
Because so many large and small elements in Enough Said strike us as being so plausible—the well-drawn characters, the cars they drive (Eva drives some sort of low-end sedan), their furniture and clothing (one can tell how much their outfits cost), Eva’s loving and nuanced relationship with her daughter (Tracey Fairaway), who is about to leave for college, the reprehensible manner in which Eva’s otherwise sympathetic friends (Toni Colette and Ben Falcone) discuss whether or not to fire their maid—we’re willing to accept the central coincidence on which the plot hinges. Eva finds herself falling in love with a man named Albert (James Gandolfini)—also divorced, also the father of a daughter about to leave home for college—who turns out to be the ex-husband of Eva’s new massage client, Marianne (Catherine Keener). A poet so famous that adoring fans recognize her when she is out hiking, the stylish and beautiful Marianne is Eva’s idea of perfection.
Flattered that Marianne values her company, Eva continues the friendship even after she realizes that the ex-husband about whom Marianne is so unreservedly and gleefully nasty is none other than Albert. Indeed, Eva presses Marianne for more information about Albert’s failings, in part because it allows Eva to view him from two perspectives at once, and because Marianne’s complaints seem to contain an implicit warning about a future that may lie in store for Eva, whose own first marriage failed. Alone with Albert, Eva gazes at him with the adoring eyes of the newly in love, besotted by his charm, his sweetness, by the surprise of discovering that an overweight, middle-aged man could be so sexy, and by the irresistible allure of the fact that they appear to share the same sense of humor. But gradually she begins to see what Marianne saw: a fat, sloppy “loser” with the repellent habit of swirling a corn chip in his guacamole in order to separate the avocado from the onion. It’s as if Eva is having the rare experience of enjoying the exultant beginning and suffering the unpleasant ending of a love affair—all at once.
The parts have been written with sufficient depth and wisdom that, under Holofcener’s skillful direction, the actors never seem to be movie stars impersonating people. Rather, they disappear into the vulnerable and self-doubting characters they play without a hint of the preening vanity that so often causes cinematic performances to seem forced and shallow. It’s fascinating to watch Louis-Dreyfus’s mobile face twist and contort itself into expressions of shame, chagrin, bemusement, and regret, just as it is at once instructive and moving to be reminded that the late James Gandolfini was not Tony Soprano but rather an immensely gifted actor who became famous for his portrayal of a Mafioso. Here he projects the uncertainty and the vitality of a guy with a big heart and a sharp mind, a man whose sense of pride and personal dignity is undiminished by his pained awareness that he really needs to tidy up his house and lose some weight.
The extent to which we come to believe in—and care about—these people can be gauged by the intensity of our discomfort during an excruciating scene in which Eva drinks too much wine at dinner with Albert and her friends, and begins to channel Marianne. She accuses Albert of overeating, offers to buy him a calorie book, informs the increasingly uneasy party that Albert is incapable of speaking in a whisper, and glares with hate at him when (sure enough) he swishes a chip in the guacamole to herd the onions off to one side.
We are aware, as Albert is not, of Eva’s friendship with Marianne. But the fact that we are in possession of knowledge unavailable to a character does not (as it often does, in the hands of a less accomplished artist) diminish our respect for that character and his intelligence. And when, in the car going home, Albert angrily asks why he feels as if he had been having dinner with his ex-wife, it doesn’t seem like the culmination of a tricky plot twist but instead like evidence of a talent that V.S. Pritchett identified and praised in the work of Turgenev: his ability “to convey how everyone is aware of everyone else as if they were in telepathic communication with one another’s passing thoughts.”
I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that, after much grief and misunderstanding, the lovers ultimately come to realize that they can’t live without one another. It is what I suppose could be called a Hollywood ending, and those of us who have been watching a lot of premium-cable-channel TV (dramatic series in which things turn out to be much more catastrophically awful than anyone might have expected) may find themselves thinking, for a moment, that a less neat and cheerful conclusion might have been more lifelike, more real.
But only for a moment. Because, by the end of Enough Said, we desperately want Albert and Eva to be reunited. This feeling is a great deal like our desire to see the lovers marry in the last act of a Shakespeare comedy or in the final pages a Jane Austen novel: even the most jaded of us still want to believe that it is possible for flawed and imperfect humans to love one another—and to be happy. Give us something better and deeper than what we’ve come to expect from Hollywood, and, like the audience with which I watched the film, we’ll by gladdened, even moved to tears, by a Hollywood ending.
