Anatomy of a Script: Vince Gilligan on BREAKING BAD

hi Vin hey how y'all doing so I was telling Vince I'm beside myself with excitement yes I'm a breaking bad freak I don't care who knows it it's one of my addictions um needed something after I gave up meth um which leads me to my first question have you ever tried meth I have never tried meth but uh um I remember one time I was on a road trip down to Florida and once I you hit that uh that mold belt down there past Jacksonville I don't know what it is but uh you just feel like you've done it I I started sneezing very very hard and I and I stopped at ra a or CVS or something I bought a bunch of sua fed and I I didn't read the package I just took like three or four of them and I was so wired I have a like a lame uh you know plain vanilla kind of uh take on meth probably it was perhaps it's similar I don't know for sure but it was it was unpleasant if I was going to be a drug addict I think I'd do heroin cuz I like being sleepy so well there you go this is something you've never heard in a Vince Gilligan interview before um so I want to just start with uh how this came about the Genesis of the idea I mean it's so weird you know if you if somebody said okay I'm going to go do a show about this milk toast science teacher he's got cancer that's super fun and then his wife is pregnant his son has cerebral paly and then he cooks meth uh to make money so where did it come from yeah where did it come from and what was what was the just the Genesis the spark and then take us through that the pilot too yeah you know you you guys all know nobody really knows where they come from I can just tell you when it came to me I was talking to a buddy of mine who's a fellow guild member uh first East and then West a guy named Tom snow who is uh now a fellow writer on Breaking Bad but uh I've known him since 1986 when he and I were in uh NYU together went to film school together and probably back around 2005 or so uh he and I had both been on the X Files and uh the X Files had come to an end about three years earlier and you know we were not not a lot was happening for us career-wise and we were on the phone one day bemoaning that fact and uh wondering what to do next and uh we talked about you know maybe so wait I'm sorry I I'll I'll keep interrupting you and hopefully if we if I lose the train or he does you'll you guys will remind us but so you finished the X Files and then you're just doing nothing oh no no I I shouldn't say doing nothing you know you guys I know know how it is uh a lot of pitch meetings that go nowhere a lot of ideas for Pilots that go nowhere a lot of movie rewrites or or or you know a lot of meet and greets that go nowhere so we it's not like we were sitting around eating Cheetos as is our want but it just the frustration we were doing that too but but uh you know just sitting around not sitting around but just trying to get stuff going that never he and I wrote for instance wrote a uh movie script together that we had a lot of fun writing but that never went anywhere so stuff like that so just wondering what to do next or rather how to get the ball rolling get something going and just feeling you know like nothing much was happening and um decided to um I'm sorry I didn't decide basically not knowing what to do not knowing which way to turn figured maybe being a greeter at Walmart you know something like that you know switching careers maybe and then uh either he or I and it might well have been him said how about we uh buy an old RV and cook crystal method in the back and as we were goofing around on the phone uh that image of a guy driving around in an RV with a with a meth lab in the back it just tickled me and it doesn't it doesn't often happen this way but uh I don't know if y all have ever had this kind of this this this uh experience before but this character kind of popped into my head this guy uh Walter who I didn't have his name at the time but this guy who became Walter White kind of popped into my head this middle age man cuz we're both the same age Tom and myself and we were Oh I thought you meant you and W oh no well I feel like I'm way older than he is but uh I think you're way younger than he I'm a little bit younger but uh feel I I I all joking aside was definitely you know starting to have my uh you know perfunctory you know middle- AG crisis I suppose and uh thinking about that thinking in those terms thinking about have I done all the things I wanted to do with my life and and what's next and and all that kind of stuff and then this character kind of popped into my head and I couldn't really shake it out I just wanted to write this thing uh KN full well that it it probably was not going to go anywhere as a TV show it's a pretty hard to sell TV show and yet lo and behold here we are so so um it so you got this idea you had this image of this sort of mild-mannered Guy cooking meth so did that lead you just answering questions why would the guy do it is that what led you to the canc sir and I mean talk about and and the science teacher and all that can you just talk about the the thought process from the that idea to I guess the image came first the image of a guy driving around an RV cooking crystal meth and um then the question of who is this guy and of course your first I'm I'm doing a little forensic uh reconstruction on this to be honest I don't quite remember fully how this whole thing uh you know sometimes stuff just happens in bits and spurts as as you all know but forensically reconstructing it you know in hindsight probably my first thought was well you know he's a criminal but then my quick second thought would be so what I've seen that 100 times what what I think interested me quickly early on was the idea of a guy like myself who knows nothing about crystal meth knows nothing about the life of a criminal except what I've seen in Scarface and in The Godfather and in The Sopranos and stuff like that and uh if I had to me personally Vince Gilligan start cooking crystal meth well the cooking is probably not that hard you probably don't even have to be a chemist to do that but the quick question then is how do you go about selling it and if you can sell it how do you go about laundering your money how do you avoid uh scrutiny from the police and the DEA how do you avoid uh scrutiny from the IRS you know stuff like that and to me those questions I was asking myself I guess were the the thing that interested me about this the idea of unlike a Tony Soprano you know what a great show that was but that's a guy as I recall Born Into the trade right I was interested in a guy you know starting from zero and and I you know sort of knew innately that he'd fumble his way as we all would through such a you know an evolution of his life he he'd fumble his way and and those fumbles would be very funny so I actually early on I was thinking of this show in terms of humor of it being aun flat out I mean what is is so amazing to me because I'm basically a comedy writer and I am a comedy writer and the show is so funny and it's just it's flat out a comedy to me um you look at um one of the things that I really feel is missing from a lot of TV comedy now and has been for a while as the element of unpredictability and surprise and um and and it's just everywhere the comedy is everywhere except for the last two episodes of season 2 yeah I mean there was no humor in that whatsoever but um just even things I I was saying to to Holly um before just things like um was his is his name Badger the yeah Jesse's friend who was wearing like the dollar bill Sandwich Board he brings the Harpoon you know whatever that thing was he brings a harpoon crossbow yeah crossbow and in any other show you would shoot someone with it right this guy carries it around he doesn't shoot anyone he can't even shoot a tire with it so it's just comedy and it's really uh sticking to the premise of fumbling what you were saying fumbling these guys have no idea what they're doing and taking you through what would happen if any of us decided to do it and just really committing to it good I'm glad I'm glad you see the and you know and and uh the the the uh you know it just always struck me as funny this the scenario leaving the cancer aside that that's nothing not too much funny about that but but was that just to motivate him to give him a real reason to do it or well yeah you know it just purely structural terms um why would a middle-aged comfortable uh college educated nervous about breaking the law type character suddenly become a meth dealer and you know you have to have to let the audience believe why he would make that decision and and it it seemed like uh you know speaking personally again you know I don't live my life with a lot of fearlessness you know I never have and I think that's what interested me about a character like Walt uh this guy you know it's the Fearless characters and all the the characters have nothing to lose I suppose a better way to put it uh who do all the really exciting things and in in the great novels and then drama and television and movies and uh I knew I needed to get this character there so uh you know when you find it you're dying you can either go well I guess there's a lot of ways you could go but the two fundamental ways you can go a you just sort of retreat into your into your you know into your house into your burrow and sort of you know pull the covers over your head and and and the other version is just just say screw it just go out with the go out with a bang well I to me what again rewatching the episodes cuz I watch the whole series again and just kind of thinking about other shows that I love I was thinking man this is a bleak world I mean I'm not saying anything you don't know but you know The Sopranos there's that uh mobster glamour so even though it's brutal you know and I'm not just talking about the tacky house I'm talking about there's something you know about that and weeds you know they're very sexy and she's sexy and she screws people on top of a car and this is just like the just the decorated in that house alone is enough to make you want to blow your brains out and those those clothes that he wears it just so depressing but ultimately the no you know what I'm saying it's just like oh my God there's got to be something in that horrible store that's not those you know where Walt junior boys is clothes but um but the wish fulfillment and Vince is going to make available in the library a PDF of the pilot I I don't think I'm going to have to urge you because I know you're fans here I urge you to read this pilot it's not just a great TV pilot it's just a great it's a great read and he writes very visually he really writes like a director but there's an act Break um where you talk about him feeling the power of uh having nothing to lose or um I actually have the script right here but I'm too lazy to get off this chair spoken like a true writer um if only I was in my pajamas um but uh but that is the wish fulfillment it's that it's it's the great scene where he blows up that asshole's car I mean how many times have we wanted to do that yeah yeah exactly which was a scene actually uh if you all haven't watched his show this is in uh what Robin just mentioned is in episode three and he blows up a guy's car uh guy who's just one of these Bluetooth wondering you know ja offs who's uh cutting in front of him and lying at the bank and and just talking really loud on his phone and yeah talking very loudly about nailing uh you know waitresses and stuff and and he runs into them again at the end of the hour and he's at a at a he sees him at a gas station and the guy's inside berating the uh the gas station attendant or the owner or whatever so he when no one's looking the Walt pops the hood and takes the um all the science stuff's fun to write by the way the takes the um uh the Ouija the Ouija Jesus the squeegee not Ouija the squeegee takes theque a whole other series when he takes the Ouija out actually we use a Ouija board coming up in episode three season three in a fun way that uh if you all watch you you'll catch takes the squeegee and takes the the metal edge of it lays it across the battery terminals positive and negative and shorts out the battery which uh I got that idea from my brother my younger brother working on his car one day out in the driveway and we heard this enormous was boom and uh we went outside he had accidentally crossed the battery terminals and that thing man you do not want to do that it's it sounded like it was way louder than shot simple though as it turns out to blow up some guy's car yeah it really works believe me so don't don't try it at home now now about the science tell I mean were you a science nerd or was again that something that you just decided to look up because the science it's just it's just a whole other thing I mean it's so great but it also you know so often or at least in a couple episodes he the science um what the hell the science experience that's what I'm going to call it the science thing that he's talking about is exactly what happens in the episode like when he goes in and he blows up tuos oh yeah yeah he's talking about in one episode he's talking about uh uh what was the the exact um he's talking about rapid uh change uh as uh as demonstrated uh by the quick release of of of gas and energy in other words explosions and he he mentions fulminator Mercury and it's sort of in passing it's just a throwaway to his class uh you know in his his high school chemistry class and then later on the episode uh he's got these crystals that he's he's showing to the uh to the very scary nasty kingpen named Tuco and uh the guy is berating him for for you know for bringing in meth even though he's already been uh you know embarrassed you know uh and and and made belittled by this guy in the first place the GU now you're bringing me more meth and he says well you got one thing wrong this is not meth it's actually fulminated Mercury which luckily looks pretty similar and he throws it down and he blows it up and yeah I'm sorry I forgot the question though I did too it doesn't matter that was no it was just sort of about the science stuff but I just oh I know what it was the scci I'm not a scientist not in any way shape or form I have a Layman's understand understand in and appreciation I have been a long time Popular Science magazine subscriber that's about the level I can understand it at you know Scientific American