HippiesEatBabies

GQ: Do you enjoy the physical side of your jobs—actually filming the show? 
Vince Gilligan: It’s wonderful. It’s more fun than writing. Anything is. Writing is like getting hit in the head repeatedly with a mallet. For me, anyway. I love having written. You feel good when you have that fifty-page script. I don’t know from personal experience, but it’s like childbirth: You forget the pain, and then you’re ready to do it again.

Matthew Weiner: To have your work shot—it’s an experience that nobody else gets to know. As opposed to piling up scripts, trying to sell a story, getting notes, and then hoping the execution will happen at all, let alone well. It would be like being an architect and never getting a building built. Everyone here—we’re drawing plans, and then we build the building.

Vince Gilligan: I always loved stories of the studio system back in the ’40s and ’50s, where you’d have writers in their individual offices, this one working on a Humphrey Bogart movie, this one doing something else.

David Milch: Isn’t that nice to think about?

Vince Gilligan: And your movies would get made. Now there’s a kind of hang-fire misery involved in living the life of a screenwriter in which you get paid a lot of money, you can write your movie in the South of France or wherever the hell you wish to work, but it’s very likely your blueprints will never be made into a building. With TV, you write something, and a week or two later it’s being produced.

Matthew Weiner: Screenwriting is not our end product. I walk on set and I see the person I cast, and the costumes I went to the meeting for, and the hair, and somebody’s done something amazing with the set. All these people’s creative input comes into it.

David Milch: That’s the extraordinary part. How much you learn, how quickly. It’s like this in-gush of information that modifies your original idea. It’s so precious.

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Vince Gilligan read my mind. 

If Greg doesn’t die in the next episode of Mad Men during the Tet Offensive and if season 5 doesn’t end in March 1968 with the My Lai Massacre, Robert Kennedy entering the presidential race, and closing credits that play either Hurdy Gurdy Man, Pictures of Matchstick Men, or All Along the Watchtower… Then someone’s dropped the ball. I get that Mad Men has basically existed in a vacuum since season 1 and they rarely dip their toe in the water of social upheaval but there have been so many opportunities for awesome historical details and relatively important events that have been missed or glossed over. Howabout some historical fan service?  

Just use Sally Draper and the television. Perfect way to throw in some context. Case in point: 

Here and Here

And Back to the Music:

I will also take The Beat Goes On but under no circumstances should any of the songs from The Graduate be used because the only Simon and Garfunkel song that is appropriate is The Boxer and that’s not released until  April 1968 and should be used in season 6 episode 1.

Why?

Because that song IS Don Draper. That’s why. 

The only other option is to play a song from Hair. But that’s just because it would be the best crossover ever. And only if it’s because Sally Draper is watching Hair on Broadway and gets the idea to run away to Haight Ashbury even though she’s only 13. Creepy Glen can go with her.

So Creepy. 

If you see the new Wes Anderson movie Moonrise Kingdom, you’ll hear background music from composers Benjamin Britten and Alexandre Desplat, as well as several songs from Hank Williams.

How those songs ended up in the movie is partly the work of music supervisor Randall Poster, who works with Anderson to help find and license music that helps add nuance and emotional depth to each scene.

Poster is one of the best-known music supervisors in the movie industry. His credits include indie films like The Darjeeling Limited and Rushmore and blockbusters like The Aviator, Meet the Parents and The Nanny Diaries. For The Royal Tenenbaums, Poster tracked down “These Days” by Nico and “Needle in the Hay” by Elliott Smith. For The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, it was Poster who helped Anderson pick out the David Bowie covers by Brazilian musician Seu Jorge.

Listen to the NPR Music Interview