September 20, 2013, 4:53 p.m.
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Difficult Men / From The Sopranos to Breaking Bad
Difficult Men: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad by Brett Martin – review
The inside story of how the best TV series of the last 20 years came to be made
Mob mentality … The Sopranos, with James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano, became a nationwide cultural event. Photograph: Craig Blankenhorn/AP
Brett Martin's Difficult Men does for the outstanding American TV dramas of recent years what Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls did for the great US movies of the 1970s: it's an entertaining and insightful history of how they came to be made. The title refers not just to the new breed of televisual anti-hero that emerged from 1999 onwards, when Tony Soprano debuted on HBO, but also to the "showrunners", the "all-powerful" writer-producers behind them: The Wire's David Simon, Deadwood's David Milch, Mad Men's Matthew Weiner, and most of all, The Sopranos' David Chase. Martin argues that the open-ended 12- or 13-episode serialised drama became "the signature American art form of the first decade of the 21st century", the equivalent of the novels of Roth, Updike and Mailer in the 1960s, or the films of Scorsese, Altman, Coppola and others in the 70s. And he presents the people who made them: a group of grumpy, stubborn, obsessive middle-aged men – mostly veterans of a hard and demoralising (if well-paid) industry, who have spent years writing formulaic cop shows and tired sitcoms. "You're here for two things," Chase once told a junior colleague on an earlier show, who had dared to use the word "art": "selling Buicks and making Americans feel cosy."
In these days of meth-dealing school teachers, it's easy to forget how shocking the idea of a criminal protagonist used to be. The conventional TV wisdom, enforced by advertisers, had always been that Americans would watch films with morally compromised heroes, but that they would never allow them into their living rooms. However, the proliferation of cable TV channels – and later, the introduction of DVD box sets – led to the creation of new, lucrative niche markets. HBO, a pay-TV channel that doesn't take advertising, produced the first wave of these shows as part of a deliberate corporate strategy: it was seeking out a sophisticated, affluent audience, and "adult themes", as they say, were a distinctive selling point. (HBO is of course famous for its use of "sexposition", a speciality of Game of Thrones: spicing up boring exposition with a gratuitous sex scene.) Its executives were famously hands-off and sympathetic to writers. Even so, when the time came to give the go ahead to The Sopranos, HBO's two pioneering bosses, Chris Albrecht and Carolyn Strauss, asked each other: "Should we do this? We should do this! Can we do this?" After shooting the pilot, Chase told his cast and crew: "You've been great. It's been lots of fun. Unfortunately, nobody is going to watch this."
But people did watch it: soon The Sopranos was racking up 10 million viewers per week, unheard of in cable TV, and became a nationwide cultural event. Industry lore has it that HBO delivered only two notes – registered only two serious reservations – about the show. The first was about the title, which they worried was misleading; they offered the lame alternative of Family Man. The second was about the fifth episode of the first series, "College", in which Tony encounters a Mafia informer while taking his daughter Meadow to an open day at a liberal arts college in Maine, and strangles him with a length of wire. Albrecht felt that this would "lose the audience". Chase prevailed on both points, and once this Rubicon had successfully been crossed, the floodgates opened: in the wake of the suburban mob boss came a slew of very bad cops (The Shield), dysfunctional undertakers (Six Feet Under), drug king-pins (The Wire), and murderous pimps (Deadwood). Writers vied to break all kinds of TV-show taboos: they had policemen murdering policemen; they killed off children; and they indulged in the frequent slaughter of regular characters that made new scripts so nerve-racking for cast members.
The main pleasure of this book is its detailed descriptions of the creation of each show, particularly The Sopranos and The Wire. The former was rooted firmly in Chase's own New Jersey Italian childhood; the family name was originally "DeCesare". His "passive aggressive, fearful, domineering" mother provided the model for Tony's mother Livia, "one of the more idiosyncratically terrifying and funny characters" in American TV; while his father, a disappointed store owner, "radiated frustration in way that would later find expression in Tony Soprano". When Chase discovered Fellini as a student, he thought: "This is the kind of nonsense that goes on in my house. The melodrama and the self-pity and the obsessiveness and the craziness. This is my DNA."
After film school, Chase worked in television for years, on the detective show The Rockford Files and on Northern Exposure, despising himself for not making avant garde films, while absorbing the lessons of the medium. Under Stephen J Cannell, the producer of 21 Jump Street andThe A-Team, he learned that "your hero can do a lot of bad things, he can make all kinds of mistakes, can be lazy and look like a fool, as long as he's the smartest guy in the room and he's good at his job. That's what we ask of our heroes."
