.michaelbsacks talks to the showrunner Vince Gilligan about the legacy of “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” and the much anticipated ending to a franchise that Anthony Hopkins once compared to a “great Jacobean, Shakespearian or Greek Tragedy.”
Gilligan was born in Richmond, Virginia, and grew up shooting sci-fi films on a Super 8 camera. He went to college at N.Y.U., and soon after graduating, in 1989, with a B.F.A. in film production, he submitted a script called “Home Fries” to a screenwriting competition. The work so impressed the judge, Mark Johnson, who produced “Rain Man,” that he called Gilligan “the most imaginative writer I’ve ever read.
I’d like to believe that, unlike “Breaking Bad,” “Better Call Saul” has a somewhat happy ending. I think Jimmy rediscovers himself and gets back to his roots. He finds a little piece of his soul again. It gets very dark in the second-to-last episode. It looks as if he’s about to kill one of the sweetest people in the world, Carol Burnett [who plays Marion], and then he rediscovers his humanity. There’s a bit of Dickens’s “Christmas Carol” in it—there’s redemption, of a sort.
I know there were alternate endings discussed for “Breaking Bad” in the writers’ room: Walt would die in a hospital hallway with no one recognizing who he was; Walt would survive but his immediate family would all perish. What were some of the alternate endings discussed for “Better Call Saul”? I tell you, that’s about the nicest thing I’ve ever heard anybody say about this. The characters really did feel alive to us. On our best days in the writers’ room, it felt like we were transcribing rather than creating. And I felt that way on my best days on the “The X-Files,” too. I’d sometimes hear Mulder’s and Scully’s voices in my head, and I felt like a court stenographer. That, to me, is when it’s really working.
It really took a village to make both of these shows. I know Peter Gould would agree. Editors, directors of photography, actors, hair and makeup, the caterers who feed us, the list goes on and on. It should come into play. It often doesn’t. It didn’t with me early in my career, which is why I think it’s good advice for writers to learn to think as producers and directors. Then they wouldn’t get their hearts broken quite as often by writing material that’s absolutely impossible to shoot. I remember the very first episode of “The X-Files” I wrote [“Soft Light,” Season 2, May 5, 1995]. I was a freelancer.
There was an edge to the way Michael McKean was playing Chuck McGill that we found tremendously interesting and fun to watch. It led us to realize that maybe there’s more to this character than just a brilliant attorney who thinks he’s allergic to electricity. But you can’t do that by forcing them like square pegs into round holes. It sounds kind of artsy-fartsy, but you’ve got to listen to them. By that I mean you’ve got to be honest about what they would do next in any given situation. It was much more rewarding for us in the writers’ room when that kind of thinking led us to realizations such as Chuck’s resentment of his kid brother.
That’s interesting. In “The Rockford Files,” say, the character of Jim Rockford wouldn’t change all that much in the course of a season, or even multiple seasons. Perhaps there was a sort of comfort in that lack of change. I got really lucky that the production guys at Sony said to me, when they read the pilot episode of “Breaking Bad,” “What do you think about shooting it in Albuquerque?” And I said, “Well, guys, as it says on the page, I set it for Riverside, California, the Inland Empire.” They said, “Yeah, we get that. But New Mexico has this rebate they’re giving filmmakers. It’s a much sweeter deal financially than anything Southern California’s going to offer us.
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