Podcast #62: Matthew Weiner on Don Draper's Inner Life

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Don Draper's got nothing on Matthew Weiner. Weiner, after all, is the creator, director, executive producer, and writer of one the the most esteemed prestige dramas ever to light up our living rooms: Mad Men. For this week's New York Public Library Podcast, we're proud to present Weiner in conversation with the wonderful author A.M. Homes, discussing writing the character's inner life, what he realized about Don Draper after seven seasons, and Frank O'Hara.
 

One of the challenges Weiner encountered in writing Mad Men was navigating his characters' inner lives without his characters discussing them. His characters would not have psychologists or share their feelings with loved ones. Instead, he worked at building tension through nonverbal drama:

"I realized that contrary to the rules in cinema and, I'll include television with that, of filmmaking, you could tell a story about what was on somebody's mind if you really, really tried hard and thought like silent movie-wise about how to illuminate an internal experience and that we would know. And you know sometimes the audience gets it and they scream, 'Oh, it's so obvious!' and sometimes they have no idea it's there, and I feel like I failed. I'd rather have them say, 'It's so obvious!' and enjoy the story. Don can sit there and listen to this pitch for Heineken after he's pegged his wife, and you can have the physical experience of knowing that he just ruined his marriage because he's so good at his job."

Don, of course, is the ad man at the heart of the show. After living with his character for seven seasons, Weiner hit on something he'd never previously recognized about Don:

"I don't think I realized this until the end of the show: that Don likes strangers. Don likes winning strangers over. He likes seducing strangers, and that is what advertising is. You're gonna walk down the side of the road, and now we know each other, and once you get to know him, he doesn't like him. We all know people like this."

At the Library, of course we're fascinated by the reading habits of Mad Men's characters. Weiner describes how he discovered Frank O'Hara in New York City and why Don reads Meditations in an Emergency:

"My wife took me to what I think is one of my favorite place in New York, which is the Museum of the City of New York... They had one of the Lunch Poems on a piece of paper and you could pull it out and read it, and she had already been, took me to the exhibit, I picked up this poem, 'Lana Turner Has Collapsed,' where he talks about he sees it on a headline, he's out there in the snow, and he's got this great line. He goes at the end, 'I've never been to Hollywood, but I have been to some parties, and I've never collapsed. Lana Turner, we love you! Get up!' or something like that. It's like your funniest friend ever sitting next to you and then every once in a while there'll be something that gets to you emotionally. And I thought, 'Oh, Don'll be reading Lunch Poems.' He'll see some guy reading it, and Don is absorbing the culture at all times. That's his job as an ad guy. He's going to the movies, he's reading everything, he's not a snob. And it turned out it hadn't come out yet, so we got Meditations in an Emergency. And then I read that, and it changed my life."

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