Chase also learned how to resist outside interference, skills born of a working lifetime's struggles with executives. The book is full of episodes in which he is asked to mildly tone down some bleak plot development, and says: "No, I just can't see it that way." One collaborator remembers: "And sometimes you'd say, 'Can we just move this comma over here?' And he'd say, 'I thought about it and I just can't do it.'" When he finally got his own show, he ran it in a Tony Soprano-esque fashion. The writers' room – an institution of US TV drama, in which a group of highly-strung writers is assembled in a room "for eight hours a day, mostly to face rejection and all in service of another person's vision" – sounds like a terrifying place. Chase sacked one of his writers, Todd Kessler, minutes after Kessler received an Emmy nomination for writing the terrific finale to season two ("I guess the timing isn't great …" Chase said). Kessler went on to create Damages, in which Glenn Close plays a terrible boss – "brilliant but manipulative, vain, imperious, unpredictable" – who sucks in and corrupts a young protege.
The only Sopranos writer who seems to have emerged unscathed was Weiner, later the showrunner of Mad Men, an abrasive egotist whose character is probably best summed up by his rousing speech after his show won a Golden Globe: "This is what you wait for," he said, "so you can tell all those people who ever said anything bad to you to go fuck themselves!" But even Weiner sounds like an ideal colleague compared to Milch, of NYPD Blue and Deadwood. A drug‑addled gambler, Milch gave up on scripts altogether and extemporaneously dictated lines to bemused actors, when not randomly handing out hundred-dollar bills, urinating out of windows, or assembling teams of young, attractive women – "vestal virgins" – to assist his creative processes. Breaking Bad's showrunner Vince Gilligan is, in stark contrast, is a "relaxed southern gentleman" who prides himself on running the happiest writers' room in the business.
The genesis of The Wire is a more familiar story, because of its background in Simon's work as a Baltimore police reporter, and Homicide, the now-famous book that came out of it. But Martin's account is still interesting. If you've ever wondered why the final series is so much worse than the other four, it's all here. Simon's writing partner Ed Burns, a brilliant, arrogant former policeman whose surveillance operations inspired the titular wire, usually shot down his bad ideas and came up with good ones by the truck-load; but he was off working on the Iraq war mini-series Generation Kill. Simon, meanwhile, became carried away by a long-running feud with his former employer, the Baltimore Sun. The show's other main writers, particularly George Pelecanos, had little interest in the satirical newspaper storyline, and felt, surely correctly, that the subplot in which Dominic West's McNulty simulates a serial killing spree was poorly judged.
There's not a great deal in the way of criticism in this book, which is perhaps a pity, because Martin does it well. His essential argument is that most of these dramas are concerned with middle-aged masculinity and its discontents; he's good on the balance of domesticity and fantasy, identification and wish-fulfilment in shows such as The Sopranos andBreaking Bad; he contextualises them well in the Bush years, and the economic slump. But what the reader mostly takes away from Difficult Men is its memorable description of the industry: the writers' room, desperately searching for the episode's 18 "beats"; stressed-out character actors inhabiting their difficult parts for up to a decade (James Gandolfini used to work himself up for his scenes by, say, smashing a stereo in his trailer or smacking the back of his own head). Most of all, the book leaves the image of the showrunner: the possibly unstable writer, in charge of every detail of a massive artistic-commercial enterprise. As one TV veteran remarks: "This isn't like publishing some lunatic's novel or letting him direct a movie. This is handing a lunatic a division of General Motors.
Saturday, September 14, 2013
Anthony Horowitz / Where have all the bad guys gone?
Anthony Horowitz
Where have all the bad guys gone?
It used to be easy to spot the baddies - they were the ones with the facial scars and incurable megalomania. These days, they hide in plain sight
Bryan Cranston's Walter White - part on the new breed of villainry
If you ask me, Mike Myers has a lot to answer for. By taking the piss out of James Bond's Blofeld in the Austin Powers franchise, he made it almost impossible for a modern audience to relish a big-screen, larger-than-life villain. The collarless jacket, the scar, the Persian cat, the wheelchair – they've all gone the same way as the prosthetic limb, the dwarf and the third nipple. Villains can no longer spend a scene describing what they are going to do before, inevitably, they are killed off in some improbable way. The last Bond villain died with a knife in his back. He didn't even get a larger-than-life death.