would be way over my head but and I was never any good at math I was never any good at that kind of stuff but I I'm very much what is it right brained instead of left or whatever but I I I I I have an appreciation for it and I wish I had a better deeper understanding of it there's something beautiful as we all probably have experienced one time or another there's something great about some aspect of life where there are right and wrong answers and no gray area in math you know 2 plus 2 equal 4 now and forever there's no debating it there's no you know arguing the craziness of yeah the Lines Moving is this good enough is it not good enough is it done undercooked yeah you mix oxygen and hydrogen in a certain manner you get water uh a million years ago and a million years from now it's always going to be us so something intrigues me about that I just I just appreciate that although I don't have a deeper understanding of it but uh you know we're all professional Liars so it's easy to your way through and and you know we have a lot of help from actual real chemists and you know actual real smart people do they they um are they in the room or you just do you have like like I did a show Once where a character was a lawyer um a DA so we had a DA and we would call them up and go we need a case where this happens and then that happens and he gets you know so they would give us that but let's talk about that that scene that we were just talking about um when you talk about the rapid change releasing energy it's ALS uh it's also describing what's going on in his life things are changing it's not just the literal setting up of the um explosion so tell me I mean it's one of the things among others that I love about your writing Vince is things play on so many levels they're innately interesting here's this guy in the class and the kids are miserable and no one's listening to him but he's a pretty good teacher that is an interesting scene in and of itself but at what point did you think to yourself I want to come up with this lesson that's going to describe this stuff or uh probably pretty early on in the process I I I I guess uh again I'd have to sort of dissect it forensically Looking Backward but you know the short answer and and really the good answer is I had I had enough time to think it through in the pilot I haven't had enough months of lead time and with enough time and enough uh you know enough motivation you sort of find your way through any writing problem and now that we're doing it on a very tight writing schedule I just got really really good writers and we there's eight of us total counting me and we sit around in a room all day long every day every weekday and and often on the weekend sometimes too and we just Hammer our heads against the wall you guys know how it is you Hammer we Hammer our heads against the wall we we have uh you know multip multiplication of effort because we got eight of us eight good brains in a room but we just we just beat it silly until it gives in you know the story The Plot so but you know one of the things that really um also as a writer and someone who's run a room um you know and hanging on by a thread by the end of it there's the way that you plot out the the first um season and the second season it really is like a puzzle I mean it's hard enough to break one story that hangs together and works but from the very beginning you've played with time um the first episode you know you you sort of Clue the audience in you know you do the title one month earlier and then eventually it's just like nope you just have to pay attention you know um and you just have to pay attention to what's going on and and I just remember the one episode where he shaved his head but then in a later scene he hadn't shaved his head and you start noticing this whole idea of playing with time and then by the second season you have that unbelievable um the eyeball in the pool getting sucked into the drain and I will say both times the first time I watched it and then I'd already seen it and re-watching it I'm going is there something wrong with my DVD it's in black and white there's no sound then I'm like oh yeah it's just something that's you know know making me pay attention but how the hell I mean you you wrote The Pilot before you started shooting it did you have the whole first six episodes arked I'm so I'm so flattered you you you would ask that no I just well for instance um I I'm so flattered uh and that the honest answer is no uh uh well season two that you're talking about that starts with the eyeball indeed we did know what our final scene was going to be uh you know before of the Season before we got there we we bookended on on purpose we bookended season 2 we started I'm assuming everyone's seen season 2 right cuz if not I'm going to wreck it for you and I don't care you should have seen it but um the whole I'm really sorry I do care but it's just the way it goes I'll give you a good example of how and and I'm not bragging that it's on the Fly I would rather I would much I would much prefer to have the whole thing figured out it would make my life easier it make you know make the job easier but it it you have to stay open to to things changing up on you uh I'll give you a good example of this um the pilot uh that uh in the pilot at the end of the pilot the two guys crazy8 and um and uh can't Amelia Amelia thank you Jesus I'm not really Vince Gilligan I just uh crazy an amilio in the pilot my intention was and when we directed it when we wrote when I wrote it when I directed it when we were shooting the actors all knew that they were both dead in the back of the RV they both got gassed with uh with the gas that that results when you add heat to uh red iodine red IOD whatever the hell it was phosphorus thanks see I don't know what the hell I'm talking about you've taught them all how to cook math the shame of it is it's it's the easiest thing in the world apparently if you just follow the the instructions on Google so but uh um but you know it's a at any rate um I'm sorry uh crazy8 was dead uh he was dead in a hammer in my understanding that was that was the point he was dead and the actor who played crazy8 was such a sweet guy the crew loved him so much that they kept saying to me uh as we went into production on on season uh one they kept saying oh why is crazy8 have to be dead we love that guy he's so nice we love him he's so wonderful and and I heard that time and time again and of course I enjoyed directing him enjoyed working with him as well Max is his name Max arcena and wonderful young guy and uh just a real gentleman wonderful character and um so all of this and long-winded answer to to your question is that when it came time to break episode one uh I thought to myself you know it would be a really good complication if this guy wasn't actually dead or at least one of these guys was not actually dead that's not to say amelo the actor played him was a pain in the ass he was wonderful too but it just seemed a little too complicated to have two guys alive but uh having one guy alive and one body to dispose of because I I you know it came down to I I've never or at least I haven't often seen that in movies or TV before what do you do with the bodies afterward to me this show is about process in large part and most movies skip over you know a guy shoots another guy in a movie and I don't want to see the aftermath I want to get on to the next exciting adventure and the next exciting but to me it's like in real life what the hell would you do well that's what I like is it really does seem like real life and I always thought the best episode of 24 is just like they're stuck in traffic like that bomb is about to go off who thought we could drive from downtown to Santa Monica in an hour and and that stuff works for me as a viewer that works like gang Busters I love that stuff I'm not putting that down I I want to see a show or a movie cut past the boring Parts myself and yet I thought to myself if I'm going to be honest about this show and honest about what what it is you know to learn the process of being a drug dealer and by the way I pitched at the AMC originally this is this show is about taking Mr Chips and transforming him into Scarface over the course of the series and that's indeed that's what we're up to so you pitch it and they and they bought that and that whole thing is a whole other long story I can tell you if you guys are interested about the process I'm interested but but um to me this show is indeed and that's something I did Pitch them this is a show about transformation and it's a show about process those are the two pitches I gave them transformation a guy from Mr Chips and a Scarface process how do you go about the process of of becoming a drug dealer and and you know again in movies countless times I've seen the guy kill another guy and maybe there's some bad feelings about it afterward but they passed pretty quickly because you got to get under the next step of the plot and to me you know episode two we got to deal with these guys we could do a whole episode about how do you hide a body how do you where do you do you go here and dig a hole and then a guy comes along and you get spooked so you fill in the hole and you drive away and you go to point B and point C we thought about that and then we thought you know is there another way to get rid of a body and certainly we wound up with acid you know as a means of getting rid of a body and also just the fact that it keeps coming back what a horrible chemistry student Jesse was and I also like how he calls him Mr White like there there's one there's an episode where he it gets very um I wish I could remember what it was in in the middle of season 2 where he gets very serious and it's like the first time he calls him Walt um we we plan that you know a couple episodes in advance yeah that was a big moment we didn't do that lightly yeah no but then he goes back to calling him Mr White again yeah um but uh again that's what I love about it is that it's it's all of that it's it's embracing the premise and yes it's about transformation and and process and what would it really be like but it's also you know sometimes people have the premise and it's like you know what I'm not that interested in cancer I'm just going to have him get better but now he's a meth no this is the premise and I'm committing to it and that's what the series is you know it's exactly and and it just seems you know I don't think we're Reinventing the wheel here it just seems obvious to me to slow down any story you're telling or rather should slow down it's not a it's a kind of a that doesn't sound good you don't want to slow your storytelling down but rather you want to milk every bit of drama you can find within it you want to milk every drop you can get you want to treat it you know like it's a sturgeon and you want to milk every last bit of caviar out of it and then do whatever you do with sturgeons afterward but uh you know you want to you want to get you know so that's why dispose of the body that's why the first two episodes after the pilot are all about we've got a guy chained in the basement uh with a bicycle lock around his neck you know uh what in the world are we going to do with this guy well that I mean and again that was unbelievable and it just shows you the fact that it looked planned because I was I really was wondering I thought one of two things happened either this whole thing was um structured or you're so in a weird way so loose that you can see what you have and go okay I'm going to do that now I I created this little Pro you know I created this little problem for myself that's going to lead me to what the story is what if this guy was alive now what yeah and and again not uh not reinvent not Reinventing the wheel but just sort of realizing that drama is in the little inet moments if you if you allow time to if you look for it and if you allow time to play it out you know it it it's it's just not what television usually does but but I I wonder why because uh it it you know there there was a show that came on the air uh a new series that came on the air on ABC uh this last fall uh fast forward and and and when I heard the premise I was fascinated by it I thought this is amazing what a what a fun show this is going to be uh everybody goes to sleep for however many seconds and then they wake up and the whole world is you know the I thought and then I watched the pilot and it was really you know if anybody here worked on it or whatever I thought it was such a wonderful premise and really well done but I could tell and I may be wrong but I could I had a feeling that the network was telling the showrunners you got to speed it up you got to keep it moving you got to speed it up you got to and I remember watching the pilot and thinking I am so interested in this premise I wish they would slow down this first hour into maybe 4 hours of television because what happens when everybody in on in the planet falls asleep for 26 seconds what happens you know planes fall out of the sky and all this and the writers to their credit they they jammed all that they they they got as much of that in as they could but it just I would have enjoyed so much more slowing down the storytelling rather than speeding it up and again I'm not faulting the writers I'm assuming this was a network note and this is the shame of modern storytelling we are uh we are perceived to be an audience of Knuckleheads with one second long attention spans and nobody you know wants to be in it for the long run everybody's you know watching uh on the in the movie theaters watching the movie while they're you know blackberrying each other and all this kind of crap and I just I I refuse to believe that that is the case you know well then that's one of the things that I I you know I love about breaking bad and again I highly recommend watching it a second time because I'm such an audience first of all I never see anything coming I mean part of it is the writing is so beautifully unpredictable and you know it it has that kind of weird um uh unpredictability and dichotomies of life where you've got you know everybody nobody is who they appear to be but um but I like that I as an audience member have to pay attention and it never feels slow and I know why you keep stumbling over that because you're not really talking about making it feel slow what you're talking about is shining um a a light or a microscope