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'

• by Mike Figgis
  The Guardian
• Thursday 20 June 2013 13.41 BST
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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.

The Guardian

Read also
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES GANDOLFINI

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.

James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano: 'surprising gentleness, as if frightened of his own potential strength'. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar/HBO

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.

The Guardian

Read also
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES GALDOLFINI

Obituaries / James Gandolfini

James Gandolfini obituary

US actor best known for his role as the mafia boss Tony Soprano

• by Ronald Bergan
• The Guardian, Thursday 20 June 2013 16.06 BST

James Gandolfini, who has died aged 51 of a heart attack, was one of those rare actors who was able to portray a violent, bullying, murderous, vulgar, serial adulterer, while simultaneously eliciting sympathy and understanding from television audiences. In 86 episodes from 1999 to 2007, in HBO's hit series The Sopranos, the balding, beefy, middle-aged Gandolfini, as Tony Soprano, a New Jersey mafia boss, managed to transcend any stereotyping of Italian-Americans (although the charge was still made) by showing the flawed character's vulnerable side.

While Tony Soprano does embody the close-knit Italian-American community, with its codes of masculinity, Gandolfini, who had studied the Sanford Meisner method of acting for two years, lived up to Meisner's exhortation to "find in yourself those human things which are universal". Gandolfini always claimed to be nothing like Tony Soprano: "I'm really basically just like a 260-pound Woody Allen."

Gandolfini explained that he sometimes went to extremes to express Tony's anger by hitting himself on the head or staying up all night to evoke the desired reaction. "If you are tired, every single thing that somebody does makes you mad. Or I just walked around with a stone in my shoe. It's silly, but it works."

Yet it was the scenes of the therapy sessions with his psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) that really humanised the character. "If you took the Melfi scenes away, you wouldn't care about this man as much, or care about anything that was happening to him," Gandolfini explained.

Like his television alter ego, Gandolfini was born, raised and educated in New Jersey. His mother was a school dinner lady, and his father a bricklayer and stonemason. Both his parents were devout Roman Catholics of Italian ancestry and spoke Italian at home. After graduating from Park Ridge high school, Gandolfini gained a BA in communication studies at Rutgers University.

After the role of one of the poker- playing buddies of Stanley Kowalski (Alec Baldwin) in a revival of A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway in 1992 – in which he had the last line of the play, "The game is seven card stud" – Gandolfini started to get roles in movies, first making an impression in Tony Scott's True Romance (1993), which understandably got him an audition for the leading part in The Sopranos. In a memorable stomach-churning scene, as a ruthless hitman he beats up Patricia Arquette, only to have her whack him on the head and set him on fire.

Gandolfini was then cast against type as shy guys in Mr Wonderful (1993) and Angie (1994), but returned to bad ways as an ex-KGB man in Terminal Velocity (1994), as a southern-accented stunt man turned bodyguard in Get Shorty (1995), as a corrupt cop who kills himself in Sidney Lumet's Night Falls on Manhattan (1996) and a mafia man in The Juror (1996). Of the last, Roger Ebert wrote: "Gandolfini has a very tricky role, who is about as sympathetic as a man can be who would, after all, kill you. His line readings during a couple of complicated scenes are right on the money. If the movie had been pitched at the level of sophistication and complexity that his character represents, it would have been a lot better."

Gandolfini portrayed all his roles admirably, but there was no inkling that he would ever be anything more than a serviceable heavy in mainly commercial thrillers for the rest of his career. It was television and Tony Soprano that gained him Emmy awards, three years running, and superstar status, which he never equalled but which sustained his active post-Sopranos life. This included In the Loop (2009), The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009) and Welcome to The Rileys (2010), in all of which he attempted successfully to soften his persona.

In 2007, Gandolfini produced a documentary, Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq, in which he interviewed 10 injured Iraq war veterans. This was followed by Wartorn (2010), about post-traumatic stress disorder and its impact on soldiers and families through several wars in American history.

His first marriage, to Marcella Wudarski, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Deborah Lin, and their daughter, a son from his first marriage and two sisters.

• James Joseph Gandolfini, actor, born 18 September 1961; died 19 June 2013

The Guardian

Rea also
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES GALDOLFINI