Matthew Weiner keeps them madly guessing

Matthew Weiner admits he is a fortunate man. As the creator, writer and producer of Mad Men, the darling of the US critics, he has worked hard for his success.

He talked to TV Tonight on the eve of the drama’s third series in Australia, explaining that working in television instead of film has allowed him to see his dreams realised.

“Being a screenwriter, particularly in television, I am one of the few who has written a lot of things that get produced and I know that my stuff is going to get to the actors and be on screen. But it’s different when it’s your thing, from your imagination. It’s really a very special experience,” he said.

“I think the life of someone who’s exclusively in the movies can do a lot of work and never have it shot. When you’re writing things to sell you have to over-compensate with stage directions and have to lead people by the nose through the story, and when you are writing something that is actually going to get produced you can write a much tauter and more interesting script usually. If it was good enough to be read it would be fine, but there’s an extra element of actually producing something.”

It took four and a half years for Weiner’s dream just to get to its the first casting session, after Sopranos writer David Chase took notice of his script about advertising executives in the 1960s. Weiner remains fastidious when it comes to scripts, remaining as Showrunner on his baby.

“I am involved in writing every single script, that’s why my name’s on there. I am also involved in production in a very hands-on way,” he said.

“There are other shows where the Showrunners’ names are not on the script and they are doing a lot of writing.

“From my end I don’t want scripts out there that I wrote that don’t have my name on them. I don’t like that. And for the writer who has been re-written, I don’t know why they would want to walk around with their name on something that they didn’t write.”

Weiner, 44, says he talked to a lot of Showrunners before undertaking the role, modelling himself on others he has worked for.

“I have an amazing Producer, Scott Hornbacher, who bears the brunt of most of the financial concerns of scheduling and budgeting and things like that. He is a great sounding board because I can trust him. He won’t lie to me. He won’t make me take something out of a show just because it’s cheap if it’s essential. That’s a great relationship to have.

“I’ve looked at every aspect of production and hired amazing people for all of these positions, and at this point they’re all very comfortable doing what they’re doing. They are expressing themselves creatively and I am there as a sounding board,” he says.

Despite the show’s affection for the 1960s, Weiner says he is a child of the 70s.

“I grew up in an age watching movies become terrible and come good and terrible again and good again. My parents are from this era. Unlike a lot of people nowadays it was expected of me that I was aware of what had gone before me –that if someone quoted a line from Casablanca that I could identify it. Or that I knew Franklin Roosevelt was the most beloved President in my family,” he says.

“Nostalgia is something I’ve talked about in the show because it’s a very complex emotion. I do not really want to travel back in time but at the same time I do.”

Cable Television is where nearly all the top drama is being produced these days. Although Mad Men has become a sensation for the AMC Channel, Weiner says network television all saw the pilot, but were nervous about a weekly period show. There was nothing about the show that they could sell.

“I grew up in the 70s when two of the biggest shows were MASH and Happy Days, so I didn’t think it was impossible. But it certainly looked impossible, with the smoking and the realism, and the political incorrectness. When you’re trying to appeal to as large an audience as possible what usually overtakes you, in marketing as well as creative, is you’re overcome with fear. You don’t want to antagonise anyone, you don’t want to alienate anyone, and you don’t think for yourself,” says Weiner.

“I would never try to guess what everybody likes or what they want. I am barely right about what the person sitting across the table from me is thinking. So I only go from the inside and say ‘Am I entertained by this?'”

As to the drama’s third season, Weiner is deviously coy.

“I’m not going to tell you when it takes place because I’m sure it will get out,” he says. “But I want people to know that it doesn’t pick up where it left off. Some time has passed. It hits the ground running. It’s about change and how people respond to change. There’s societal change, political change and personal change. I think we know everybody know, and there’s more to tell.

“I know I am being super-vague but I would hope that people could come into the first fifteen minutes of the third series and not know if Don and Betty are still married.

“I get asked a lot why the show has so resonated with the audience and I know it’s beautiful and the actors are beautiful, but I really think it’s one of the few entertainments out there that people have no idea what’s going to happen in the story. And they speculate, and they wager and they’re invested in it. Sometimes they’re disappointed and other times they’re just completely confounded. I want to maintain that. I think it’s the commercial viability of the show,” he says.

“It’s a bedtime story that they haven’t heard before, so let’s let them be a little bit nervous.”

Mad Men returns 8:30pm Thursday on Movie Extra.