on these small moments that when you look at the small moments they have a they're a huge moment it it creates Another Universe um I always thought Larry David was such a liar when he said uh Seinfeld was about nothing because that was a comedy version of taking these little things um I I just saw um or in this last year that there was this episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where the beginning three minutes of the show is just having having him try and open one of those plastic packages that's that's fused together and that's all it was and I was laughing my ass off and it's three minutes of that nothing else is happening there's no story we don't know where it's going but that's an example of taking that little moment that we've all experienced and and again I mean I'm I know I'm gushing but I just feel like it it works so well on every level and and therefore if it's not planned if it's if it's something where you're going okay we sort of know I know what the show is you're very you're very clear about the tone of the show and what the show is thank thank you very much and it just it helps and it's just good general advice I suppose and and then probably VI advice at that but it's just good to really have an understanding of your of your characters and and if you truly understand your characters and it probably also helps to have a great deal of sympathy for them and then to feel for them and empathize with them and if you really get them then you you sort of in and if you're honest about how they would react to any given situation then to me you've got a show you've got you've got uh you know the trick is stay honest I mean we we often have ideas for U scenes we'd like to do and every now and then we we have a bad afternoon we get a little lazy and we say uh tell you what let's uh we just need a little bit of Sho leather to get us from point A to point B so we can get to this real fun scene that we want to do and then uh hopefully more often than not we stop ourselves uh and I'd like to say it's always me who stops the flow but sometimes it's some of my My Writers who work for me who who are honest on days where I'm being you know a little morally weak uh uh being strong when I'm being a little morally weak and they say you know how would this how would Walt ever do this how would Skyler ever do that how would you know and we we've thrown away some really good scenes that we would truly have loved to have done they go in a special uh I always joke that it's like going to be my pilot but just with all those scenes that I want to write just one after the other so I want to ask you something though when you say you know the important part is to know your characters what kind of you know is this an instinct for you do you what kind of work do you do when you're coming up with the characters um well to be fair the character does indeed there's no character that doesn't evolve over time when a show is actually up and running and on the air Walt Walter White is not the guy I saw him completely not the guy I saw him as when I was first ring the pilot because Brian Cranston I mean just what Brian Cranston brings to this character is you know I don't I don't even remember back to where my contribution ended and his started so much of of Walter White is what this wonderful actor brings to this part and and that goes for all the other great actors Aaron Paul who plays Jesse Anna gun who plays Skyler and on and on it's just you have to be open to what they're adding to the character uh you have an amazing cast I mean I have like 15 questions and I just want to say if it doesn't work out between Hank and Maria I would like to marry Hank I'm completely in love with you know Dean Norris went to Harvard are you kidding me Dean Norris who plays Hank went to Harvard and I said what Harvard School of auto body repair we and now man Harvard so yeah can you talk about um since you brought up Brian talk about a little bit about the process of casting um Walt and at what point did Brian get involved uh I was very fortunate to have worked with Brian Cranston back in the xfiles I wrote an xfile episode back season 6 and this was I don't know 1999 or so uh in which we needed a character we basically I was I was doing my homage to the movie Speed uh and so we had a we had an episode where agent Moulder is trapped in a car a speeding car with a guy holding a gun to him G to his head and making Moulder Drive Drive West Drive very very fast and if the car were to stop the man holding uh Walt hostage uh his head would explode and it was a long invol the inner ear and the radio waves sent by project harp run by the Navy and it it kind of made sense if you squinted but uh that's got to be the beauty of the X Files it's like yeah it's one of those he's got the his head's going to explode that was a fun job boy that was my second greatest job ever after Breaking Bad oh man what a fun job that was but uh and a great learning experience but long story short we needed an actor who and and this guy um and to be phoh was borrowing a little bit too from wonderful episode of the TV show homicide uh which was a very uh underrated wonderful wonderfully written wonderfully acted and directed show uh they had a wonderful episode where a guy gets pushed in front of a subway train and gets crushed squeeze between the platform and they know as soon as they airbag him out of there he's going to die I remember that episode and the beauty of that episode the thing that never occurred to me as a writer was make that guy an and he's played by Vincent denafo and he's a he's a creep and and yet you feel sorry for him when he dies in that episode of homicide because the guy's a wonderful actor and it wonderful writing so uh I was I was perhaps borrowing a bit from that too because I wanted a character in this car for the bulk of the you know 43 44 minute running time of the episode I wanted this guy in a car with agent Moulder a guy who is a kind of a bastard and he's ranting on about the international Jewish conspiracy that runs the government and he's you know he's just a creep he's a he's he's anti-semitic and he's nasty and he's weird and and he lives out in the trailer in the middle of nowhere and there's no good reason for you to feel sorry for this guy and yet my fervent Hope was you do and when he you know not to give it away but it's been 10 11 years when he dies at the end uh you just want to feel sorry for this guy and some of that this before Brian had done yeah this is year and a half Malcolm Mill so long story short this this character you had to care about this guy or else the episode was not going to work and you needed a guy who was scary and who was a great actor and who had Charisma and who you'd want to who' hold the screen with our TV star David Duvy for an hour uh but you also needed to feel some fundamental Humanity some sympathy for this guy and his plight even though he's kind of a bastard and uh long story short we read a bunch of actors read some damn fine ones uh any of them no you know uh no but there's some real good ones and uh and no no no no uh you know through no fault of their own they were just weren't the guys and then one day uh we're getting a little frantic and then suddenly our casting director brings in Brian Cranston who I didn't know from Adam I only realized later I had seen him on Seinfeld playing the uh playing the uh Jerry's uh dentist on Seinfeld and and I realized later he was the one armed uh officer in uh uh saving Private Ryan who sends Tom Hanks on his on his mission and he played Buzz Aldren and from the Earth to the Moon stuff like that and he's such a chameleon he looked so different from Roll to roll I had no idea these were all the same guy and he came in and he read this part and he just blew us away and uh he gets a job he does a wonderful uh job of playing uh this character and uh he's such a pro too he goes through so much physical pain doing this episode and he never complains and he's just great and then a year and a half later Malcolm in the Middle comes on and it takes me a while to realize this guy is the same guy cuz he's so goofy and funny and and and I said oh my God that's that's our guy from our episode and then I remember saying to myself I didn't know he could be funny i' no idea this guy had these comedic chops cuz he had never been called upon in our brief time together to exhibit them and uh long story short uh you know if all I had known was Malcolm the middle probably not probably I would not have had the foresight I would not have had the imagination to hire this guy if all I had known you have offer it to him at that point or he did not read for it he came in and we had a meeting and he was he read the script and he was he told me in hindsight later and I was playing it kind of cool because I wanted to you know make sure I got the right deal and all he says but I was desperate to do it you guys again read this script I mean read the script it's but he was uh he was he was in my mind the guy because I knew he was the whole package in a nutshell I knew he could be uh dark and dramatic from the XF final episode I knew he could be very funny for Malcolm the middle and I knew he had an innate humanity and likability that this character needs uh the show doesn't work without Walter White being somebody you uh can sympathize with because this guy does a you know if you guys haven't seen the show this guy does some seriously Twisted dark stuff as the series progresses well yeah and by the end he's like a mass murderer yeah well I'll give him a pass on that one but uh give him pass I would call that manslaughter not murder manslaughter manslaughter if you if you it depends how you interpret the chain of events that that lead to that but talking about Brian one of the things that I really notice re-watching it is how much of the first season he plays with his mouth hanging open yes he just it was like such a great choice cuz it's like I can't believe what's going on I'm befuddled I'm in over my head and it his two looks were this and it's true he can actually suck in his jaw so it looks like has no Chin yeah I don't know how he does it so angry I've been angry for my whole for 50 years yeah yeah and I've been angry and squashing it down into a tight little black hole inside my midsections so squeezing it so tight I myself am not even aware of it until I get my cancer diagnosis he's this guy if you ever you know meet him in person you won't even recognize him most likely he is he's just this cool hip good-look guy in real life and he plays this you know little milk toast as Walter White or at least he did in the early episodes he's getting a little cooler as the show progresses but uh you just don't even recognize this guy from Roll to roll at least I I don't and U so much of Walt isn't indeed Brian Cranston uh he he came to me uh in the pre-production on the pilot he came to me saying I want to hit about 178 lbs that's a good that's a good weight and I'm like huh what he's like no I just want to be a little bit doughy I want to be a little bit gone to seed a little bit fleshy so 178 he knew exactly to the pound the weight he wanted to hit and by God he hit it well and and I mean that really to talk about a lack of vanity for him to be standing there not only in that under but like old you know like it's not new underwear well that's a good story too I was a wimp as a director we were out into tajali which is this uh um Indian Reservation out about 40 Mi west of Albuquerque shooting with those beautiful Red Cliffs and whatnot and was shooting these sequences when they're out there cooking in the pilot and uh and also it was cold out there it was you know I'm bundled up in a parka and it's you know maybe 40° 42 de and he's running around in in his in his shirt and his tidy whes but on the day he was first to appear dressed that way I wimped out and I went to him as the cameras being set up and I said um or it might have been the day before uh but I but I I I wented out and I said to him uh so the scene we're doing are you you know as written are you you know he said what what what I said are you you know as written the character is in his underwear he says yeah what I said well would you be more comfortable in sweat pants he's like oh yeah absolutely but what's your point and and and and I said well okay so underwear it is how about boxers would you be more comfortable in boxers he said what's the most pathetic kind of Underpants there there that exist I said tidy whes he says yeah well he looks so that's what I'm going to wear despite the fact that he's totally in character you can see how much fun he's having it's like how ugly can I look I'm I'm friends with Lisa Cudo and when she did opposite of she was so excited about that ugly hair and the those hideous outfits and you know if you're a real actor you you stand out in the 40° weather because that's the fun for you uh is having those moments where you the most pathetic that you can get yeah it's it must be true I I God bless him I couldn't do it I you don't want to ask someone as a direct at least I don't I don't want to ask anyone to do something I myself wouldn't do but it happens all the time I'm breaking bad I godamn if I'm going to stand out there in my Underpants you know but he's uh you know uh Brian is a he's a trooper he's he's a prince were you um to me as much as many wonderful complex relationships there are the centerpiece of the show always seems to me um Jesse and Walt and that sick sick kind of fatherson horrible relationship and talk about another another sympathetic character Jesse is such a loser and then there's that that that poignant um in season two it got a lot more into the family and what's it like to be the family uh that has this kid these kids that are these degenerate horrible drug addicts and his mom has this great line where she says to Jesse why are you like this and uh just literally um made me cry but Mr White uh Walter is so mean to Jesse he's just calling him all sorts of idiot stupid loser pathetic but yet can you just talk a little bit about that relationship and how you see it it's uh you know I said it was The Odd Couple for the 21st century but it's it's probably more like Laurel and Hardy for the 21st century but uh in in the sense that uh and I'm sorry I always get these confused Stan Laurel was the skinny one right yeah he was the tall skinny one right right and Oliver Hardy was