Hollywood has some key directors who have made a name for themselves. They do this by picking a genre they love and doing it right. When one talks about mob films, it is only natural to think about the director of the Irishman, Martin Scorsese.
Scorsese has distinguished himself as an extraordinary gangster filmmaker, delivering some of Hollywood’s biggest classics like Goodfellas and Gangs of New York. However, despite how deeply situated the auteur is in gangster and mob fiction, the director has found it impossible to sit and watch The Sopranos, the hit mob prestige series on HBO.
Martin Scorsese ‘does not get’ The Sopranos
Scorsese, in an interview with Sight & Sound Magazine, revealed the various issues the Casino director has with the hit crime drama series. He said:
“They live in New Jersey with the big houses? I don’t get it. They use language – four-letter words – in front of their daughters, at the dinner table? I don’t get that.”
Scorsese’s main contention with the show was that he did not identify with the generation of the underworld that was being displayed. From what he has mentioned about the show, he does not understand the lack of decorum and class that seems to be missing in the crime drama. In contrast with the characters that are depicted in Scorsese’s films, The Sopranos is much more grittier. There is no absence of grit in Scrosese’s films, but it is nowhere close to the kind of violence that has become the staple of prestige television.
Martin Scorsese has watched a few episodes of The Sopranos
The Sopranos aired from 1999 till its end in 2007. Over eight years, the show spanned 6 seasons with 86 episodes. The Casino director admitted in an interview with The Independent that he watched only one episode of the show, Scorsese has admitted several times that he barely finds the time to watch TV series:
“I don’t have time to watch any other shows, the famous ones. I’ve seen a few episodes of some, in fact. I only watched ‘The Sopranos‘ once or twice. I just couldn’t connect with it.”
While the director has not watched the hit crime drama, it does not mean it might not have influenced his work in one way or another. Scorsese worked on Broadwalk Empire, famously written by former Sopranos writer Terrence Winter. Scorsese seems uninterested in continuing the Sopranos, but with the amount of films that he has directed and written including Mobs and Gangsters, no one would blame him if he said he has had enough for a lifetime.
