Martin Scorsese is not a fan of The Sopranos.
That intel come from Sopranos creator David Chase himself, who appears on The Hollywood Reporter‘s It Happened in Hollywood podcast along with filmmaker Alex Gibney, director of the 2024 doc Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos.
In the doc, Chase says, “Marty Scorsese doesn’t like the show. He said, ‘I don’t get it – it’s like all these trees and shit.’”
Chase goes on to postulate that the Goodfellas director couldn’t identify with a mafia epic told in the sprawling, wooded suburbs of New Jersey, as opposed to one set in the urban jungles of New York City, where Scorsese grew up.
On the podcast, I bring up the moment, asking Chase, “Was [Scorsese] really not a fan of The Sopranos? Did he ever go on the record to say that?”
“Yes, he did,” Chase replies.
Scorsese said as much in a 2019 interview with Sight & Sound magazine, telling the outlet, “I think I only saw one episode … because I can’t identify with that generation of the underworld. 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. I just didn’t grow up that way,” the director continued.
Chase was asked to unpack Scorsese’s distaste for the celebrated HBO series — winner of 21 Primetime Emmys — on It Happened in Hollywood.
“What was that all about?” I ask. “How could he not appreciate what you’d done?”
“I don’t know. You have to ask him,” Chase replies.
Asked if the two had ever crossed paths, Chase shares, “I met him briefly, but we’ve never talked about it.”
Chase then goes on to elaborate on the theory he relayed in Wise Guy.
“It’s very simple,” Chase says. “He grew up in New York in Little Italy, and there is Five Families organized crime there. That’s what he depicted. I grew up in New Jersey and there was branches of suburban New Jersey and there was branches of Five Families organized crime, but they’re different from the ones in New York, a different culture.
“People go to the suburbs to build fancy houses and get trees and stuff. It’s that simple. It was real for that place. Like his is real for his,” Chase explains.
And yet that doesn’t entirely explain it — as large portions of Scorsese’s Goodfellas were filmed in verdant, rural parts of Upstate New York, Long Island and, yes, New Jersey. And The Sopranos has certainly paid homage to Scorsese, even having a lookalike actor play Scorsese in a cameo role in season one.
Scorsese was unavailable for comment.
For more from Chase and Gibney on The Sopranos and Wise Guy, listen to the full episode of It Happened in Hollywood — and be sure to subscribe.