the uh was was the Walter White character who was always exasperated at the at the meekness and the innocence of the Stan Laurel character and that's that's probably a better analogy but um you know you bring up a very interesting point too that that is not a typical TV convention I'm it's kind of an experiment for me this show I'm I'm trying to see how unlikable we can make this guy and still have the audience hang on are you talking I'm talking I'm talking about Walt because it was something you said a minute ago is very true Walt wal's a protagonist no question about it but he is not the hero I mean he he doesn't even like his kid I mean I think he sort of does but you know what I mean I think he has love in his heart for his family but I think he's I think this is a guy who's been wrapped so tight for so long as he says in the pilot I am awake but unfortunately being awake for this guy is is leads to some pretty very dark things and as the show progresses you you realize you know this this this construction of I'm doing this for my family because I need money I desperately need money for my family is a load of horseshit this guy's a this guy's doing it because it makes because it gets him hard because it literally and figuratively because it makes him feel good about himself because it makes him feel alive he's not a good guy and and yet I love the character I mean you got to love your characters it seems to me uh if the show's really going to be firing on all cylinders and you you have to love them but you don't have to like them or you think like there probably a better way to parse this but I you got to you got to be intrigued you can never lose your interest in them I suppose and this guy the darker he gets the more interesting he gets I'm not trying to make him repellent I'm trying to see how believably dark he can go and yet uh still hook us still hold our interest but but um back to Jesse played by Aaron Paul this kid is going to be a star I love he is such a sweet young man and he is such a fine actor and I mean he came into this job with amazing skills uh but I think Brian Cranston is also I don't think I think he'd be the first to to say I I I would I would than to give props to Brian Craner for being such a good role model to him as a young actor and and and know the sense of professionalism the sense of uh of of you know this is a job and we come in and we do our best on this job is is is a wonderful thing is is a wonderful uh thing to learn from and I think uh heck Brian's work ethic is even rubbed off on me but I think it's I think it's uh you know it's I I see I see these two guys together and they really respect and like each other there's so much fun when the cameras aren't rolling together and it really is to my feeling kind of a a father son or older brother or or uncle and uh nephew kind of a feel where they really respect each other and like each other and these guys it's hard to go toe-to-toe with Brian Cranston as an actor I mean I'm I'm no actor but I just you know I'd be if I were an actor coming in to play against this dude I'd be quaking in my boots and uh but Aaron Paul brings it every episode as does anagon and whole emble really holds their own and um is it Dean Norris Dean Norris who plays H yeah I mean and and I don't know the name of the actress but Marie is amazing Betsy Brandt who is a wonderful she should have her own talk show she is so damn funny uh in real life she is just yeah I'm so blessed you know you can write the best show in the world I'm not saying this is it but I'm using I'm saying I'm giving the example that you can write the best show in the world if you don't have the right actors you got you got nothing well it's it's always the you know X Factor whenever we do this is you've got to have this Confluence of things that all work at the same time you've got to have the writing and then you've got to have the network who wants to air it and then somehow or other the audience has to turn up who wants to watch it and then you got to have the actors that do it and the actors then you get into this really interesting symbiotic thing with the actors where they feed you and you feed them um and you know and they show you what to do with them I'm sure you get a lot of ideas for stories also just not from the actors as people but from watching them perform what you oh absolutely learn stuff all the time from watching the way they they you know Aaron Paul has a very interesting way he stresses the lines that I write that we write that my writers and I write he he uh the only the actor that comes to mind uh when I think about it is is actually Christopher Walkin uh at his at his best when he's he's somehow he's it's a subtle thing he does and and that Aaron Paul does but they're stressing certain words that never in your wildest imagination when you're writing them because you know probably you guys are a lot the same as what I do I I talk out loud to myself when I'm writing I I I when I'm writing dialogue I read it out loud because I don't want it to be a mouthful uh you read it back to yourself or you say it out loud as you're writing it a little both say it out loud write it down oh that's good you know what that'll work you know or or or or write it you know if it's a long speech write it in bits and starts and then you know say it out loud under my breath over and over again to make sure it flows uh and um but I I never when it when it comes to the other actors I often nail it in my head in in the in my mind's eye I can hear them saying it and I'm I'm very often right in the way that they will stress certain words uh leave other words unstressed I usually get every other actor right except for Aaron Paul he stresses certain words in certain ways that I would have never seen coming and it's always wonderful it's just a pleasure there's I know as writers you know there's always that um temptation to underline certain words you want them to hit or do these parentheticals and you know usually really good actors hate that they don't want to be told but if you and again to bring up Luca cudra who I've been I've worked with a lot over the last 20 years um you never want to tell her where to what to hit a word because she's gonna do something that's just GNA G to surprise you but I wanted to ask you um about um Jesse's dialogue especially now meeting you you know I mean it's always so interesting to see that the this show came came out of uh this very gentle man appear uh appearing appears Philip rewrite that um but that Jesse dialogue you know I would be so like in over my head to write that kind of lingo and have it sound authentic can you talk a little bit about writing that you know it's it's fun stuff to write and um I don't know just um I at the risk of Sonic to me the dialogue is always the key to the dialogue is cutting out everything you don't need to me that's i i i to me I want this show to I don't know where it comes from I just I I sort of hear that stuff in my head and and uh I don't take any great credit for it it just but but then the danger is at least in my estimation of the job the danger is to write a bunch of fun dial that makes you chuckle as you sit there in your chair and get kind of precious about it and want to keep every line of it to me the real hard part of the job and yet the one of the most crucial Parts is when you've got this fun dialogue cutting it down killing Your Darlings as fauler said I don't know if you meant it in this uh sense but that's how I take it and getting the scenes down to getting them down whenever possible getting them to the point that they work without dialogue at all one of my writers Peter Gould has been with me since day one came to me last season beaming he was so excited and he said I just realized in my script there are four pages a little over four pages four and an e four and 28 with not a single word of dialogue got through four pages without writing any dialogue well the first three pages of the pilot uh well there's that the monologue that he gives to the video camera where he's saying you know to his family you're going to find this stuff out about me but prior to that it's all it's all starts on page two or three I I I I do you know take it with a grain of salt but uh other showrunners uh uh very much other other directors other other folks in the business very much don't want the writer saying what's you know they don't want the stuff in between the dialogue but to me the stuff in between the dialogue is is is what it's all about the dialogue is just the the marcino cherry on top I mean if you can tell your story without dialogue and you can't always but also you got to keep in mind I mean what do people do in real life very often in real life people say the opposite of what they mean so you got to work then and your you don't have to but you can do anything you want but to me that's that's the key to it too having the characters saying the opposite of what they really mean and yet allowing the audience to understand it and if if you're if the audience is going to understand those kind of moments the uh the crew and the cast need to understand it first and so you need to put all that in between stuff in between those chunks of dialogue you got to explain things and you got to do it in a way that is not boring to living hell out of everyone who's reading this thing you got to keep it I don't know novelistic as much as possible you got to keep it short and sweet but you got to make it clear Clarity above all there's a lot of energy that energy it's why I keep saying you really need to read the script because the energy in your um action lines captures the feel of the energy of the pictures that we end up seeing there's a pace to it there's a pace to the writing there's a humor to the writing um so it's not just um very um you know just like just very straightforward saying we go here and we go there um I'm going to talk for another couple minutes I just um then we'll take a break and then when we come back I really want to get to a lot of your questions I know you guys have a lot of um questions to ask Vince but just to talk a little bit about um about subex which is what you're talking about one of the things um I talk about on the shows that that I'm running or the show that I'm running right now is is it playable or not are you giving the actor something to play and by that it's exactly what Vince was just saying they don't we don't walk around saying everything we think and feel first of all half the time we're not even aware of what we're thinking or feeling we just think of all the things in a day you want to conceal from people you know you may not want the waiter to know you don't have enough money to get the entree you know there there's a million different things and I think that's what the actors love what they like to play but also for the audience to understand it you have to have the in the stage Direction so that his crew and the actors will understand but also you need to have the audience understand what the actors are thinking and feeling so can you talk a little bit about how you um set those scenes up so we know the subtext is that something uh first and foremost it's it's I guess it's it's hiring uh it's hiring and then it's trusting the actors and then thirdly it's trusting the audience uh in other words you know we've all seen the network notes where is it spelled out enough is it clear enough and you have to you have to trust in in your actors to sell it to you know does it play as you said that you have to trust your actors to put it over to sell it and you have to trust your audience to to get it because the truth is if you're watching a show like Breaking Bad you're invested you have to be because it's such serialized it's I don't call it serialized I call it hyper serialized we we start up you know a minute after the last episode ends very often and and those Cliffhangers you're just going what I knew it was coming but not now but you know and figure if you're bastard you know it's a it's a show certainly not for everyone but the folks who are tuned into it are in you know you hope are invested and so you you you you you you don't ever uh write down to them you you you know that they're going to get it if they put in that much effort already and uh it's just you know I I I the best way to put it I guess I look back over my early writing every now and then I'll I'll find a script I wrote 20 years ago and I'll blow the dust off and I'll start I'll start reading through it and I'm amazed how much I spell out in the dialogue how much stuff that really is obvious to an audience that I wound up spelling out back then and uh it's it just comes with I don't know it just comes with time the more you the more you write the more you do it the more you realize half of what you've written in some of your earliest Scripts God knows mine stuff you didn't need to ever put down the you know you're kind of teaching yourself um just I don't I don't feel bad about that it was all a learning process nor should anyone process um this will be my last question before we take our break but the show shoots in New Mexico shoots in Albuquerque New Mexico um so when you were talking about pairing down the dialogue do you guys have table reads or no be great great there's just no time we shoot the show in 8 days we shoot it on film uh it is miserably hard to do and and we have the best DP and the best crew I vobo still doing it Ray vobo Wonder wonderful DP he uh he shot season one and now we have Michael slovis uh who used to be the uh one of the two deep uh CSI has alternating DPS he was one of I believe one of the two DPS in CSI wonderful guy fast as Lightning came came to it from being a gaffer there's basically you know directors of Photography either usually either come to it from being an operator camera operator being a gaffer and uh John tol who shot her pilot the great John tol the only living DP to win two Oscars back to back this guy I've still pinched myself to think that this guy got to work with this guy and he shot our pilot and uh he came to it from being an operator Mike slovis comes with it from being a gaffer but so it just shows goes to show doesn't matter where you come from but but the gaffer uh aspect of it for Mike he just bam he puts these lights up you know and he's got a great crew and and we get this show shot in an amazingly short amount of time the stuff these guys do I just blows me