Free James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano by Dan Bischoff Page B

amount of individual psychological integrity, even fearlessness.
    Teaching involved a series of exercises designed to make an actor function in the moment, with lightning-quick responses. Much of the work was deeply psychological—not in an analytical way, but in the sense of finding deep emotions that could, with discipline, be applied to a character on stage or camera. Students were supposed to come in with situations and props that would help them bring out such emotional authenticity. Sometimes a teacher or a student would do something to the actor or to his props to provoke a reaction, and that could, given the tensions in the classroom, unleash unpredictable emotion. That usually accounted for the “psychologically invasive” charge.
    Gately remembers Gandolfini having particular trouble with crying. “His class was full of women, far outnumbering the men, and they of course could cry very convincingly,” she says. Their ease intimidated Jim. “He’d say, ‘I want to cry like Melanie,’ and I’d tell him he could cry, but it would be different.…
    “There was another man, John Hall, in the class, he was big too, six-two or six-three, who had the same problem, and they came to me together to ask for a special class,” Gately says. “So I did it with them. I think it took three hours, and the only way it would work was when they regressed to childhood.”
    Gately describes a hilarious scene with two hulking wannabe actors lying on cots in the studio, struggling to regress to a point where tears would flow, each quietly observing the other while Gately coached them in turn. She could feel the competitive tension, but a breakthrough seemed elusive.
    Finally a way opened up. For Gandolfini, tears were a function of helplessness. He could make them come only when he imagined himself tied to a chair, with something relentlessly bearing down upon him—“Otherwise, I’d do something,” he told Gately.
    While that kind of personal insight was not the main object of the classes, such unexpected truths were often a by-product of the technique. It was a two-way street. Gately told Jim a personal story about her father: When she was a girl in Boston, her dad would often have Jesuit priests over for disputation (Gately was raised Irish Catholic, but her father was a skeptic), and she was always allowed to sit in on the arguments. They were cheerful dinners, full of declarative summations and their ripostes.
    When her father died, for some reason Gately couldn’t cry throughout the family services. When finally she went up to his casket, she saw the ring on her father’s hand, and somehow it reminded her of those Jesuit dinners, to which she had always been welcome, even as a girl. And suddenly the tears flowed. She was surprised that such a small token could provoke such a profound reaction in her. That was the sort of memory that could serve you on camera.
    Gandolfini listened intently, Gately recalls, to that story.
    Training at the Gately Poole Conservatory took two years, in two nine-month sessions. The first session was devoted to developing the various tools of the technique, the second to prepping an actual text. Many of the students actually had Broadway parts already, and were making their way toward careers. Gandolfini had no real acting credits but he threw himself into the process. “He was very competitive,” Gately says. “If he saw good work, he’d either be depressed, thinking he couldn’t match it, or he’d be inspired to work even harder, try to equal it.”
    It was toward the end of the first session when Gandolfini had the breakthrough he described on Inside the Actors Studio, earning the advice he said meant so much to him: “This is what people pay for.… They don’t wanna see the guy next door.”
    “The scene,” Gately explains, “was about a man learning his wife had been unfaithful, and how he reacts. And Jim came in with all these ideas about backstory, all these little props