Matthew Weiner
Matthew Weiner
Matthew Weiner is an American writer, director and producer. He is the creator of the AMC television drama series Mad Men, which premiered in 2007 and ended in 2015. He is also noted for his work on the HBO drama series The Sopranos, on which he served as a writer and producer during the show's fifth and sixth seasons. He directed the comedy film Are You Here in 2013, marking his filmmaking debut...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTV Producer
Date of Birth29 June 1965
CityBaltimore, MD
CountryUnited States of America
I am trying to be as impartial as possible. As you can tell from the trailers for Mad Men, I am a person who believes that you should know nothing.
It took seven years from the time I wrote Mad Men until it finally got on the screen. I lived every day with that script as if it were going to happen tomorrow. That’s the faith you have to have.
Hate is more interesting than love...
I'm in the entertainment business, where you're only as good as your last show.
Identity is part of drama to me. Who am I, why am I behaving this way, and am I aware of it?
If you've ever had somebody try to sell you something - people who can sell, they really are not manipulating you. They are selling themselves.
I do find it sometimes that people project their own feelings on to the characters and I think that there is a certain amount of sexism - I mean the proprietary nature, for men and women.
I'm very supportive of creative people being paid for the work that they do.
It's very hard to turn writers against each other, believe it or not.
In movies and TV, we tend to fall into tropes about how characters might get out of problems. But when you look at real life, you realize that there is a lot of drama of not being able to get out of the problems.
Success has a lot of things that go along with it and I haven't experienced any personal resentment. I can't control any of that and I try not to worry about it. I hope that's not the case, you know. Most of the writers that I know and artists that I know understand what was going on. I think there's just as many things going on in the awards process that have to do with the show having won a few times.
It's an ugly thing to see ambition and to see people satisfying themselves.
That's the miracle of telling a story in film: You can express something inside someone's mind.
TV writing is for people who hate being alone more than they hate writing.