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Standup for your blights
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When a mobster mutters philosophically, "Sadness accrues," or Tony tells his shrink about a castration dream featuring a rapacious bird, a Phillips-head screw and a Lincoln repairman, you know "The Sopranos" has tapped a rich new vein of mob-land black comedy. It's a successor both to Francis Coppola's "Godfather" films and to John Huston's "Prizzi's Honor."

Any Mafia-versed movie fan could see that much. But what if you were a gifted young movie director searching for a place to ply your talent -- what else would you notice?

Well, if you were Alan Taylor, who made the 1996 big-screen success d'estime "Palookaville," you'd see certain qualities "that just leapt out as being way too intelligent for television." As he put it during a recent interview, he saw "bravery and confidence in the vision. David Chase, who both wrote and directed, allowed dialogue to happen off-camera. Most television writers want you to shoot their dialogue in close-up and keep following it with the camera; that's when they're happy, even if they say they'd like to be more 'stylized.' If a hack were covering a scene between Tony and his psychiatrist or his family or the guys in his crew, and you had two of them talking to each other, he'd cut back and forth between close-ups or medium close-ups and show all the words being spoken on-screen. At best, he might overlap one person's close-up on another person's close-up as he cuts back and forth.

"But with 'The Sopranos' you had a wide medium shot and heard entire exchanges without seeing who was talking. You heard it and it was just part of the world. To me it makes the world of the show seem more real. It's a more cinematic approach -- having a vision, not merely documenting a show's script. In that brilliant pilot, Chase was allowing pauses to occur when you just felt the silence in the room, and gave you time to notice James Gandolfini scratching at the fabric on his pants. To have that sense of time and reality is almost unheard of in television. And he was casting this show with some of the finest actors in New York. I had made a vow not to do TV anymore, but I went back on it; that pilot was so appallingly good."

Taylor ached for the chance to collaborate with the actors he'd seen elsewhere and loved, like Gandolfini and Michael Imperioli (who plays an unpredictable apprentice thug), and with the performers who were new to him, like Dominic Chianese, whom he found "riveting" as Tony's uncle, Junior, the myopic, still dangerous mob figurehead. That kind of opportunity is one reason Taylor chose to stay in New York after he graduated from NYU film school -- because the stage fostered "a thriving actor-oriented culture. In New York you pick up on people like Edie Falco (who plays Tony's wife), who are feeding more on theater than on television, and what they come up with is just great."

When Chase's talent scouts and Taylor's agents at William Morris put him on a list of possible directors for "The Sopranos," Taylor met Chase and strove to win him over. "I really went after it, which wasn't hard for me to do: I told him how ridiculously impressed I was." He was offered Episode Six, "Pax Soprana" (which aired on Feb. 14 and re-airs July 14 and 16). It portrays Junior reneging on some long-held deals, forcing Tony to intercede on behalf of this mob's Meyer Lansky, the avuncular, unflappable Hesh (Jerry Adler).

"When you go in the first season, you can't look at previous episodes, except for the pilot. But you can read the previous scripts, and talk to the show runner and, of course, the actors, who are usually avidly policing things themselves. On a show like this, everyone agrees where it should be at; your job is to make it get there. It was so well-written -- functioning both as a gangster noir and as an examination of character, largely because Chase puts so much personal, autobiographical material into character -- my objective was to get up to the quality of the series."

One of his prime aids was the director of photography, Alik Sakharov. "He and I shared a hero -- the Soviet director Andrei Tarkovski -- and what Alik shot was reminiscent of the way Tarkovski would have lit things. He uses soft sidelight that really wraps around people and objects and brings out their texture. He also uses silhouette -- foreground silhouette. You never see these things in television, because of the time it takes, and because to do it you need to have a respect for the 'look' of a piece. Alik and I would talk about Tarkovski, then do a shot, then talk a little more about Tarkovski, and do another. He had a slightly different style from mine so it felt like a genuine collaboration. I would pull him away from some of his impulses when I thought the choice of lenses might make things too stylized."

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