With Mad Men’s final run starting a week from today, The New York Times has published an interview with John Hamm, focusing on some key moments in his character’s time on screen. The first story is about one of the best moments in the show:
Here’s what Hamm says about it:
It’s an important moment in the development of the character, where people go, ‘Oh, this guy’s not just a sweet-talking guy in a fancy suit. He’s a soulful person.’ It was beautifully shot. We didn’t really want to use a working slide projector, they’re crazy noisy, so we had some digital thing. But the slides looked wrong somehow. We had to fix that and make them smudgy. At some point we ended up just running the slide projector in the room. I don’t know [how people were reacting to the speech]. I wasn’t exactly running back to the monitors, seeing how every line was landing. I was pretty focused on myself.
That attention to detail is what makes Mad Men so special, and scenes like this so damn powerful. I’m excited to see how it ends.