Speaking personally, it is the deaths of my bad guys that often keep me going. I may be sitting in a room with 23 chapters and 100,000 words of Alex Rider to write, but at least I have a spectacular and bloody finale to reward myself with. Damian Cray sucked into the engines of a jumbo jet on a tea trolley. Julia Rothman crushed by a hot-air balloon. Dr Grief sliced in two by a sleigh. I can actually feel the writing picking up speed as I head towards these final confrontations. You'll notice that none of my characters has ever been arrested and sent to Broadmoor. It wouldn't be the same.
Why are modern movie villains so ineffectual? It's been 22 years since Anthony Hopkins created a truly memorable, iconic and believable monster. Maybe Hannibal Lecter worked so well because he was presented to us so simply, wrapped in silence. And when he did talk: "I'm giving very serious thought to eating your wife." Delicious. By contrast, most bad guys in big summer blockbusters find themselves contending with a tornado of special effects, leaving actors even as brilliant as Benedict Cumberbatch, as he was in Star Trek Into Darkness, with little to do but race around with their quiff blowing in the wind. And if you're planning to blow up New York or San Francisco, who really cares? They've been blown up so many times and in so many different ways that as an audience, we're tempted to just let you get on with it. What with their over-inflated budgets, film-makers in Hollywood seem to have forgotten an ancient truth: it's the no-frills finales that really chill. Kicking a dog or telling a child there's no Santa Claus – now that's bad.
Supervillains are, to my mind, uniquely uninteresting. If they wear silly costumes and can fly, are they really going to give me bad dreams? Consequently, film-makers have spent more and more time recently on humanising them. Not that it always works. OK, so Magneto had a bad time at Auschwitz. But that still doesn't make me empathise when he uses his magnetobility to fold up the Golden Gate Bridge. However, there are exceptions, especially in Batman. Heath Ledger was a brilliant Joker, andDanny DeVito did the impossible and made sense of the Penguin. The point of these performances, though, was that they found the human being inside the costume. More often than not it seems that their actual humanity has been written out by the 19th or 20th draft.
This is what makes Quentin Tarantino so special. I'm afraid I didn't enjoy either Django Unchained or Inglourious Basterds – they were too self-reverential for my taste – but, as a writer, nobody in the world has a better ear for the foibles and vulnerabilities of his bad guys than Tarantino. My favourite scene? The one in Reservoir Dogs where all the gangsters argue about the colour codenames they've been given: "Mr Brown… that's a little too close to Mr Shit." You could add to that the hamburger discussion in Pulp Fiction: "They got the metric system there. They wouldn't know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is." It's scenes like these which illuminate the violence that follows. These days, it often seems that in the rush from action scene to action scene, nobody has any time for real dialogue. And the result is that nothing much feels very real at all.
It has been noted how many directors and stars have turned their talent to the small screen, and it's fair to say that a lot of the best villains can now be found on TV. Breaking Bad alone is a masterclass in how to do it. Watching Bryan Cranston develop from put-upon chemistry teacher with cancer into ruthless criminal and meth dealer Heisenberg has been a pleasure in itself, but along the way, the series' genius writer Vince Gilligan has come up with some uniquely unpleasant types too. Step forward chicken-selling drug lord Gus Fring, delectably played by Giancarlo Esposito, dying one of the bloodiest and most memorable deaths on TV, ever. I also had a fondness for the deeply cowardly and almost permanently bruised and battered Ben Linus, leader of The Others in Lost, before the series disappeared up its own backside. And of course, the world is still mourning James Gandolfini of The Sopranos.
The point is that series television gives the bad guy time to settle in and develop. To this, I might add that less is more. Writing Sherlock Holmes, it's always surprised me that Moriarty has become one of the best-known villains in English literature. He only appears in two stories and otherwise he is barely mentioned. It's even unclear what it is, exactly, that he does. Maybe the fact that he has such a wonderful name helps, although, really, it's the way that he hides in the shadows, very rarely centre stage, that adds to his potency. He was brilliantly played by Andrew Scott in the BBC reboot, by the way.
One of the pleasures of writing young adult fiction is that you can, to a certain extent, bypass political correctness and create characters who are very horrible indeed. The more abominably the villains behave, the more admirable they are; there is equal pleasure in the story's joie de vivre and, indeed, its joie de mourir. Young readers still seem to like their villains big and unapologetically bad and I celebrate that. They might even allow me to keep the Persian cat.
