“I have to say, I haven’t heard a new question about ‘The Sopranos’ in a long time. I’m sorry.” “What do I think about ‘The Sopranos?’” “Yes.” “Cold. Being out on set in the cold.” “I still have people asking me, ‘What the hell was that last episode?’” “Would I have done anything differently with the ending of the show?” [ominous music] [gunshot] “It so doesn’t feel like it’s 20 years, I have to say. I mean — ” “Somebody said it’s the 20th anniversary, and I was just shocked.” “‘Sopranos’ was the beginning of a particular genre, you know?” “And you can see the influence of ‘The Sopranos’ certainly in all the antihero shows that came afterward.” “People seemed hungry to have a lead character that was perhaps as complicated as they are.” “Tony Soprano is more like me than a doctor, or a cop, or a judge.” “But the idea that a bad person can also be lovable, and that you can care about his family, how do I feel about this?” “Every once in a while, he’d make Tony do something truly awful just to remind us that we are rooting for a monster. Before ‘The Sopranos,’ TV was largely about providing answers. Think about the setup, punch line of a sitcom. Or think about cases that get solved before the last commercial break in a cop show. There’s certainly been good and ambitious shows on television before, but what ‘The Sopranos’ did is it showed that pondering questions that don’t have any answers can be satisfying too.” “You know I’ve been working with the government, right, Ton?” “‘Sopranos’ trained viewers in a way to learn to be O.K. with being a little confused.” “It was a fish that talked, for God’s sake. I’m just saying. You can walk a very tricky line when you start to do things like hallucinations, things that appear that don’t really exist. That can be a ‘jumping the shark’ situation. And rather than taking you out of the show, it just sort of added another dimension.” “A lot of people hated those dreams sequences. There were people who just wanted a mob show. And their motto was, less yakking, more whacking. So when I would read things like that, it would only make me do more yakking, so.” “Well, I think what we learned is that people want to be challenged in that way. I don’t know. I think people are smarter than we give them credit for.” “I didn’t want to change things. This Elvis Costello song where he says, ‘I want to bite the hand that feeds me. I want to bite that hand so badly.’ That’s the way I always felt about working at the network. And I think I bit it.” “Now, the script, the pilot script, David Chase had been shopping it around for a long time, and nobody wanted it.” “David Chase didn’t ever expect it really to go anywhere. Not only did it go somewhere, it became suddenly the thing that everybody wanted to talk about.” “All the reviews were extremely positive except for one. And I thought, what is this?” “We started to get this feeling like, I think people are responding to this.” “Well, I remember when the show was on the air, you couldn’t pick up The New York Times, for example, without a mention of it. There was just constant, constant, constant. And it’s still happening.” “But back then, people would say, ‘Oh, Sunday night in my house, people knew they couldn’t call, and we’d have these big meals.’” “When I heard that people had parties around it, that was the best thing I heard. And still is, in a way.” “There was something also about having to wait. Like wondering what might happen next, and then the next day, people would talk about it. We’re in a different time now. If you have five hours, you could sit and watch a majority of a series now. And here it is, a million years after we finished it, and I still can’t quite fathom the experience of that of a viewer, or of a fan of the show. I feel like, oh, I wish I’d gotten to see that.” “I don’t rewatch the episodes unless there’s something I need for research or something.” “Me and Aida Turturro, who’s a dear friend of mine, and who played Janice on the show — a couple of summers ago, we decided to sit down and watch the series, because there are many we both hadn’t seen. And we got four episodes in, and we couldn’t do it. It’s just too evocative. First of all, because Jim is gone. And we were all so young when we first started it. And the kids were, I think, 11 and 14. And we worked on it for 10 years, and they were so little. And it was so emotionally turbulent, I thought, I can’t do this.” [laughs] “We gave up.” “Which, of course, brings us to the ending of “The Sopranos,’ which is arguably the most famous thing about the show, still.” “I remember when I first read the script, I thought I was missing pages, just like people thought their TVs had broken. I’ve met so many people say to me about the ending, ‘So what the hell was that?’ And I’m like, ‘I know pretty much what you do.’ And they’re like, ‘Come on, I get it. But what really happened?’ I was like — “ [chuckling] [Music — Journey, “Don’t Stop Believin’”] “They yelled cut and we all went home. That’s what happened.” “Made a lot of people angry. And sometimes, I couldn’t believe that it was that important to people. Would I have done anything differently with the ending of the show? I don’t think so.” “There was no way to make everybody happy with the end of that show. No way. And I loved that people were left with their own uncomfortability about this. They weren’t being force fed. That’s not always easy.”