By his own admission, and the intimations of others, he has a temper too. I saw flashes of it during the first day of shooting for the season opener. As each shot was being rehearsed on the Sterling Cooper set—at 10,000 square feet it’s nearly as big as a real office—Weiner would descend from the production suite with four or five of his writers trailing him like ducklings. During one scene he became frustrated with an actor’s performance, telling the director, Phil Abraham, with an edge in his voice, “I hate what he’s doing,” and balling his hands into fists, almost as if he were on the verge of a tantrum, though he quickly defused himself, and with a little gentle coaxing, he and Abraham got the performance they wanted.

Interviewing Weiner is a heady experience. Oblique as Mad Men can sometimes be, resistant as the show is to explaining its characters’ behavior or having them mouth talking points, Weiner is not. “I always tell this about Matt,” said Jon Hamm. “It’s impossible to get anything out of him, unless you do one thing: ask him. Because he loves to talk, and he will eventually spill his guts about everything, because he’s so excited about it.” Which isn’t to say his thoughts come out in linear equations. Ask him a question and he’ll consider it from numerous angles, turning it over and over, returning to answers to amend or expand on, perfectly content to live with contradictions, as with this summation after a long analysis of Don’s and Betty’s motives during a particular scene, which struck me as a kind of mission statement: “Anytime you can have a character wanting something and not wanting something, I feel like I’m in my life, and I hopefully am in the audience’s life.”

It follows, perhaps, that he doesn’t wear success easily. At one point he brings up the show’s stylized title sequence, which depicts Don Draper standing in a dissolving office and then plummeting into a glass-and-steel Manhattan canyon, taunted by glimpses of the good life as seen in old magazine ads. “That’s what the titles are about: Don looks perfect and he’s in trouble inside,” Weiner told me. “He’s in trouble and you really can’t tell. I feel that way, and I know other men feel that way, too.” (Well, ahem, maybe … ) A few minutes later, after a question about his creative process, a long answer winds up here: “I start with me, like any writer. I start with what I’m feeling, what I identify with—like Don, I’m trying to hold on to what I have. He invented himself. He is always going to be presenting something to the outside world that’s not who he is. You don’t have to be from his background to understand that. In fact, all you have to do, really, is to have any success at all and you immediately feel like a fraud—most of us, right?”

Whatever Weiner’s demons, they work for him. “Matthew writes from this place that’s very personal,” Scott Hornbacher, the co–executive producer, told me. “I’m always amazed at his lack of inhibition, which sort of pours out into the characters and onto the page.” To hear the show’s writers discuss Weiner’s creative process, it’s almost as if the Mad Men world and its ongoing narratives exist fully formed somewhere deep in the recesses of Weiner’s mind, tangible but elusive, like dreams half remembered upon waking. He retrieves fragments and shards and brings them into the writers’ room, to use as building blocks for larger dramas. “There is some of it that is, frankly, mysterious,” said Lisa Albert, a writer-producer who has been with the series for all three seasons. “Like, Matt will have an image in his mind, and he’s not sure why, and we sit around and talk about it and try and figure out why this thing keeps coming in his mind.” She and the other writers mentioned an image of a beautiful cracked glass that Weiner kept seeing, which eventually prompted a key moment in the second-season episode where Don, on a business trip in Los Angeles, takes off with some jet-setters for a seductive but unsettling lark in Palm Springs. In the recounting, it sounded as if nearly the entire episode grew from the seed of that initial image (with the added fertilizer of a book of Slim Aarons photos given to Weiner by someone he had met on a plane). “I count on my subconscious to be consistent,” Weiner told me. “And how that works I have no fucking idea, and I don’t even want to investigate it. Because if I lose that I have nothing to say.” I will note here that the third-season premiere deals in images of motherhood, breasts, and milk.

Hamm “has this wonderful sadness and lost quality in his eyes,” said director Alan Taylor. “It’s a rare quality for a strapping leading man.” Photograph by Annie Leibovitz; Styled by Michael Roberts.

At times the show exists on such a subconscious or instinctual level that Weiner’s directives can leave his collaborators puzzled. Betty Draper is played by January Jones, whose Grace Kelly looks—with a frosting of Eva Marie Saint—have distracted some critics from the heartbreaking shadows in her performance. (“She’s so affectless that people wonder to what degree she’s actually playing the part,” said Tim Hunter, who has directed six episodes of the show.) Before shooting began on the second season, during which Betty would finally confront Don about his infidelities and throw him out of the house, Weiner suggested the actress read “Ariel,” the poem by Sylvia Plath—an abstract howl of female rage and despair. “It confused me and freaked me out,” Jones said. Not knowing the coming plotlines (Weiner may not have, either, at that point), she assumed this was his way of telling her Betty would be sticking her head in an oven for the season finale.