Michael Yarish/AMC Jessica Paré and Jon Hamm in a scene from the season premiere of “Mad Men.â€LOS ANGELES - With every ad campaign won or lost by Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, every whiskey swigged, every cigarette smoked and every errant lipstick stain that turns up on the wrong collar, “Mad Men†draws nearer to its end. That AMC period drama begins its second to last season on Sunday with a two-hour premiere. As audiences prepare to get reacquainted with Don Draper, the enigmatic executive played by Jon Hamm, and his colleagues and family, Matthew Weiner, the “Mad Men†creator and show runner, isn’t taking any victory laps.
Frank Ockenfels 3/AMC Matthew WeinerHaving spent his hiatus directing his first feature film, “You Are Here,†an independent comedy with Owen Wilson, Amy Poehler and Zach Galifianakis, Mr. Weiner returned to his usual challenges on “Mad Men,†battling to keep the narrative fresh and the budget intact. Despite his penchant for secrecy, Mr. Weiner could not prevent the leak of a subplot about Draper and his wife, Megan (Jessica Paré), traveling to Hawaii. And he was stunned when “Mad Men,†which won the Emmy for outstanding drama in each of its first four seasons, was shut out at last September’s ceremony.
Still, a recent breakfast interview found Mr. Weiner in a cautiously optimistic mood as Season 6 DVDs began to make the rounds. (Not that he’s going to discuss their contents in advance.) In these edited excerpts from that conversation, he talks about preparations for a new year of “Mad Men,†the differences between his film and television experiences and how he is thinking about the end of the 1960s.
Was it any easier creating a two-hour premiere for the show after having done it last season
This time it was a little harder because I did it under duress. AMC insisted on it - I could either do it for the premiere or for the finale. And you know how I react to being forced to do stuff. [laughs]
The previous season concluded with Don having an ambiguous interaction with a woman who is not his wife. Does that represent any kind of promise to the audience to pick up where you left off
When the season ends, that’s the end of the show for me. I’m out of stuff. I never know what’s going to be the tension in between the seasons. I didn’t know that after Season 3 the audience would not be convinced that Don was divorced. As soon as I heard, “Will he get divorced†I’m like, well, I guess they don’t know. That’s the tension. “Will he start a new agency†I guess that’s the tension. What I start hearing over the break starts to inform where I start the next year.
What did you hear from viewers during this hiatus
I was making a movie in North Carolina and seeing who knew the show and how much entrée I got into people’s homes for shooting. I was recognized there, which I’m not in Los Angeles so much. [laughs] Hearing what people expected or what they thought was going to happen, a lot of it, obviously, is about that last moment - a lot of it was also realizing in the last moment that the season had been about Don and Megan. Even in the writers’ room last year, we had to reframe our storytelling so people understood that when we were telling a story about Megan, we were telling a story about Don.
Did you learn anything from making the movie that you brought back to the show
There were a lot of things that I appreciated about the show after the movie, in terms of having this long-term relationship with my actors, and feeling I don’t have to earn a level of respect with them. They have a problem, they talk to me about it. I don’t feel threatened. For the most part they’re excited when they get a script, we all feel like it’s a privilege to be working together. It’s not like that on a movie. I don’t care if you’re going back to make the third “Back to the Future,†it’s still, like, “What are we doing†I did have some fantasy that making a movie would be more luxurious, in terms of time and lifestyle. And directing a movie is not luxurious. It’s the exact same thing.
Had you wrapped the movie before you started work on Season 6
I finished the movie on June 29, my birthday. We went on a trip with the family for two weeks, which I don’t remember. I was really in a fog. And then I opened the [writers’] room again, and started fighting with the studio for money about a week later. [laughs] That’s my job.
What was this fight about
The cast had finally been paid. I felt very comfortable with the idea that everybody who put in their time on the show for nothing, at the beginning, had now gotten the rewards that they hoped they would get. But then there was a desire to say, O.K., we’re not just going to accept the fact that the show costs more money. It has to come from somewhere, and I have to do my thing where I say, I’m not making the show any cheaper than I make the show.
Were you disappointed that “Mad Men†went from winning four Emmys in a row for dramatic series to winning none at all last year
I’m a human being. It’s an honor to be nominated, we won a ton. I thought, I guess in my heart, that it would taper off. Not end abruptly like that. We won so much. But yeah, it was a hard night. And honestly, it’s hard for me to watch even an episode from any season of the show and think that Jon Hamm’s never been recognized. How has Elisabeth Moss not been recognized It was a bummer. It was a bad night. It was unpleasant.
It shows you how quickly “Mad Men†went from an underdog to having an air of inevitability.
I was watching the Oscars, and I saw Jennifer Lawrence on the steps, and I thought: That was the perfect acceptance speech. How do you avoid the envy and appearing arrogant How do you say the perfect thing, now that you’re not an underdog anymore I don’t think she did it on purpose, but you see that and see how she behaves, and you’re like, it could not go any better than that. If I was writing an acceptance speech, I would have it start with someone falling off the steps.
As someone with a mortal distaste for spoilers, how did you feel when photos from the “Mad Men†shoot in Hawaii were published in the press
It was a big deal to go there. We knew it was impossible to keep it quiet, and I was bummed that it happened that soon. Literally, when we set up the first light. I thought it was going to take a couple weeks - obviously somebody got tipped off. It’s so expensive to shoot a foot of film, or whatever we’re shooting it on now, that everything has to matter. That’s the most important thing to me, that people watch the show and have that experience with their curiosity. And once you are relieved, and you know the story already, you can go back and read “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel†the second time and you know he’s not going to die. [laughs]
It’s no secret that Peggy Olson is back this season -
I told people that she was.
- and Betty Francis also has a substantial arc in the premiere. Were you trying to shine a light on characters that viewers thought might be in jeopardy
I see them as characters. I do not count their screen time. I learned this from David Chase: you get bored of the character, and you want the audience to be bored of them. You want to parcel it out so that, O.K., you had a lot of cello this week, next week is about drums. Don always has to have a story, and he has to have a business story and he has to have a personal story, but there’s no rules for the rest of it. I don’t want to just check in on everybody. My whole thing is, who’s the most interesting to me, and what goes with Don’s story I was interested in the shift in the period, in showing Betty’s life, where it is and where she fits into the world.
Having spent all these years immersed in the 1960s, did you find it ironic that when David Chase, your mentor on “The Sopranos,†made his first movie, “Not Fade Away,†it was also a ’60s period piece
I talked to him quite a bit about the film and I’m a huge fan of it. David’s process is so arduous to begin with. To explain the difference between the joy and the compulsion is really hard. When I was in North Carolina, and David was finishing his movie, I spoke to him on the phone, and I talked to my wife afterwards and she said, “You guys just keep sticking your neck out there.†My wife’s an architect, so she definitely has a very high-risk artistic profession and she gets the idea that you’re really sensitive, you really care what people think, you have a low threshold for criticism, and you keep making this [stuff] and putting it out there for people to react to. It’s like asking why people do heroin when they know it will kill them. I gotta give up at some point.