Russian Roulette by Anthony Horowitz is out now in hardcover, e-book and audio formats
MARK JONES PICKS FIVE OF THE BEST CONTEMPORARY VILLAINS
Calvin J Candie – Django Unchained
There's nothing as effective as a smooth-talking devil when it comes to villainy, and Leonardo DiCaprio pulls just the right amount of oily charm out of the bastard bag here to match his mephistophelean beard. He prances around his estate, abusing his slaves as though they're characters in a sadistic game of The Sims.
Dr Strangeluv – The ABCs Of Death
The baddie at the climax of the horror-comedy anthology might make your head spin: a brash mash-up of Kubrick's Dr Strangelove and every unfair Japanese cultural stereotype imaginable. Ultraviolence and giant rice-spurting Nazi hermaphrodite phalli have never seemed so much at home.
Mom – Futurama
Named by Forbes as fiction's fourth-richest individual, the ruthless MomCorp CEO is a wiry plutocrat, manufacturing endless platoons of killbots. Far more driven than Springfield's Monty Burns, Mom will throttle the life out of anything threatening the profit margin.
Crimer – @Crimershow
Some villains shun power and money – it's sheer mayhem they crave. Take Crimer, the antihero of cult Twitter "series" Crimershow, for example, whose misspelled exploits range from simple blimp theft to contaminating the water supply with broccoli. It's sociopathy with a surreal twist.
Some villains shun power and money – it's sheer mayhem they crave. Take Crimer, the antihero of cult Twitter "series" Crimershow, for example, whose misspelled exploits range from simple blimp theft to contaminating the water supply with broccoli. It's sociopathy with a surreal twist.
The Governor – The Walking Dead
While David Morrissey's portrayal of the murderous leader of Woodbury is menacing enough, it's in Robert Kirkman's original comic book version where The Governor's true malevolence lies. Comic Book Gov lives by his "kill them all!" mantra.
Thursday, August 22, 2013
Annie Leibovitz / The Sopranos
THE SOPRANOS
FAMILY PORTRAIT
by Annie Leibovitz
About Annie Leibovitz...
Every year, Life Magazine holds therds" for Magazine Photography. In 1999 one of the winners was Annie Lebovitz for: BEST IMAGE PORTRAYING A PERSON OR GROUP. “The Sopranos”
Vanity Fair, December 1999. (Last Supper)
Vanity Fair, December 1999. (Last Supper)
Monday, June 24, 2013
James Gandolfini, remembered by Mike Figgis
James Gandolfini, remembered by Mike Figgis
The British director writes about working on an episode of HBO TV series The Sopranos with 'the big Gand'
James Gandolfini was larger than life. I directed an episode of The Sopranos and got to know him a little.
This was season five and it was clear that the cast and crew had been in the trenches with the show for a very long time. The characters were so strong that I had some difficulty separating the real names from the fictional.
My first meeting with everyone was a table reading of the episode I was to direct, three days before we were on set. it was the lunch break and everyone was frazzled. I was the only outsider in the room. James sat next to me but we had no conversation. I contributed nothing to the read and then everyone left to continue shooting. Monday morning arrived and at 7am I found myself on the set. Lighting was quick, it was an ongoing set and suddenly the 1st assistant director got everyone's attention and it was over to me.
I was extremely nervous. I sounded pretentiously English among all those New York accents, I knew Steve Buscemi a little but no-one else.
I suggested a way of shooting the scene which involved James turning his back on his gang, giving a nice camera angle and also indicating that Tony Soprano was playing a double game. I had done my homework and thought it all out, or so I thought. James looked at me for the first time, a look of puzzlement combined with a "Who is this guy" expression. "Why the fuck would Tony Soprano turn his back on his guys?" It went quiet. Now I had everyone's attention. I wanted to die. The part of the brain that remains coherent whispered to me, don't argue with him.
"OK," I said. "How would you do it?" This sounded so weak, first bit of directing an admission of incompetence. I sat down and gave the floor to James and his merry men.
Now, there were circumstances. Mr Gandolfini liked to party at weekends and he was nursing the mother of all hangovers. But from my perspective all I could see was my own failure with two weeks of humiliation stretching ahead of me. Perhaps I would be fired.
