MAX – ON DEMAND – DOCUMENTARY
He goes backwards, his back slightly hunched and his air grumpy. David Chase does not like to talk about himself, especially not in front of a camera. But for HBO, the network that, in 1998, approved the pilot of the series The Sopranoshe lends himself to the exercise and submits, with a reserved amiability, to the questions of the documentarist Alex Gibney, in a staging which Chase quickly notices resembles the office of Doctor Melfi, the psychiatrist played in the series by Lorraine Bracco.
For those lucky enough to have not yet seen it, Melfi is the psychiatrist whose door Tony Soprano, an old-school New Jersey mobster, one day pushes open to treat his anxiety attacks. The cure would last six seasons, and seventeen years after its final episode − one of the most debated “finales” − the series continues to monopolize the first place in the ranking of the best series of all time.
Mystery of a success
Wise Guy (“gangster” in local slang) : David Chase and the Sopranos attempts to unravel the mystery of this success by interviewing its creator, but also the HBO executives who supported the project, as well as the actors who played the characters. All that is missing from these first-rate testimonies is that of James Gandolfini, the unforgettable Tony Soprano, taken by a heart attack in 2013. David Chase speaks about it better than anyone, aware of the similarities between their trajectories, starting with their childhood in New Jersey and a late-onset success.
Read the interview (2021) | Article reserved for our subscribers David Chase: ‘The Sopranos’ Completed My Education’
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A mediocre student, David Chase discovered Godard and cinema at university, from which he left with a fixed idea, “make a fucking movie”. This film does not come and, since one has to earn one’s living, it is on television that Chase begins to make a name for himself. But the man is stubborn, and The Sopranos were first born as a movie script before being reimagined as a series. The fortunes of the project, which depicts the decline of America through the moral panic of a provincial gangster, are more than uncertain. Even Chase, during the filming of the pilot, is not entirely convinced. But HBO lets it happen and it takes off, in crazy proportions.
Read the 2016 interview: David Chase: “Series are dream ribbons”
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The whole point of this documentary is to capture this moment when creative freedom and a certain taste for risk allowed a golden age of series to open up that has no equivalent today. After Oz et Sex and the City, The Sopranos come to enrich a catalog that is beginning to stand out for its audacity and modernity. Pop culture is rising a notch in the esteem of critics, whose documentary humorously recalls how dithyrambic they were.
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