away and uh I forgot the original question but uh but we don't have table reads we just no time for it it'd be great but at that point when you're running for your life as you often are on television you you got to trust your actors and you got to have hired the right ones in the first place and I chalk a lot of that up to luck you know not like I was all yeah that was I hope I I remember to get to this but that was another thing I wanted to ask about was the uh the role of luck in this show good luck and bad luck it's inestimable it's inestimable oh so we we'll come back to that we'll go back to your questions we're going to take a um 12 and a half minute break this is um the fourth year that we've done this series and by we it's usually me and Winnie holsman although tonight and last week it was just me but um so this is our each each year we do six um they are for sale we have some amazing um interview people we've interviewed over the years TV and film um you know we interviewed Nancy Oliver Lars and the Real Girl talk about a fascinating story there Don Roose not to be missed Don Roose you will get obsessed with his kitchen timer he does he writes with a kitchen timer and people it upsets people and fascinates them I've done that too I I I don't stick to it cuz I have no self-discipline but that's that's a good idea that is well it's it yeah like what I do I don't know how he does it but I mean I you know I'll set the timer for 15 or 20 minutes and say I got to have a page done by then and but then it falls apart very shortly after that well Don uh don Roose has his whole thing I think it's available in the library it's called the kitchen timer and it's very very intricate and what he does is he writes a minimum of 1 hour a maximum of 4 hours a day um he well he's a feature writer you can do that um he decides the day before how many hours he's going to write the next day he writes in one hour increments during the hour no email no phone calls and he works in two documents one is whatever he's writing and the other is like a journal whatever and he and he will sit there and go I why am I so fat you know blah blah blah I wish I could go back to sleep I wish the hour was over and then he he can only work in one of the two documents and then when the hour's up he can do whatever he wants and he can write the you know another hour but people get completely obsessed with it but um those are for sale but they're also for free in the library so if you are interested in any of them sampling them or watching the whole thing um they're available to watch in the library that's about you know what Isaac azimoff used to do he uh he had he never had a computer he never used a computer apparently died in 92 I think but he had four or five identical IBM selectric except one in each one in a different color and had a rolling chair and he would have uh an essay a science essay uh in the on the typewriter carriage and one and then he'd have a short story and the other and then he have correspondence in the third one then he'd have and he would roll sideways back and forth and just I'm like that except on one of them I have Zappos they're just like different Windows zos email weather.com so I can in my mind picture myself on a vacation somewhere with better weather um or diff at least different weather so um I want to open this up to you guys because I know you must have a lot of questions yes um and wait I think there's going to be somebody here we go with the microphone yes over to hi um I've heard you have an unusual post schedule and that you wait for the LA in the last 10 or so episodes you let him get to director's cut and you don't do your cut until after you've done shooting are you in the uh uh uh showrunners program I am yeah so you heard Peter ghoul talking yes true if you maybe talk a little about that seems like a really hard thing to sell to a i you know to I don't know how you got that idea and how you uh pitched it to them and and had them go V will you talk a little bit too for those who have not worked in television what a normal post schedule is versus what you do H there's really nothing normal about about the way AMC does business and and God bless him for it and that's a good question uh uh normally on TV the way we did it on the xfiles for instance uh you uh uh are you don't have that much lead time before an episode airs uh you have more lead time at the beginning of your season you have much less at the end I remember times in the xfiles uh as a producer on an episode I'd written i' I'd be at the uh I'd be watching the final visual effects up until about 6 in the morning on the day that that episode aired at 6:00 in the morning we'd have to we'd have to cut it off and we and we'd have to say Okay this as good as a monster gets and then and then we'd have to ship it to they'd uh beam it to New York or whatever they would do I is a Greek to me but uh Network TV especially you have amazingly tight turnarounds and you do not so much uh in cable perhaps you don't we don't in other words we're shooting our show we uh I directed the last episode we finished shooting on January 28th 26 something like that uh you know a month and a half ago and uh we don't start airing till March 21st so we we have a lot more lead time uh just by by virtue of the vagaries of the schedule you know and because that was the case this year and because it was the case last year that we had enough lead time uh I am you know I'm as most showrunners are I don't think I'm unusual at all I'm a I'm a control freak and I'm actually pretty good in an editing room I'm not good at a lot of things but but I'm actually pretty good uh in an editing room and I want my you know I want to fine-tune the cut of every episode as you know producers are allowed to do after the director's cut and so last season uh I just it wasn't an idea I had in advance it just it was I just was not going to let an episode leave that I had not had cut over uh and you know understandably the the studio and the network were screaming for their episodes and I just my my line over and over again all last season was you can't get blood from a turnup over and over again you know the the short answer for how you get anything done is you got to be ready to walk away and not not you can't go around threatening it you can't you know go nuclear you can't do the nuclear option uh you only get it really once maybe maybe twice but you you can't go threatening it all the time but you and you just have to live it you can't fake it you just got to this show is the best job I've ever had Breaking Bad I love it I will be extraordinarily sorry when it's over I will probably never have it this good in my life ever again I may make a lot more money but I will never have this level of creative control over anything I do I just know it I don't mean to be negative but I just know it it will never be this good again but you have to you have to be willing to just Chuck it all and you have to they have to see you can't say it you got to mean it and they got to see it in your eyes yeah you got to seem really crazy like they've got to go not you know not crazy works sometimes but crazy can crazy that you mean it that you would really walk away from show well or crazy in the crazy is a double-edged sword uh but uh they have to know that you don't need the job and that you're going to do it your way or else you're not going to do it and it's not about being a tough guy or about screaming at people or anything although you got to I suppose at moments male or female tough guy you got you got whoever you are you got to be ready to do that too when necessary but you know not do it too often but you just got to be and with me I I just I love this show I I I I I I I want it to be the way I want it to be I I can't accept anything otherwise when it's bad it's my you know it's my fault and if it's good I want you know my share of the credit for that too but come hell or high water I you know I I you know I I I was very I've been extraordinarily Lucky in my career I I was lucky to make you know to this day I don't know how I got so lucky but I I you know and I did enough ears in the X Files I don't need I don't need to do it for the money I just want the show to be as as good as I can make it and they just they have to know that you want to be an artist like like cooking meth is an art yeah you whatever it is you choose to do in life you want to be as good as you can humanly be at it and uh um all of this to say my long-winded way of saying uh last year I didn't present them any other option uh I didn't go into it uh with forethought to say you know we're going to reinvent the uh post-production Paradigm here but but it just inadvertently turned out that way and so this year uh one one of my wonderful uh uh producers uh Melissa Bernstein sitting over here helped helped make it happen and uh and um yeah so um uh I don't know if that was a proper answer to your question but but essentially I I could see no other way to do it I wanted had to have cut but I couldn't have cut when I was in The Writer's room I couldn't do couldn't be two places at once so we had to drag it out and it added a little more money to the post schedule uh that we tried to save money in other aspects and you just you do what you can do and is your writer room here in La yeah we're over so how does that how does that work in terms of the the production having the production in in Albuquerque and you guys being here do you go back and forth or it's it's good and bad it's good it's bad in the sense that I'd prefer to spend much more time on the set and as the as seasons have progress season one I spent most of my time in Albuquerque um season two less Time season 3 that just ended barely any time at all except for the last episode that that I directed uh that's a real shame to me that I can't be out there more often but what I came to realize pretty quickly is they don't need me out there the best thing I can do is work with my writers and deliver to our wonderful crew the best scripts we can humanly give them and the actors know their characters and know how to play it we have wonderful directors we've gotten to a point now where we're using uh directors uh you know we we've we've honed in we've dialed in uh we know our directors that we want to use and reuse they know the show The Crew the DP everybody knows the show I don't really need to be there I I want to be there but I fun it's fun and and so that's the downside of having a writer's room 800 miles away in this case from uh production that's the upside as well because if if if we had writing offices uh uh of a two-minute walk away from The Sound Stage we would very I just know I know myself we would very quickly uh run a file of the schedule because I'd be spending time on the set that I shouldn't be spending and the writing uh schedule would would suffer uh and it's just ultimately it's probably better for me personally we does show that um there's a bunch of people here working on the show but the show that we just wrapped the writer offices are upstairs in a building that's attached to the stage and it's like I I I call the actors and I think they know this I call them my dolls because it's like when you're a kid and you're playing with your dolls and you can make them do whatever you want you can dress them up so I just really always feel like I want to go play with my dolls so it's so you know it's so compelling and then there there's the craft Services it's just really you know there's so many reasons to want to go in there and not be in the writer's room yeah being on the set is more fun cuz you're not banging your head against the wallter on to write something you're you're watching the fruits of your labor being executed you're right that craft service table is wonderful and it's just uh you you know bsing with the crew and you know just it's just so much more fun being on the set so absolutely uh you had a question that gentleman uh will you wait for the microphone please thanks you had mentioned earlier uh a story regarding the pitch and I was really curious to hear about that because it's so unusual for a network I know this is cable but to pick up something this unusual so I'd love to hear that yeah I I'll try to make it quick um and and uh I had this idea that I pitched I told you guys how it came about earlier I had a pre-existing uh relationship with Sony with the two guys who run Sony television uh Zack van Amberg and Jamie erck uh they had been supporters of a ill- fated pilot a few years earlier I tried to get going called battle for CBS we got to the point of uh having we started to build sets we we had actors we had you know and everything and then CBS shut it down they weren't into it uh which actually in hindsight was good CU I I couldn't do what I'm doing now on a network 13 episodes is is about uh you know one straw less than the straw that broke the camels back if I had to do nine more uh 11 more 24 of them in a year I kill me uh so I'm glad I never I'm glad that show didn't go but back to the question you ask um these guys at Sony uh liked the script Battle Creek I'd written that never went anywhere at CBS they were I sort of had an open invitation to come pitch them stuff and I came up with this idea talking to my buddy about driving around an RV cooking crystal meth and I went and Pitch it to these guys thinking it's AAR you know they're not going to be into it as a TV show and to their credit they really like they signed on as the studio Sony signed on as the studio then they accompani accompanied me around town uh to pitch this idea at this point it was not written into a pilot form yet we went to we knew there's no point going to a network that'd be utterly pointless waste of time for us and them uh so we went to uh Showtime we went we actually never went to Showtime uh we went to HBO we went to FX we pitched to a couple other places like TNT that was one of the best meetings I've ever been in I pitched to TNT the two Executives male and female I can't remember their names they were a wonderful audience cuz you guys a lot of you guys have pitched before it it so sucks when you're when you're pitching to someone who's just you know sitting there staring at you like you know these two were like yeah and then what happens yeah it was it was wonderful and then they looked at each other said the end you know and Walt you know has sex with his wife the end and they