“I’m of the persuasion that budget constraints are very, very good for creativity. I think people having unlimited amounts of money makes you really lazy. And I will be quoted on that, believe it or not.” The speaker turning his back on decades of Hollywood wisdom was Matthew Weiner, 44, the auteur behind Mad Men, who also has a Sopranos pedigree, having written for that series during its final three seasons. As Mad Men’s creator and show-runner—the industry term for whoever has ultimate creative responsibility for a series, typically a writer- producer—he has imbued his own series with a similarly novelistic richness, scope, and meticulous sense of craft. He talks about “training the audience” to learn how to read the show, and says things like “It’s been a process for the audience to trust the show on some level, to think that we’re thinking about it as much as they hope we are.”
Interviewing Weiner is a heady experience. Oblique as Mad Men can sometimes be, resistant as the show is to explaining its characters’ behavior or having them mouth talking points, Weiner is not. “I always tell this about Matt,” said Jon Hamm. “It’s impossible to get anything out of him, unless you do one thing: ask him. Because he loves to talk, and he will eventually spill his guts about everything, because he’s so excited about it.” Which isn’t to say his thoughts come out in linear equations. Ask him a question and he’ll consider it from numerous angles, turning it over and over, returning to answers to amend or expand on, perfectly content to live with contradictions, as with this summation after a long analysis of Don’s and Betty’s motives during a particular scene, which struck me as a kind of mission statement: “Anytime you can have a character wanting something and not wanting something, I feel like I’m in my life, and I hopefully am in the audience’s life.”
“I count on my subconscious to be consistent,” Weiner told me. “And how that works I have no fucking idea, and I don’t even want to investigate it. Because if I lose that I have nothing to say.”
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