On the floor, Tony Soprano and the boys tried the scene out ... and it was not working. James got more and more bad tempered and it seemed to me that everyone got more and more tense. Things ground to a halt. I had no idea what to do nor did I have any authority on the set, a new experience for me. "OK, OK," said Gandolfini, "let me try something." And so the scene began again and this time he did exactly what I had suggested in the first place, but it was like he'd thought of it. I wanted to sob, I wanted my mother. And then James turned, looked at me in a very mean kind of way and then a huge grin spread across his face, he stuck out his hand and said, "Fucking honour to have you on the show, big fan, welcome."
I'd been royally wound up by the big Gand'. Later, Buscemi told me he sometimes did that, liked to test directors out a bit. Thank God I didn't cry.
After that we got on fine and at the end of the shoot he threatened to take me drinking but I chickened-out of that offer.
I feel honoured that I got to direct him in such an iconic series. He was a really good actor and a very warm-hearted human being and way too young to exit.
Sunday, June 23, 2013
How James Gandolfini reinvented the gangster for The Soprano
How James Gandolfini reinvented the gangster for The Sopranos
The landmark HBO TV series had a depth greater than that of a film or novel – and a towering central performance by the late Gandolfini
For actors, physical type is often destiny: height, weight, hairline and colouring can all dictate whether they will play romantic leads, comic foils or villains. Burly and with a good line in surly looks – and with Italian-American heritage as well – James Galdolfini was always at risk of being stereotyped as a mobster or a heavy.
What was remarkable abourt The Sopranos, though, was that Gandolfini – and David Chase, creator of the HBO series, which ran between 1999 and 2007 – took a dramatic type that had become familiar in American popular culture, through The Godfather films and Goodfellas and other examples, and made it completely their own. They managed this despite the fact that even the variation on the Mafioso bloke that Gandolfini's Tony Soprano represented – the gangster with neurotic doubts about his calling and his killing – already had a predecessor in the nervy murderer played by Robert De Niro in the movies Analyze This and Analyze That.
One advantage Chase and Gandolfini had, though, was that a long-form TV series permits the protagonist to be developed and challenged at a depth impossible in a film, play or novel. Chase saw in the TV serial the possibility for a sort of visual novel equivalent to thousands of pages. In his 80 or so hours of screen-time as he head of a New Jersey crime family, the actor was able to display every facet of the complex character of a man who was professionally and genetically required to be a wolf but, underneath, had deep fears and dreams of being a pussycat.
To carry such a concentration on a single figure – other great modern American TV shows such as The Wire, The West Wing and Six Feet Under were all ensemble pieces – Chase needed a remarkable actor – and he got one.
All the best TV actors – from Alec Guinness through Helen Mirren and David Suchet to Benedict Cumberbatch – have had two predominant skills: stillness and thinking. A small-screen role is defined in moments of repose, when the camera stops and watches. Because Tony Soprano was often sitting, in long consultations with his shrink or with family or associates over a meal, and was frequently unable to speak the truth, the part demanded above all the ability to suggest the mental activity churning within physical inactivity.
Gandolfini could convey multitudes with a look: whether baleful, lecherous, menacing, halfsmiling, impassive. Through this flexibility of expressions, he indicated the guilt, memories, regrets and desires that enfolded Tony. And, as is often the case with big men, he often moved with surprising gentleness, as if frightened of his own potential strength, an effect intensified by a vocal range that could encompass softness as well as the growl his stature led you to expect.
But, while his character was often cornered or tortured, Gandolfini also had to make it credible that this was a man who had killed for a living. The actor carried a rare sense of danger and rage that was controlled, at least for the moment. His explosion of anger in the Broadway production of Christopher Hampton's translation of Yasmina Reza's play The God of Carnage remains one of the most terrifying spectacles I have ever seen on stage.
The Sopranos was part of a wave of American TV dramas that finally persuaded cineastes and critics who had been snobbish and dismissive about television as a medium to accept the smaller screen as an artistic equivalent of the larger one. Although many of those who watched and wrote about TV had got this message much earlier, the remarkable and sustained range of Gandolfini's portrayal of Tony Soprano played a major part in ending any remaining inferiority complex about the medium.
Busy in movies on either side of The Sopranos, the actor did relatively little other TV work, although he had recently signed up to return to HBO in the American version of Peter Moffat's British legal series, Crimina Justice. There had long been talk of a possible Sopranos sequel – left possible by the ambiguous final shoot-out scene – which would probably have been made for cinema.
That possibility dies with Gandolfini and it may be right that Tony Soprano will now remain forever a character of television, a form in which he represents one of the greatest achievements. It is a small consolation for his shockingly early loss that TV now has such a considerable after-life on archive channels and through box-sets.
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