they looked at each other Crest fallen and they said if we buy this we will be fired so we can never they said can he be a counterfeit instead of a crystal meth salesman H and to their credit God bless him I I love these guys forever CU they they didn't they didn't hang me on the hook and leave me waiting they told me right then and there there's no way they're going to buy it they were great HBO on the other hand kind of sucked that was a what what happened HBO the lady running it just sort of kept going like this the whole time as I was pitching you know flop sweat on my she's like oh God and then I get to the end she says yeah yeah yeah thanks for coming in so you know it's anyway it happens to everybody from time to time I'm sorry yeah but of course there the Zeitgeist has gone from there bye-bye HBO what notm well that was a couple years ago probably was well whatever it's objective anyway not not to and to be fair not to not to It's a Wonderful Network they they helped we wouldn't be where we are in AMC FX wouldn't exist none of these places would existed not for HBO they're wonderful Network this particular lady might have had have been having a really bad day before I got there so you you never know but the the point is uh the real point of the story is you got to roll with it and I'm not good at rolling with it I I I want to see some positive feedback when I'm pitching cuz I'm really really not very good at it but you're not always going to get it so you got to what I always do is I practice uh get my girlfriend Holly to to stare at me stone-faced as I uh pitch and and how do you prepare for a pitch I mean do you write it out and kind of memorize it do you do like bullet points do you I mean how do you prepare I write it out I write it out into a into a short document and I and I it usually winds up being seven or eight pages and then I memorize it and I and I'm not very good at memorization I can never an actor but I I memorize it and I I I I commit it to memory I just read it over and over again and then I say it out loud and I time myself and I try to keep it under 20 minutes and usually it's more like 30 you know you there's a lot of hard and fast rules when you're pitching that you want to keep it under 20 minutes and and and I've never pitched under 30 and and I think the key is to give the best pitch you can possibly give Whittle it down to the shortest amount of time you can Whittle it down to but if it those 21 minutes or 22 minutes or 30 minutes don't kill yourself over it just pitch it fast with energy with enthusiasm get through it and put your best foot forward and practice to uh your loved ones who either will be bored and and not hide it or Fain bored them uh it doesn't matter which really just to get used to get used to borom so it doesn't throw you because it's throwing me in the room and I'm like you know and then I forget where I am like a deer in the headlights so don't you know don't let it throw you do you which is easier said than done but do you have that original document that you memorized to pitch Breaking Bad I ask this because my one of my obsessions is to collect things for the library that are Works in progress or that give other writers a window into the process so I'm going to bother you later but if you still have that and we could have something like that for people to look at that would be incredible I'll try to dig it up uh we got I got uh we got our house robbed a couple years ago and it might have been it might have been gone with a laptop that got stolen but I will look for it maybe I still have it long story short to finish the original question we pictured It All Around Town everybody said no uh except for FX they bought it they were a nice bunch of folks went and pitched it to uh John landra at FX they bought it uh not in the room but like a week later they said okay we'll we'll pay for this in the room by the way he said to me as I got halfway through this verbal pitch he said this sounds a little like weeds and I said what is weeds and and and he said it's a show you know D D D and I and I said oh and I felt the blood leaving my face and I turned to our Sony guys I said have you heard of this show he says oh yeah I said why didn't you tell me about this thing I I didn't know this thing existed I didn't get showtime and at that point I'm not even sure if it' been on the areir yet anyway maybe it had I I was unaware and um and it's a wonderful show and it sounded very similar and I was like oh crap luckily I didn't know about it because I would have if I had known if I learned of weeds existence I don't know 6 8 10 weeks earlier I would have not gone forward and you know anyway P FX they bought it they uh thought about doing it for quite a while once I turned in the script they they uh ultimately went with the show um dirt instead which which made a lot of sense and and they were wise for doing this it's because no one knows the future no one's got a crystal ball that had Courtney Cox attached who was a TV star we had nobody they were also at the time trying to become more female friendly I believe was their corporate mandate so it made perfect sense uh then we're back to square one which meant nowhere because if all the edgy places in town turned us down I knew we're dead in the water so I went on to other things had you pitched AMC or that was not no and and what happened with AMC was I I knew of their existence I knew the American movie classics Channel i' had it on my cable for years but uh a guy named Mark Gordon not not the movie producer Mark Gordon but uh the other Mark Gordon soon to hopefully soon to be known as The Mark Gordon and the other one will be the other Mark Gord but he was one of my agents he was an assistant at the time at ICM and uh previously broer but anyway he took it upon himself to send this script to a friend of his at AMC knowing that they were knowing what most folks did know at the time which is that AMC was in the process of of trying to create a scripted programming comp opponent and that they were soon going to have a show in the AA called Madmen which was not on yet and Mark Gordon called me up and said the folks at AMC like your pilot script cuz at that point I'd ridden it for FX so that and that thing was done so sent the script of these guys and they said would you could would you want to meet with these guys when they come into town and I just knew it was just going to be a giant jerk off but I figured we'd meet at this bar at this hotel that I like and I'd get some good you know Hotel uh Heritage I think is where where they stay it's a nice bar yeah and I figured I'd get a couple of good you know free $14 scotches out of it so for what the hell you know it's good to be stroked to Your Ego stroked and get a couple of free expensive drinks but I knew this wasn't going to go anywhere cuz I said to him at the time I said Jesus Christ am am seen that work why don't you send it to the Food Channel you know it's about cooking so so long story short AMC said from our first meeting they said we're trying to get into the scripted business we like the script would like to make it would you be interested in directing it and I thought it was a Candid Camera it was like being Kramer on Seinfeld and falling ass backward into Good Fortune you know but they were true to their word every step of the way it was a dream place to work I would highly recommend it they're great uh they had nothing to lose and they just went for it with mad first with Mad Men and then with Breaking Bad and God it hasn't changed them sometimes people are so loose and then they get a couple shows like that and they to my best to my knowledge it has not changed them and it's it's a tricky Waters It's Tricky Waters to navigate because I just know from personal experience the the more success I've had the more nervous I get as a human being I I I have more stuff to lose I have more possessions to lose I put up more alarm systems I you know whatever buy another gun whatever that did you yeah so exactly so it's like uh I got robbed I wasn't just being rude but it's it's it's it's it's Human Nature to uh to be that way and and but may AMC be ever thus may they always be courageous as they are now cuz they are truly courageous they don't give us any crap about you know can you can you make Walt more likable can he not be quite so bad does there have to be quite so much crystal meth does he have to be in his underpants quite so often you know he's there they're God bless them I assume Matt Wier I've met a couple times has similar stories we had um Matt was my guest last week and yeah it's it's really really amazing what they did because those there's no really connection between the two shows other than a completely clear original Vision apples and oranges Mad Men and Breaking Bad could not be more different but are the product in both cases of somebody's some writer's passion and AMC saw that it sounds like I'm blowing smoke sounds like I'm doing a commercial for him but God bless him cuz uh everyone else in town passed on this for various reasons and they said yes so I am forever in their debt yes this gentlemen and then we'll go to you next uh thank you yes since I know more about features I want to hear more about how um you run a writer's room on um your show like in pre-production like you said you were in the room with the writer you assign it to one writer how's that work and also since I'm wer uh more about features could you talk a little about like the comparison to Hancock um if that's not too painful since I heard that they changed your script but well it would have been a lot more painful Hancock to start with a second question first would have been a lot more painful if it had been my original script to begin with Hancock was originally entitled tonight he comes and it was written by a wonderful writer named VI Vincent no who I never actually met but he wrote a great script it was very dark very atmospheric very well written and I was hired to come along and and had a little inject a little humor to it I guess uh and I was on that job for about four years and made a lot of money it a wonderful job but by the end of it I was so ready to move on to something else because you can only rewrite something 25 or 30 times before you start to you know uh but great bunch of producers great bunch of folks on that on that on that project but um TV and movies they both have their ups and downs there's good and bad about both as you would imagine uh if I could only do one from now on it would be television the downside of Television is it has schedules and and deadlines and and requirements that can come close and I'm not even exaggerating come close to killing you I mean depending on your level of emotional investment but you the writer uh in television are you're the boss and in features which uh you know the great thing about a feature is you get hired as a script doctor or whatnot uh or or you're writing an original you go right in the south of France you could be anywhere you want and uh you're always connected by facts and internet and all that stuff but there's just so many cooks stirring that broth and uh there's so much lead time and there's time for everybody to pee on that hydrant you know that is your script and it's and no one has bad intentions they're not bad people they're not it's just there's so much lead time that it that it leads to second guessing and triple guessing and quadruple guessing and in TV the writers are left alone because the deadlines are so damn tight there's just not that you get notes I get notes from the studio and on Breaking Bad studio and the network but there's uh you just don't have time for a lot of notes and tons and tons of notes and it's you know so that's the good and bad of it uh and uh it's always a good experience even if it's kind of a negative one whatever it is I learned a lot from Hancock uh it doesn't represent uh what I think is in any way shape or form my best work and a lot of it doesn't even represent my work uh but but a committee's work or other writer work and um you know I wouldn't want to spend the rest of my career doing those kind of jobs but having said that Will Smith being in a room with him he's a very smart guy very smart guy and the producers I worked with uh Michael Mana Goldman really smart guys I learned a lot from all of them good bunch of people it's just I'd rather I'm an eagle Maniac I'd rather be the boss instead of you know the guy in the room taking notes from everybody else so uh having said that uh the writers room the way we do it on Breaking Bad is the way we did it on the X Files my boss on that show the creator of the xiles Chris Carter uh wonderful guy really brilliant writer and brilliant producer and what I learned I learned so many things on that show but one thing I learned in particular that I that holds me in good stad is to empower My Writers as much as they can possibly be empowered in other words uh when I started on the X Files I was I had a creative consultant title that my agent had had Juiced out of them but uh Juiced Juiced out of them uh the word Juiced uh uh you know he had the juice to get it so I don't I don't want to be misunderstood there um uh that he had gotten out of them uh um and um I'm missing what he never any anyway uh I just suddenly dawned on me that that could be misinterpreted if I hadn't pronounced it you know uh uh he had the juice to get a creative consultant long story short anyway um uh um and um uh what was my point I forgot uh how Chris ran I was just a staff writer but Chris Carter was such a good boss that he made us all producers whether we had the title or not and it was our job to uh uh go um to the set visit the set it was our job to be in the uh writers uh obviously in the writers room but be in the uh auditions help pick the actors we listen to music cues we were in the editing room that's all the the editing that I know nowadays is is all the time is because all the time I in the in the in the in the writer's room uh in the editing room so uh anyway uh long story short uh that's what I do with our Breaking Bad writers I I expect them to take responsibility for their individual episodes the uh the way we divide up the episodes is simply seniority we start episode one I usually write episode one episode two is my next most senior writer episode three you know and then we just we roll them through once or twice in in that order in that batting