'The Sopranos' Creator Analyzes Final Scene
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David Chase explains everything from the music to the location of the final scene, but won't answer the question whether or not Tony died.

AceShowbiz - More than five years after "The Sopranos" ended its run, the series creator David Chase addressed the final scene again. In a new piece for DGA Quarterly, he did a shot-by-shot analysis of the final scene set in a local ice cream parlor that raised a never-ending question about whether or not Tony (James Gandolfini) died.

"The music is very important to me in terms of the timing of the scene, the rhythm of the scene. The song dictates part of the pace," Chase said of the last song "Don't Stop Believin" which Tony picked on the jukebox. "And having certain lyrics of the song, and certain instrumental flourishes happen in certain places, dictates what the cuts will be. I directed the scene to fit the song. The singing gets more and more strident and more invested as the song goes along. Musically it starts to build and build into something as it's just about to release. And when you look at the scene, you get that feeling."

Of the suspicious looking guy at the counter, he explained, "I just wanted the guy to look over. I didn't want him to look particularly menacing. And he glances off Tony so quickly. We worked on that quite a bit so he wasn't staring at him. The guy was like looking around the place in general. Tony doesn't acknowledge that he sees him."

"Tony leads a very dangerous, suspicious life and he's always on guard," Chase continued. "But he's in this old-fashioned American sweet shop with those round stools and the counter and the football hero pictures and Cub Scouts. Everything that should make him feel at ease, and yet there is a slight ill at ease feeling which we bring to it because we know who he is and what he's done. And he can never be sure that any enemy is completely gone. He always has to have eyes behind his head."

He went on detailing the last shot, "I said to Gandolfini, the bell rings and you look up. That last shot of Tony ends on 'don't stop,' it's mid-song. I'm not going to go into [if that's Tony's POV]. I thought the possibility would go through a lot of people's minds or maybe everybody's mind that he was killed. He might have gotten shot three years ago in that situation. But he didn't. Whether this is the end here, or not, it's going to come at some point for the rest of us. Hopefully we're not going to get shot by some rival gang mob or anything like that. I'm not saying that [happened]. But obviously he stood more of a chance of getting shot by a rival gang mob than you or I do because he put himself in that situation. All I know is the end is coming for all of us."

"I thought the ending would be somewhat jarring, sure. But not to the extent it was, and not a subject of such discussion. I really had no idea about that. I never considered the black a shot. I just thought what we see is black. The ceiling I was going for at that point, the biggest feeling I was going for, honestly, was don't stop believing. It was very simple and much more on the nose than people think. That's what I wanted people to believe. That life ends and death comes, but don't stop believing," he concluded.

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