Quotes

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.

I felt I was out of step with everything. I remember seeing Pretty Woman (1990) on an airplane. Everybody was laughing their heads off. "Ho-ho-ho!" It wasn't funny to me, it wasn't dramatic--it wasn't anything. I thought, "Why don't I just open the door and jump out?"

It wasn't something I was really dying to hear, because my response in my head was: I don't give a fuck - I hate television. But I wasn't used to being talked to that way. - on his reaction to Brad Grey's desire to sign him to a television deal.

Network dramas have not been personal. I don't know very many writers who have been cops, doctors, judges, presidents, or any of that--and, yet, that's what everybody writes about: institutions. The courthouse, the schoolhouse, the precinct house, the White House. Even though it's a Mob show, The Sopranos (1999) is based on members of my family. It's about as personal as you can get.

[on a perceived change in the traditional view of men as heroes] There are people that will tell you the white American male is clinging to, and nostalgic for, his place at the top of the food chain. Maybe it isn't true anymore and that's what we're seeing.

I guess Tony Soprano has his roots in film noir, but the American gangster picture goes back a lot further than that. But in those films there was a moral accounting. In The Sopranos (1999) there is not. I guess what's essential about it is you are still portraying a hero. In American film, the hero is always the smartest guy in the room, he's always got the answer or the plan. We don't make movies about stumble-bums and slackers or lost souls.

I wrote many, many, many a script and they never got made. I could not get arrested, as they say. Nothing started to click movie-wise for me. All the scripts were either too dark or too this or that. Their appetite for me didn't get whetted until The Sopranos (1999), and once they see you are someone who can make a billion dollars, they let you do anything. That's all it comes down to.

It's a cold universe, and I don't mean that metaphorically. If you go out into space, it's cold. It's really cold and we don't know what's up there. We happen to be in this little pocket where there's a sun. What have we got except love and each other to guard against all that isolation and loneliness?

[on the conception of The Sopranos (1999)] When I got over there, they asked, "Would you be interested in doing The Godfather (1972) for TV?" I said, "No, it's already been done". But then I started thinking about this idea that I'd had for a feature film, about a mobster in therapy. I told them about it, they sparked to it, and Fox bought it. When I wrote the pilot script for Fox, I had a feeling that this whole thing wasn't going to happen. I knew what network television is like, and this didn't have that feeling. Sure enough, they passed.

I was picturing Anne Bancroft as Livia, Tony's mother. We must have read 200 women or more. Then somebody suggested Nancy Marchand. She came up the stairs; she was very out of breath. She sat down and did it, and she was channeling--that character is based on my mother, her mannerisms--she was channeling it. She just got it. The other people were playing this Italian mama who was crazy. She was playing some person who's only hearing what's going on in her head--that was the key.

[on having to eliminate certain characters during The Sopranos (1999) run] I'd call them into my office and tell them how grateful I was for all the work they'd done, and that this was very painful for the show but that the story had to be served. and this is where the story has taken us--rightly or wrongly--for myself and the other writers. And that the writers had thought about it a lot. We didn't do this easily or cheaply. We never fired anyone for dereliction of duty or for being difficult. It was a hard thing to do, but at the same time, I thought to myself, "Well, I'm writing about a guy who's the boss of a Mafia family, and he has to do these things, too".

[on James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano] His eyes are very expressive. There's something about him that's very caring, which you see in him no matter what he's doing. There's a sadness there. As cynical, bullying, vulgar and overbearing as he could be, there's still a little boy in there. He did a lot of mean things, and he enjoyed vengeance, but he didn't seem mean. Somewhere he believed that people are good. There were some roads he was not going to go down, because there was no coming back.

Network television at that time was nothing but a world of certainties. The Sopranos (1999) was ambiguous to the point where, to this day, I'm not really sure whether it was a drama or a comedy. It can be both, but people like to reduce it to one or the other. I know there are the two masks, Comedy and Drama, hanging together, but that's not the way American audiences seem to break things down.

[on the final scene of The Sopranos (1999)] He [Tony Soprano] can never be sure that any enemy is completely gone. He always has to have eyes behind his head. He stood more of a chance of getting shot by a rival gang . . . than you or I do because he put himself in that situation. All I know is the end is coming for all of us. That's what I wanted people to believe. That life ends and death comes, but don't stop believing.

[on the influence of 'Twin Peaks'] Everything was mysterious. I don't mean "When did the perp kill the vic?" I mean the weather, the trees, the doughnuts. The dream sequences were more nightmare-like than anything I'd seen before - Fellini, Hitchcock. Lynch dug them up from the bottom of his unconscious. Anybody making one-hour drama today who says he wasn't influenced by David Lynch is lying.