in that batting order uh um and um that's just sort of how we do it and you know I expect them to to really take full responsibility for these episodes and really uh do a great job on them and and you know I I want them involved in all aspects of production so that's one of my fantasies is if I could ever work it out to for a class at the writer Guild to to take people into to a writer's room because I'm also so curious how you guys work I mean you talked about that you knew where the second season was going to end you knew where it was going to begin but what happens in between I mean do you say Hey you know I think it would be really cool to you know to do an episode where he you know Jesse loses his house or whatever it is or or how do how do you come up with the I mean do you guys first of all do you work with a G or um a grease board or whiteboard or we we work not with a a a dry eras board because that seems very impermanent to me I'm scared somebody might come along and and you know rub up against it and erase all our hard work we we uh we board using cork boards and U uh 3x5 index cards with sharpies and we uh we fill a whole board one of those quartet boards we that that represents an episode we have the teaser act one act two act three act four and a teaser is usually uh the way we do it five or six cards uh individual acts are usually uh uh we try to keep them to within two lines uh we try to we we have to fit it all on the one border else something's wrong so uh each individual Act is usually about somewhere 14 to 16 maybe 17 index cards and is each card a scene uh often each card represents a part of a scene each card is a story beat uh usually uh color code I love to color code no because we don't really if by that you mean like a and b stories and what well A and B stories are or you know I guess every all your stories are Walt although interestingly you definitely do have scenes without Walt in it um now I need a little bit more air conditioning if anybody it's it's the wine it's the it it whatever it is if anybody here has anything can help all right um so you don't color code no I do that if there's different characters and you sort of have to visually see I was taught by Chris Carter everything I do is just stuff I learned from Chris Carter and I he just wanted it clean and simple like newspaper headlines and maybe that was his journalism training he was a journalist for years before he got into the TV business and also we don't really in my mind we don't really do A and B stories I mean sometimes it might feel that way watching our show but we don't we don't break it out like that we just sort of we we proceed in a very linear fashion and we we we we start with the teaser and we sort of work it from there and we can't really again me being a weird obsessive compulsive type we can't really go forward we can't skip a scene and go forward we don't usually work that way we have to build it Brick by Brick and just like you build a building you can't skip floor number two but do you know where an episode might end you may go oh I like this ending or you or am I misunderstanding or you literally just start at the beginning and you see where each scene is going to take you yeah we see where we know we will have ideas we will often have ideas where the episode ends but we we flesh it out Brick by Brick even though we will have often touchstones that we want to write to or we'll have an ending we're we're working toward but more often than well I say more often than not but very often we will uh have what we think is the great ending and then we will realize we've got too much uh things to Too Much real estate too much stuff to cover not enough real estate to in other words that great ending will push off to the next episode because it's fantastic yeah which is the good part about hyper seral or regular serializing of a of a show uh sometimes you you run out of real estate so you got to push off that great scene until the next episode we we've done that many times so cool uh next question is this gentleman here uh microphone oh yes you yeah I'm oh thanks um I'm just trying to to imagine Breaking Bad before you knew Brian Cranston was going to be on it before you knew about what episode 2 was going to be and when you're just coming in and pitching the pilot and I'm just curious about because we hear a lot of things now about people asking what does episode 100 look like where do you know where is this going and on a more micro level than the uh you know Mr Chips into Scarface thing how much did they want to know about what actually was going to happen in this process oriented show good question um I I had a meeting at Sony which is our studio this was pretty early on this is the meeting when I said this is going to be taking Mr Chips and transforming him in a Scarface and I uh sat down with these these folks the Sony and uh AMC Executives and I I kind of I kind of gave them highlights I had certain scenes that I had in mind honestly some of which we have never done and may never do uh but I had I I I was very lucky uh so many ways I can't even count but one way I was lucky is that AMC was so new at this that uh they they don't do things the way a normal television network would do and they didn't require uh a show Bible for instance they didn't require um they just kind of they just kind of assumed it would work out and they they I mean they they believed in the original script and and and I and I I pitched them some highlights of of what at that point in my mind then was going to be season one I I didn't connect all I didn't I didn't pitch them all the connective tissue I didn't you know get them from A to B to C watching the pilot again and to me just how want to give him the mic I want everybody to be able to hear when we were watching the pilot again which I'd seen before uh multiple times it occurred to me how much Walt both has and hasn't changed in where he is now at the end of season 2 it's gotten so much more dark and yet we still care about what happens to him and so um it's not it is both the same show as it's always been and and also very different from what it's been and so I'm just wondering how I guess you know AMC must have been a really good get because I can imagine a lot of other networks trying to bring you back to the Walt that we see in this episode absolutely without doubt you're absolutely right um there's no other way to say it but that television to me historically television is is about protecting the franchise and that's not a bad thing I'm not I'm not putting that down that's not a negative but uh when you watch mash for instance of which I've seen every episode and I think is one of the great shows of all time but somehow they managed on that show to keep uh two and a half year police action going for 11 or 12 Seasons you know except for the fact that actors all of us age and you can chart that you know uh on any show Gunsmoke you know Marshall Dylan and gun smoke in season 20 is fundamentally the Marshall Dylan of the first episode this is what I mean by protecting the franchise and it's a good thing agent Moulder Agent Scully I was seven years in the X Files we would take them as far as we could take them in any given episode we would have terrible things happen to them we would have lifechanging things happen to them and then we would reset sometimes in in ways that were more believable other times we kind of just glossed over it to be honest they reset back to the molder and Scully that you know and love for at the start of the next episode you know somebody dies in mould's apartment and next episode that's kind of forgotten about and now we're back to you know yet another case and there's nothing wrong with that I'm not putting that down but to me that's what television does and does well they protect the franchise they they give you a place to come visit tune into and visit with folks that you like I.E the Stars the actors of Any Given show week in week out but uh I just wanted to do something different and and I'm glad to hear you're still liking Walt there will be I got a feeling with our show that certain people certain folks are going to different folks are going to every F every person out there watching is going to have a slightly different tolerance level for how bad this guy gets hopefully most folks will be in it for the long run all the way through to the end but some folks have probably I'm sure have already tuned out because they're like ah this guy's just too nasty why am I going to spend time with this guy every week but to me that's the fun of it that's the experiment and and uh AMC to their credit God bless them and Sony too big company like Sony but to be fair they've never they've never really given us the the note which is can you make them more likable we've never God bless them we've never gotten that note I don't I'm not even sure why some days but I'm glad and I hope it it's always that way you know just I'm I'm the comment that I want to make is because I'm sitting here going why still like him cuz I can't you know it's been very very hard to not have the show on the air you know and just go what you know because I you get really talk about addicted you get super addicted to it but I'm thinking about um I'm not going to say what it is cu I know people who haven't seen it yet but the second to the last episode there's an unbelievably shocking moment that was the one time they got a little nervous yeah that being said it was heinous but I understood why he did it good I understood why he did it so even though I don't condone it and even though he really crossed a line for me I understood and I understood from looking at it I mean talk about brilliant acting he's looking at it he thinks what should I do and you see him realize all the problems that he thinks will be solved in that moment and he and and but I understood why he did it good and then that was that was that moment you refer to is is the one time that uh they called us up and they said you sure you want to take them this far because there's no coming back there's no going back after you do this and they were in a very real sense right and it was a it was a good Network note and they kind of scared me because they didn't tell me you got to do it this way they just said are you sure you want to do this and especially when you have complete freedom from people who are like yeah yeah and then they go you sure you want to do this Johnny well with as we all know with freedom comes responsibility and and and it behooves you as a showrunner uh or a writer of a movie or what or whatever if you got Final Cut in a movie as a writer direct or whatever you wind up with it you're you know it's not wise to stop listening to people just because you don't have to listen but ultimately you decided to go with what you we we probably did and they didn't make us but we probably did tone it down a little for my first um my first idea was was actually even rougher wow so uh the first idea was that he doses her up on purpose oh yeah well that was what but but but what you ended up with and this is one of those those things that is you know I I keep wanting to get back to the idea of luck good luck bad luck happy accidents I did read an interview with you where um there were supposed to be Eight Episodes the first season nine episodes and because of the strike um production was halted and so that there were certain obviously you'll tell me if this was accurate or not but there were certain things that you would had been planning for the first season that you didn't do that in retrospect you were glad you didn't do because you thought it would have taken it too far but I think what you wound up with personally was so much more interesting because it was that decision in the moment and it was more ambiguous and it just sounds to me it's easy for me to say but more interesting than what you had planned well thank and it's it's absolutely true I've been I've been again I feel like a lottery winner here because uh I I the fact that I didn't get to do the ending that I was originally the Cliffhanger that I was originally going to end season one with is is very fortuitous for me because uh I just say it now the original ending for uh season 1 was going to be Jesse Pinkman being killed horribly and some drug deal gone terribly arai and uh that was my idea for the end of season one great idea Vince it would have been like the most boneheaded idea ever but uh um but everything I said earlier about slowing down the storytelling or rather milking out every little moment of drama you can find uh I was going to work against that because I was scared that I didn't I just wanted I just in my gut I knew I had to end the season with a real big bang I had to throw this kitchen sink at it you know I had to give the audience reasons to tune in the following year Following season and I I I was lacking confidence I was nervous uh about G are the end of this enough so let me just go Hog Wild go nuts at the end here it would have been wrong uh on a on a on a level of why in the world would you get rid of as wonderful an actor as Aaron Paul but beside that it would have been wrong from a lack of being truthful to the story that you're telling kind of a thing it would have been not believing in the story you're telling it would have been uh going too far too fast it would have been everything I don't believe in and yet I was poised to do it so I I kind of get saved and I'm very lucky that way will you will you talk a little bit about um do you consciously you must but consciously think about the role of good luck and bad luck in the in the show I mean one of the things that I thought of rewatching it is it's really got this Perils of Pauline quality where every minute you know the the thing that could possibly happen happens and then something weird happens like the great episode where um it's I think it's tuco's father has the stroke and he keeps hitting the bell and I mean the tension in there and then they bring him in and he's being questioned and and they verify that no he does know who the president and he's like and then and then we're going oh my God and the luck is the guy won't rat on them to he you know he would yeah he takes an enormous dump instead in his wheelchair just as a show of disrespect to the DEA as much as he hates Jesse Pinkman he hates the DEA even more and his his he's a he's an old school uh he's an old school