Matthew Weiner Quotes
-
My major goal is to take my bathrobe off before the kids get home from school.
→ -
I think there's a kind of elegance to it, to work within that framework where what you don't see is often more enticing.
→ -
TV writing is for people who hate being alone more than they hate writing.
→ -
I was never really that worried about being a member of the Sopranos crew. I think it looks kind of fun to not have to work, to not have to take crap from anybody. And then there's the reality check in there, which is that you do have to work, you do have to take crap from people, and you can fail, and all these other things.
→ -
It's an ugly thing to see ambition and to see people satisfying themselves.
→ -
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.
→ -
Super confident people with no problems and great marriages and great parenting are not good entertainment.
→ -
I'm a different writer now. You don't sit in a room with Sopranos creator David Chase and writer Terence Winter for four years and not learn something. And just watching the way the show was done, and watching the way that David encouraged the imagination.
→ -
That's the miracle of telling a story in film: You can express something inside someone's mind.
→ -
On the set, I visit the set for a lot of the rehearsals, and there's always a writer on set. And then I'm involved in post-production, very intensely involved in editing, and the sound mix and color timing. Really, I have about nine jobs.
→ -
I'm very supportive of creative people being paid for the work that they do.
→ -
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.
→ -
It's impossible for me, without getting a big wide shot of Manhattan, to convince people that it's another day. But if we go to a commercial and we come up and people are in different clothes, you know it's another day.
→ -
But you know what, honestly? I'm not that interested in advertising. I think it's a great way... It's such a huge part of our culture. It's like saying, "Are you interested in hair?" It's such a part of our life, and it's such a reflection of how we feel about ourselves, and what we're interested in, and what we want to be.
→ -
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 have this amazing team that I trust. I completely go with their decisions on things. I don't have to go in and micromanage everything. And I think the other thing is, you start to sort of... I wouldn't say relax, because I've never relaxed. But I've tried to have more confidence in the things I like, or the things other people like. That's really the big thing in this job, to second-guess yourself all the time.
→ -
Hate is more interesting than love.
→ -
I don't want to pretend like I'm clairvoyant or anything, but I had a tremendous sense of malaise about our political future. This is right around the millennium, right around 1999, when I wrote it. The Sopranos certainly reflected that; when I saw that on the air, I was like "Oh my God, I'm not alone." But it doesn't seem that the culture really caught up with that. George W. Bush won two elections... I'm not even trying to say this from a political standpoint. I think there is a resonance to the kind of glory of that period, and the foreboding of what happened.
→ -
Opinions can't be inaccurate.
→ -
The other thing - and writers can say whatever they want - is casting. You need to find a person who can inhabit that role, who can not sugarcoat the bad stuff, and not be too hard on the good stuff, but who can come across as a three-dimensional human being with some depth and some thought about what they're doing. When you find James Gandolfini or Jon Hamm, someone who can inhabit this role but still has a natural humanity to them, no matter what they're doing? It's a gift.
→ -
I am a competitive person, but it's so hard to do a show. Anybody who gets to the point where they get their show on the air, I wish them the best. It's too hard. I'd rather waste energy thinking good things on myself.
→ -
All human stories are interesting. You don't put a kid in a show because you need a device. They have a story, too.
→ -
The show is not a history lesson or intellectual exploration. It is entertainment based on tension, irony and storytelling that is closely related to today’s life.
→ -
My life philosophy and personality has been driven by the fact that I am incapable of really understanding the future, on some level. I am in this moment. I take risks because I really don't think that far ahead.
→ -
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.
→ -
Every single word that's on the screen, I oversee. There's nothing that's shot, I'm not involved in. The scripts go through multiple drafts, and I work with the writers on all these things. And I'm extremely involved in the writing process.
→ -
Who knows where the talent goes? Sometimes it goes where the money is. Sometimes I think writers are really interested in the glory.
→ -
The chance to tell personal, language-specific, culturally specific stories is really flourishing on TV and I think it's just the nature of movies and international demands that you need to get a much bigger audience. TV is more like independent film was. The forms of adult drama and certain kinds of sophisticated comedy, there's no room for them in the tentpole movie universe.
→ -
You can do a lot with a commercial break - you can change days, you can suggest the passage of time. So sometimes that's a great thing artistically, to know that's going to be there. Obviously you'd always prefer that people see it straight through, and you don't want them to be taken out of it by advertising, but that's the reality of what's paying the bills here.
→
Related Authors
-
Elvis Mitchell Film critic -
Alan Sepinwall Writer -
Bryan Batt Actor -
Andrew Schneider Screenwriter -
David Chase Writer -
Robert Morse Actor -
John Slattery Actor -
Jon Hamm Actor -
January Jones Actress -
Kiernan Shipka Child Actor -
Rich Sommer Actor -
Elisabeth Moss TV Actor -
Christina Hendricks Actress -
Terence Winter Writer -
Vincent Kartheiser Actor -
Diane Frolov Television writer -
Aaron Staton Actor -
-
Robin Green Writer -
Jessica Pare Film actress