In a show filled with countless classic moments that reshaped the entire paradigm of how great television can be, “Pine Barrens” still continues to standout as one of the creative high points of The Sopranos. In what’s basically the closest that the prestige series ever got to a bottle episode, the Steve Buscemi-directed “Pine Barrens” strands Michael Imperioli‘s Christopher Moltisanti and Tony Sirico‘s Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri in the New Jersey woods where the two gangsters watch their tough guy exteriors hilariously crumble as they clearly have no idea how to navigate in the wilderness and eventually resort to eating ketchup packets in an abandoned car to stay alive.
However, according to a new oral history from The Ringer, there were real life challenges to making the now classic episode. Namely, Sirico who did not adapt well to filming in the woods. Like his character Paulie Walnuts, Sirico was obsessive about his hair and his pillows, which resulted in the crew finding ways to work with the actor’s quirks:
[Terrence] Winter: The two ways to get Tony to do something was if you told him, “You will be really scary or you’ll be really funny.” I said, “Tony, you will be so fucking funny for the audience to see you, who they’ve never seen except looking like a movie star, with your hair [messy].” So he took like two fingers and just messed up three hairs. I was like, “Tony, come on. Come on, man.” He’s like, “All right you motherf*cker,” and he put his hands through his hair and he completely messed up his hair. I said, “Thank you so much.” I turned to Steve Buscemi, I said, “Roll camera. Get this on f*cking film. It’s not going to happen again.”
On top of having to slowly coerce Sirico into mussing up his finely coiffed hair, which he personally styled himself every day, the actor was also very particular about his pillows. According to co-star Steve Schirripa, Sirico “didn’t like the pillows at West Point, so he sent a production assistant back to Bay Ridge in Brooklyn to get his pillows off his bed. That was like a four- or five-hour round trip.”
As for how the classic episode came about, it turns out the impetus for one of the most standout moments in television history came from a pretty mundane source: Writer Tim Van Patten had a dream the night before:
Terence Winter (writer): Todd Kessler was another writer on the show. He and I were sitting in the writers’ room alone at the time and just talking and trying to cough up story ideas. Tim came in and said, “I had a dream about a story but it’s really stupid.” I said, “Well, what is it? It can’t be any stupider than what we’re talking about.” He said, “I had a dream that Paulie and Christopher got lost in the woods after trying to kill somebody, then they couldn’t get out.”
When Winter heard the idea, he knew Van Patten had something. “That’s a great f*cking idea,” he remembers saying. “You’ve got to go pitch that to David [Chase] immediately.” Clearly, The Sopranos creator was on board, and 20 years later, TV aficionados are still obsessed with “Pine Barrens.”
(Via The Ringer)
