Has there been any course correction in the way you behave?

Honestly, the course correction happened during the show. I can say this because I’ve been on both sides of it, but there are very few other jobs — maybe being a model — where when you critique someone’s work as a writer, you are crossing a boundary into the personal immediately. But I was a very demanding boss. The show’s not going to happen if you don’t do it, and someone has to make these decisions. Because of that, when scripts come in and they’re not the way you want them, you get mad at people for not doing things the way you would have done it, and that is just wrong. But no one cried in my room.

Did you ever cry when you were a writer in someone else’s room?

Yes, I did. I felt that I had been treated way worse than I had ever treated anybody on my show. I’ve never shared people’s first drafts. I never did anything that I felt was crossing the line. You get rewritten, and it’s embarrassing, but in a comedy room, they put your script up on the screen and 12 people see what you wrote and rewrite it. I think the fact that I’ve retained 85 percent of my crew from the first season of “Mad Men” over eight years is because it wasn’t a crappy place to work. It’s hard for me to believe that it was that bad.

I remember once that at a Q. and A. for your film “Are You Here,” you told an audience member that you cared more what strangers thought of you than the people who know you well.

Wow. You can write down that I’m smiling, because out there in the world right now are lots of writers, painters, performers who are smiling at the baldness of that statement. I don’t feel that way anymore, I can tell you that.

It feels germane to “The Romanoffs,” because many of these characters are preoccupied with how they come across to people who barely know them.

Here’s the most uncomfortable thing about that statement: What an ugly thing to admit, what a shallowness there is to that. Who I am and how I’m perceived is literally the same question of nature and nurture to me: It’s what’s on the inside and what’s on the outside. I do care what strangers think, but who doesn’t? And if you end up in the public, you realize, “I can’t care too much, because a lot of the strangers aren’t out there to pat you on the back.”