The cast and creative minds behind “The Sopranos” reunited Thursday night at the Tribeca Festival in honor of the series’ 25th anniversary.
They gathered for the premiere of Alex Gibney’s HBO documentary, “Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos,” which played to a packed audience Thursday night at the Beacon Theater on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The two-hour and forty-minute documentary begins with the opening scene of “The Sopranos” driving into New Jersey. This time, the show’s creator and showrunner, David Chase, is in the passenger seat. Throughout the documentary, Chase is interviewed by Gibney in a recreated set of Dr. Melfi. Chase shares stories about growing up in New Jersey in an Italian-American family and how his own experiences with his mother influenced the show.
Chase explained that he first pitched “The Sopranos” as a feature film, but HBO was the only party interested in picking it up. Naturally, the show would run for seven seasons and become one of the most successful series in the history of television. “This is the GOAT of TV series,” Gibney said.
“I was so lucky to work with these guys, and I really saw today what kind of family this is,” Chase said of reuniting with the cast. “If the word ‘fuck’ wasn’t there, where would we be?”
The audition tapes in the documentary are a real behind-the-scenes treat for any “Sopranos” fan. While discussing the casting process, Gibney asked Chase if his eyes “must have lit up” when he found James Gandolfini to play Tony. Chase responded, “That’s not really how it happened.”
‘It wasn’t exactly like that, because [Gandolfini] didn’t want to do it, and he didn’t show up to auditions and it was tough,” Chase continued. “Steven Van Zandt had read for the role and I was in the room with a rock ‘n’ roll star. I was like ‘Holy crap’, and not only that – he had gone to my hometown to get clothes where John Gotti got his mafia clothes and he wore them to the audition, and I was like ‘This is the guy’ , but then it didn’t work that way.
Gibney asked Edie Falco about the hardest part of playing Tony’s wife, Carmela Soprano. “I didn’t find it difficult,” Falco said. “Very early on, Jim and I got into a relationship that felt like we had been in it for the 20 years before, just like Tony and Carmela. So even the hard things were easy.”
Matthew Weiner, the creator and showrunner of “Mad Men,” said he wrote the pilot for “Mad Men” before joining “The Sopranos” as a writer, and the experience he had under Chase changed his approach to “Mad Men ‘. ”
“It was seven years between writing the pilot and writing the second episode, and in four and a half of those years I was on ‘The Sopranos,’” Weiner said. “I’m still in awe, I couldn’t believe it. I joined [‘The Sopranos’] in season 5. It was the biggest thing in the entire universe, [the cast] didn’t even remember how big it was, and [Chase] was so miserable I was literally a cheerleader. I thought, ‘You know, everyone loves this.’”
Michael Imperioli arrived fashionably late to the panel and was welcomed with cheers from the audience. “The show was much better than I remembered,” he said. “By some distance, how thorough the production was at every level of filmmaking… it’s just remarkable, how fantastic it is and how well it holds up over time.”
