Paris Review: Matthew Weiner, The Art of Screenwriting
The spring 2014 issue of the Paris Review features a lengthy interview with TV writer-producer and writer-director Matthew Weiner, most notably known for the series “Mad Men”. Some excerpts:
Born in 1965, Matthew Weiner is barely old enough to remember the period with which his television series Mad Men has now become almost synonymous. His office is exactly what one might hope for the creator of Don Draper: a stylish mixture of midcentury modern furniture, with a cabinet full of top-shelf liquor. But it turns out that the furniture came with the building, which was designed in 1955, and the liquor, mostly gifts, is wasted on Weiner, who hardly drinks at all.
Weiner’s sensibility reveals itself on closer inspection. A framed still from the set is shot from behind the actors’ heads, showing the crew. There’s a black-and-white photograph of Groucho Marx, Alice Cooper, and Marvin Hamlisch in conversation. There’s a homemade Father’s Day card by one of Weiner’s four sons, reading “Dad Men” in red and black crayon. There’s a picture of Stedman (Oprah’s boyfriend), because when Vanity Fair photographed Weiner’s desk soon after Oprah’s, he asked what she’d had on hers. His bookshelf overflows with fiction, essays, and poetry — from Diaries of Old Manhattan to Billy Collins to Moby-Dick.
A former Jeopardy! champion who once, rather than give notes, jumped up and danced to “Zou Bisou Bisou” for Jessica PareÌ (Megan Draper on the show), Weiner seems never to sleep. Our interview took place in four sessions that spanned almost eighteen months — real months, that is. More time than that passed on the show during the same period, but to say exactly how much would be, in Weiner’s universe, a spoiler. We spoke late into the night after he had spent full days in preproduction meetings, in editing, in sound-mixing sessions, on set, and in the writers’ room — and we could only sit down to talk on the rare nights when he didn’t have to write. Even with this schedule, he comes in every morning inspired by a movie he’s seen, an article he’s read, or a poem he’s remembered. (I’m lucky to be a writer on the show.) Weiner begins every season by rereading John Cheever’s preface to his Collected Stories: “A writer can be seen clumsily learning to walk, to tie his necktie, to make love, and to eat his peas off a fork. He appears much alone and determined to instruct himself.” The life of a showrunner leaves him almost no time to be alone, but Weiner seems always to be instructing himself.
WEINER
You know, I got a subscription to The Paris Review when I was fourteen or fifteen years old. I read those interviews all the time. They were really helpful.
INTERVIEWER
How did they help you?
WEINER
There were people talking about writing like it was a job, first of all. And then saying “I don’t know” a lot. It’s helpful, when you’re a kid, to hear someone saying “I don’t know.” Also, they were asking questions that I would’ve asked, only I’d have been embarrassed to ask them. Like, What time of day do you write?
INTERVIEWER
What time of day do you write?
WEINER
I write at night on this job because I have to, except Sundays when I write all day and all night. Left to my own devices I will always end up writing late at night, because I’m a procrastinator. But if there’s a deadline, I will write round the clock.
— —
INTERVIEWER
I’m struck by the irony that Don Draper has become an icon of the 1960s Establishment when the character himself feels like such an outsider.
WEINER
Everyone loves the Horatio Alger version of life. What they don’t realize is that these transformations begin in shame, because poverty feels shameful. It shouldn’t, but everyone who’s experienced it confirms this. Sometimes people say, I didn’t know we were poor — Don Draper knows he’s poor, very much in the model of Iacocca or Walton, who came out of the Great Depression, out of really humble beginnings. Or like Conrad Hilton, on the show. These men don’t take no for an answer, they build these big businesses, these empires, but really it’s all based on failure, insecurity, and an identity modeled on some abstract ideal of white power. I’ve always said this is a show about becoming white. That’s the definition of success in America — becoming a WASP. A WASP male.
The driving question for the series is, Who are we? When we talk about “we,” who is that? In the pilot, Pete Campbell has this line, “Adding money and education doesn’t take the rude edge out of people.” Sophisticated anti-Semitism. I overheard that line when I was a schoolteacher. The person, of course, didn’t know they were in the presence of a Jew. I was a ghost. Certain male artists like to show that they’re feminists as a way to get girls. That’s always seemed pimpy to me. I sympathize with feminism the same way I identify with gay people and with people of color, because I know what it’s like to look over the side of the fence and then to climb over the fence and to feel like you don’t belong, or be reminded at the worst moment that you don’t belong.
Take Rachel Menken, the department-store heiress in the first season of Mad Men. She’s part of what I call the nose-job generation. She’s assimilated. She probably doesn’t observe the Sabbath or any of these other things that her parents did. That generation had a hard time because they were trying desperately to be buttoned-down and preppy and — this is my parent’s generation — white as could be. They were embarrassed by their parents. This is the story of America, this assimilation. Because guess what, this guy Don has the same problems. He’s hiding his identity, too. That’s why Rachel Menken understands Don, because they’re both trying desperately to be white American males.
Of all of them, Peggy is my favorite. I identify with her struggle. She is so earnest and self-righteous and talented and smart, but dumb about personal things. She thinks she’s living the life of “we.” But she’s not. And every time she turns a corner, someone says, “You’re not part of ‘we.’ ” “But you all said ‘we’ the other day.” “Yes, we meant, ‘we white men.’ ”
For the rest of the interview, a must-read for any fan of “Mad Men,” go here.
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