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The (Mad) Man
We catch up with the man behind the madness, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, when he was in Australia recently.
Australian audiences are currently clinking their martini glasses in excitement over the screening of the Third Season of Mad Men on Movie Extra. The hit show, centered on a sixties New York advertising agency, has been repeatedly cited as one of the finest dramas on television and continues to collect a spate of awards and nominations. The show's attention to detail is part of why the show has earned such a loyal fanbase in the States and with local audiences. Audiences devour the lavish set pieces, accurate costuming and undercurrent of individual repression which we know will soon be shaken up by the looming social reforms of the sixties.
In the first of a three-part interview, exclusive to the Filmink website, Weiner discusses how the idea for one of the most-talked about shows to come out of cable television in recent years came to fruition. We also discuss the trajectory of the series, and get a taste of what audiences can expect from Season Three.
Where did you get the idea for setting the show in the advertising world of the early 1960s?
"I've always been attracted to this period. Although I wasn't born in New York [Weiner was born in Baltimore], in New York and in other parts of the United States, the world was like that until the mid-eighties and many qualities of it are still there. So a lot of the lines you hear are things I have experienced in my real life. The rest requires using imagination just like you would in a period piece set in the recent past.
"People may be capable of individual change, but human behaviour has a lot of constants. Right back to old texts like the Bible we see the depth of human behaviour from selfishness and vanity to joy and love. I've tried to maintain a sense of that continuity in the show, and using the model of advertising and aspiration of that time, which to me has this great dramatic conflict.
"The advertising man has a creative job where they have a financial reward and it's always a conflict, even the question of identity which I was really interested in. Who, as a man, do I look up to? Who do women look up to? How do women and men interact? All of this seems very defined by manners, and political correctness, and we're still laughing at it even though we have to comply with it. There's a lot of control over what you're allowed to say and how you are supposed to behave, and none of it really intersects with what's our natural inclination. So that conflict in itself seems perfect for a TV show."
What do you think is the secret to the show's success, and what is it that people watching grasp onto?
"I don't know, and anybody who says they know is grasping at straws because if that was the case you could write these things down like a math formula and do them. It was a confluence of many good decisions. It was a commitment to the risk of revivifying an old form of entertainment that is somewhat forgotten.
"The show is really rooted in human behaviour. Although the show portrays a heightened reality in which more happens and the people are more eloquent than anyone you've met in real life, the surprises come from showing the good and the bad that comes with the organic rhythm of life. That, I think, is the entertainment value of it all."
Every episode in Season One seemed to have a distinct theme to it. How would you compare the overall flow of Season Two?
"In my opinion the second season has more of a theme to it than the first. My goal has been to make it a new story every year. People have to be on board with the fact that it's going to be something different, which might be horrifying as it seems as though you're messing with something successful. But I get bored too easily to keep doing the same thing.
"I want to do the next stage in the characters' lives but at the same time explore something different. For example, Don's relationship with Bobbie Barrett (Melinda McGraw) last season did not play out as audiences may have been expecting, it was destructive, and his wife's involvement in his decision to leave was very interesting to me."
What's in store for the characters in season three?
"One of the continuing themes of the show is how people respond to change. Not only personal change, but ageing, everything. For some people it's an incredibly exhilarating experience when they hear something new. For other people it's terrifying and they become conservative and scared and angry. They can submit to a feeling of powerlessness if they want to, and a lot of the time they don't even have a choice because a lot of times life is not fair. That's the story of the third season for all the characters."
Are you in production for Season Four?
"No, I just finished Season Three, and it airs while I'm still making it. So the finale went to air literally two and a half weeks after I mixed the last episode. I'm now in a period of rest in preparation creatively. I should start writing the beginning of Season 4 near the end of January and the shooting should start happening in March or May 2010."
What about other projects? There were rumours you were making a feature film.
"I have a feature film [You Are Here] that I wrote in between seasons of The Sopranos (Weiner served as writer and producer on the long-running HBO show) that I was supposed to make in the hiatus between Season Three and Four of Mad Men. But the network didn't want to delay the season any further so I will make it immediately afterwards production of the fourth season wraps.
"I am a long term thinker and I'm not going to waste the opportunities that have been granted to me by having this success. As an artist I just continue to create and I'm lucky that it hasn't gone away. Hopefully I'll be in people's lives positively and negatively for a while if I'm given the opportunity."
Check out Movie Extra for info on the screening of Mad Men Season 3. Mad Men Seasons 1 & 2 are available on DVD now.
Picture Caption: Matthew Weiner (second from left) with the Mad Men cast at The Golden Globes. Image courtesy of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.