Matthew Weiner on Life After ‘Mad Men’
>> LOS ANGELES: Before writing an episode of his new Amazon series The Romanoffs, Matthew Weiner would ring a small bell. The trinket was a Christmas gift from one of the writers on the show, and the sound it made was essential for “clearing the air”, Weiner said. “It was a moment of faith in intuition and the process.”
Weiner’s last series, the Emmy-winning AMC drama Mad Men, also concluded with the soft trill of a bell: There, it rang on a Northern California cliff top as ad executive Don Draper (Jon Hamm) sat cross-legged among a group of meditating hippies. Don had come west in an attempt to divest himself of his job, but as the bell rang on that hill, a smile spread on the man’s face. Without even meaning to, he had come up with a new idea.
Inspiration did not arrive quite so easily for Weiner after Mad Men went off the air in May 2015. Recently, in a Hollywood editing bay, Weiner described a long rough patch where he felt unable to think of a new idea. After finishing a novel called Heather, the Totality, he found himself turned on by the notion of closed-end stories and resolved that his next television project would not be serialised. Instead, he would make an episodic anthology where the characters, and sometimes even the genre, were different week to week.
The result is The Romanoffs, which debuts Oct 12 with two nearly 90-minute episodes. (In a break from the trend toward binge-watching, the next six instalments will arrive every week thereafter.) The episodes, which Weiner also directed, take place all over the world yet have one unlikely thing in common: In each story, there are characters who believe themselves to be descendants of the Russian royal family whose reign came to a bloody end a century ago.
But The Romanoffs is not the only notable thing that happened to Weiner this past year: A sexual harassment allegation was made against him last November by Kater Gordon, his former assistant and a writer on Mad Men. In an interview, Gordon said that while writing the second-season finale of Mad Men, for which they would both win an Emmy, Weiner intimated that she owed him the chance to see her naked. “That was not an isolated incident, but it was the most affecting,” Gordon elaborated in a recent Vanity Fair article.
Weiner, who is married with four children, rebuts the claim. But he acknowledges that he was not a perfect boss. “I’m sad that I might have caused people anguish in the job or made people unhappy,” he said. “Might have? I did.”
These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
When did you know you wanted to make another television show? I didn’t for a while. I really didn’t. I got a lot of advice from people who said I should stop working for a while after Mad Men and soak it in, and I was kind of into the time off. You have to reacquaint yourself with your family. I started watching TV in a non-competitive atmosphere and really stopped writing anything down, even notes, because Mad Men stories were still coming to me for a while after that.
Even after the show was off the air? And it’s like, what am I going to do with that? I wanted to try the discipline of not thinking that way. What if I were to experience things without the purpose of trying to turn it into a story? Then I tried to turn it back on again after six or eight months, and it was really bad. Nothing was happening. Then I went to Yaddo [an artists’ retreat] and started my novel. Everything was activated by the novel. There was something about telling a story that was not continuing.
You had a story people wanted to continue. People were clamouring for a ‘Mad Men’ spinoff about Sally Draper. That was very flattering, actually. I loved that. I’m curious what would happen to her, too, but I didn’t want to do that. I liked leaving the show where it was. ‘The Romanoffs’ is very different than ‘Mad Men’, and even different from other anthology shows on television now. No matter which ‘Black Mirror’ episode you’re watching, you know it will be about the perils of modern technology. I’m not sure ‘The Romanoffs’ is as easy to sum up in a sentence.
Not to quote Don Draper, but you want to be a needle in a haystack, you don’t want to be a haystack. If I went in pitching, “It’s Don Draper, but it’s a woman in a pharmaceutical company ...” I said that as a joke to someone I was pitching to, and he said, “Sold!” But I don’t want to do that. You know, they didn’t want Mad Men at first, either, so asking for another Mad Men is funny. But what is the one-sentence thing? I don’t know.
When it came to ‘Mad Men’, you challenged AMC on the episode length, the budget and the expense of the licensed songs. And now I watch ‘The Romanoffs’, and the episodes are feature-length, incredibly lavish and filled with famous, expensive songs. Did Amazon let you have carte blanche?
It was a wildest-dreams scenario. I will say that I don’t know what people think an episode of TV costs, but we’re not in the realm of Westworld or Game of Thrones. But I did say, “These are the things I would like to do that I couldn’t do on Mad Men.” And music was definitely part of it.
Why an episodic anthology?
I’m not a trailblazer or a disrupter. I’m just thinking in terms of the audience: Wouldn’t it be nice to have something that was on once a week that you didn’t have to catch up with and you could watch in any order?
There are 16 people on the poster for ‘The Romanoffs’, and every one of them is white.
The famous people are white, that’s true. Most of these characters are really rich. This Romanov thing, it’s not like there couldn’t be Romanovs of different races. I don’t know what to tell you. There is a lot of diversity in the cast; they’re just not people that you know. You will know them, hopefully.
What did you make of the Kater Gordon article once you read it?
I have reasons I don’t believe that I said it, if that makes sense, but I really don’t remember saying it. I mean, Kater and I were in a room together nine hours a day for six months, six days a week, and I just don’t remember having that attitude. I didn’t feel that way about her. I was surprised that so many years later, I was being told about that. We worked together for a year, and it did not work out. Why didn’t it work out? She had won an Emmy the season before she was let go. There’s lots of reasons. That was a really hard year for the staff on the show, and it was a very difficult year for getting story. I had a lot of people with no experience, and they needed to get experience elsewhere because it was too much work. In the end, she was not asked back, which is how we do it in TV. I really remember she was supposed to come down [to the office] to have that conversation with me, and she knew what it was about. Who would want to come down for that? So it was done over the phone. We did have a conversation that I really regret, the way it went. It was a lot of questions and a lot of answers, and it was not polite, and I never did it that way again.
What do you mean when you say it was not polite?
To do it over the phone and end up in an argument. It was really mean: “I don’t want you to work here any more, and these are the reasons.” It’s something you should do in person. It was heated, and it was not what I wanted. I had not been the boss very long. I had watched a lot of people do it, and I think that I was very casual about my responsibility to have higher standards of language.