The Sopranos’ final scene shows Tony sitting down to dinner with his family. The tension builds as the restaurant fills with suspicious characters and, suddenly, the screen cuts to black. In an interview with the Newark Star-Ledger, series creator David Chase got to the point on the lingering issues surrounding the controversial finale.
“I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there,” Chase said of the scene. “No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God,” he added. “We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people’s minds, or thinking, ‘Wow, this’ll [tick] them off.’ People get the impression that you’re trying to [mess] with them and it’s not true. You’re trying to entertain them.”
In answer to all the speculation about what might have happened after the camera cut out, Chase stated: “Anybody who wants to watch it, it’s all there.”
The Sopranos did draw a share of fans interested solely in seeing characters get whacked, but Chase informed the Star-Ledger that he never killed a character without first developing them.
“I’m the Number One fan of gangster movies,” he says. “Martin Scorsese has no greater devotee than me. Like everyone else, I get off partly on the betrayals, the retributions, the swift justice. But what you come to realize when you do a series is you could be killing straw men all day long. Those murders only have any meaning when you’ve invested story in them. Otherwise, you might as well watch ‘Cleaver.'”
And as for Tony, despite all the therapy, the coma and sociopathy, Chase offered the final word on his show’s central character. “From my perspective, there’s nothing different about Tony in this season than there ever was,” he stated. “To me, that’s Tony.”
Now that it’s all over, Chase has no regrets.
“It’s been the greatest career experience of my life,” he says. “There’s nothing more in TV that I could say or would want to say.”
Some fans assumed that the ambiguous ending was a set up for the oft-rumored “Sopranos” movie, but Chase countered the speculation.
“I don’t think about [a movie] much,” he says. “I never say never. An idea could pop into my head where I would go, ‘Wow, that would make a great movie,’ but I doubt it.”