drug dealer and he's not going to ever help out the DEA so it is fortuitous for Jesse but it it is in keeping with the character I always say the writers cuz we do have a certain amount of u of um what do you call it what's the right word for it we have a certain every now and then on our show we have a certain things happen that are are are fortuitous for storytelling that are uh uh what the hell's the word it's notar Inus it's a very obvious word and coincidence coincidence I'm sorry it's the wine I suppose do I get anything that right uh I get a high five we we we have certain number of coincidences on our show well the one that I was just thinking of was when Jane's father winds up in the bar sitting next to the wall that would seem like a big Co coincidence and my writers every now and then and then in that case uh that's a good case in point My Writers say to me this is very coincidental coincidences feel like BS and my philosophy on it and you all are free to disagree my My Philosophy on it is if it's a coincidence that's bad for the main character it's completely cool storytelling wise if it's a coincidence that's good for the main character it's so I said to them think about what happens here Walt winds up sitting next to a bar and and by by the way and you'll see if you watch season 3 uh cuz we never forget anything uh at least so far we haven't we never leave things hanging wal will reference it in a very important moment in season 3 The sheer Coincidence of it in fact not to give too much away but uh to me you know a coincidence of winning the lottery right at the moment you need money the most is absolute lazy writing and and Bs but at that moment Walt sitting down next to the guy who turns out to Jane's father is the worst possible thing that could have happened because if you watch that scene closely this this guy enjoying his beer and giving Walt parenting advice is what puts Walt over the edge and drives him to go to Jane's house and the next scene and the terrible thing that happens next is part and parcel because of The Coincidence of running into this guy so it's in fact a very bad thing so you know coincidence I'll take coincidences all day long just as long as they make the protagonist life tougher which is you know the essence of drama so well and especially I mean Breaking Bad is just such a beautiful example of it I think sometimes um we're so conflict averse in general people don't want bad things to happen and they don't want conflict but of course you know it took me so long when I started writing where they're going they need obstacles it's like I'm that makes me really uncomfortable but of course you you know you can't tell the story but um I also love you guys must just go why did we write write that how the hell are we going to get out of this now every season at the end of every season we we we we do our best to paint ourselves in a corner and then we spend at the beginning of The Following Season we spend weeks in the editing room saying to ourselves we did this year I mean after the the big thing that happens in the end of season 2 uh we were in the room weeks and I think at one point in despair I said we we we're I mean what do we we got if you only say that once though you're in good shape we I've said it many times I a very negative person to begin with I say it many times you know three or four times a day but uh uh but we we wind up so far and there may well come a day knock on W it won't make well come a day when we're we uh you know so far we' haven't been able to unfuck ourselves but uh that day may come but uh so far so good unfuck yes that's my new favorite verb do you know where the series is ending I mean it seems like you have this Vision so do you know how many Seasons you're going to have I'd like to say yes uh I don't really um there's a couple things at play there's the the greed that I feel toward toward wanting more of this job not MoneyWise but I I want this to go as long as it possibly can I don't know right now how long that will be in my mind's eye see at least a season four and hopefully season five but you don't want to leave the you want to leave the party with the with the other party goes wanting more you don't want to be the you don't want to be that guest that just won't leave you want that with your TV show too you and it's hard it's very hard to know it's next to Impossible again luck will either play a hand or it won't either good luck or bad luck will play a hand but you want you want to take it you want to explore everything you want to explore but you don't want to overstay your welcome I can't promise we won't I can't promise what'll happen one way the other I think the smartest thing currently in TV is uh is the way they did un lost apparently I don't really know the show that well but but I know that a year a year and a half ago the folks who run lost said we're going to end this show at such such and such a date at the end of season X da d da brilliant I wish more shows did that I would like to do that ourselves right now we don't even know if we're going to get season 4 so the future is very hazy as it is on most shows you can only really get away with that on on an outof the-box hit such as lost but I think it's brilliant because then every one knows what they're writing toward the writers the showrunners have lost all are working in a room together I assume you know building it Brick by Brick toward an ending that they are starting to sense or perhaps already know they're sitting around going how do we make the all this seem like we knew what we were doing what the is a smoke Monster by the way that's the way it was in The X Files it's the way it it's the way of Television it's it's uh it's very rare to know where you're going hey you for a good case in point you said to me um a few minutes ago you said you know did you know you wanted to write an episode where Jesse uh loses his house because his parents realize that he's got a meth lab in the basement and they kick him out you know why that happened we we we we Wing that we were just tap dancing as fast as we could what happened is the house that we Ed for Jesse's house in nice neighborhood in Albuquerque New Mexico went up on the market and it was sold out from under us and the nice lady who had been renting it to us said uh you know I got to move I need the money and it was on the market for a while we kind of prayed that it wouldn't get sold but sure enough it did and that episode when his folks kick him out was just a very rapid response to the fact that we no longer had a major set but but and as a matter of fact if you watch the last episode as he's being kicked out one of the last episodes early season 2 The the shots don't frame the roof and that is because there was no roof on the house at that point it was being re-roofed you know as we were and they let us we had to pay some exorbitant amount to the new owners maybe it wasn't exorbitant to be fair but we we had to plead and beg and cajo and Weedle and get them to let us shoot one last day and wrap things up and then uh the house is uh is gone it's no longer available to us so we just you know like I said tap dancing as fast as we can but that's such an interesting you know again it and and you know as writers we all know know and it's going back to the tarot thing it you just don't know you don't know what's going to trigger that thing you don't know what's going to push you into doing the story um and this is such a perfect example I mean you guys were probably going oh my God this is the worst thing that ever happened but it absolutely it leads into this great story and I mean to me that really deep in Jesse um I loved the thing with his brother and him kind of taking the rrap for the brother but the just the whole thing of the kid one of my one of my favorite shows is intervention and it's cority Celebrity Rehab um but uh just the that whole thing of just the horror of having this kid in your family the parents were almost these kind of jokes but yet I really understood I just I just loved that episode and I love and then again that I think it was in the next episode where when Tess Harper says to him why are you like this and then you're just going there's no easy answer he comes from a perfectly nice home and well here's the funny thing about Tess Harper and and Michael boser who play uh uh uh Jesse's parents on the show we do not see them in any way shape or form as villains we write them to be long-suffering sweet people who care about their son but who've just been put through the ringer by his drug dealing and his drug using and his just general antics and yet they really do play they really do function as the antagonists and and you'll see if you watch season 3 we you know um they come back into the story in a fun way that actually relates to the house and the fact that the house is now available to us again and that's all I'll say but uh they you know it's funny when I talk to folks they say man I love it I love uh I want to see them stick it to his folks you know and uh it's just funny how because they that's because they love Jesse because they love Jesse so much but Jesse's really a rotten son in a lot of ways he's horrible I mean that's the interesting thing is you love these people so much and I keep looking at it and trying to remind myself no he's a degenerate he's a drug dealer he's a he's a drug addict um you know he's all of those things and I love that kid and yet he is all those things and yet more and more I realize and again I don't I don't I only come to this slowly and dribs and drabs he's very much he's all those things and he's very much the moral center of the show very often he's saying to to Mr White as he calls him he's saying to Mr White are we doing the right thing here is this the right thing to do are you sure you want to do this are you sure D D D D very often he's the you know his naive and and unschooled as he is people say he's stupid I I think he's just extraordinarily naive and and you know uneducated you know which is sort of his own choosing for not paying attention at school but he's he's got a lot of Street smarts and he's and he's got kind I mean the scene where he realizes that um Mr White has cancer and the compassion um that he that he brings to that moment really makes you you know just love him so much but that was another thing that I noticed rewatching it is again dark and I don't just mean dark I mean like again the depressing Decor the the dark lighting and so many people being to each other constantly little things the chemo woman going I won't Cas cash your check till Monday and you know when Jesse gets beat up one of the bazillion times he because you know what he reminds me of like the Scarecrow from Wizard of Oz where people just pick him up by his baggy clothes and throw him around and stomp on him like every episode but uh he's in the hospital and that guy I think his name was skinny it's like so nice he's there he's looking after him and the nice Jan who gets completely screwed over you know it's true no I you know I I just I don't know we try we try to show it all we we you know the good starting point I would I would advise anyone is is what have you not seen before and uh put that on the air and and I'm not saying we've reinvented the wheel here or anything I don't mean that I'm just saying you know use that as your launching point for when you when you when you come up with a character or a show or even when you come up with an individual scene what's the way to play it that you don't see every day so you know re re um reading the pilot script um I think I'm using this term right but there's a term obligatory scene so like there was in the pilot there's the scene where he has to find out he has terminal cancer right that's a scene you have to have it but but there's no way to write that scene so it's not a cliche right everybody can hear the doctor says oh you have terminal cancer and he's like really you know what I mean it's like there's no way to make it interesting what was Vince's solution you he he don't he can't hear it all he's doing is looking at the guy's mustard we know everything that's going on the guy is like are you listening yeah yeah I know I got terminal cancer you know but what an inventive way talk about a scene being played in a way you've never seen it played before um that's just a a good example of a an unpredictable way to play it let's take one more question and then uh yes okay we'll take two more questions thank you are you okay for us to take fine I'm very flighter to be here thank you I'm very curious what your experience was um knowing almost nothing just a lay person's knowledge of meth culture and then your experience having to research all of it and where you went and what you found out both uh at square one just doing the pilot and then after you got picked up and you had more resources is it's a good question and what holds me in good stad is is uh Walter White is kind of me in a sense I mean uh when you think about it in the sense of Walter White starts from square one he's never broken the law and it's not because he's a good particularly good person it's just because he's too scared to uh you know there's probably laws I would break if I wasn't so afraid of Retribution and being caught and whatnot but uh I don't know what they are off top of my head but you get the point but uh I what holds me in good stad is that I know nothing about meth but Walter White doesn't either he doesn't know he knows what he's read in the New York Times or the Albuquerque Journal or whatnot which is was about my depth of knowledge at the beginning of this whole process uh and he learns and fits and starts as do I as do all my writers we learn a lot of you know it was a lot you know I didn't know anything about meth uh except for again cursory knowledge I I glean from newspaper you know in my years leading up to that point that I started writing this but I also didn't know that much luckily about terminal cancer nor do do I know that much or didn't originally about the inner workings of the DEA you know nor do I know that much about chemistry but you know we're all professional Liars in a sense and I say that kindly we're all telling stories about things that we don't necessarily know firsthand and uh um so I guess it's just all a matter of research and and did that answer your I'm not sure if did you ever do but did you write along with a DA DEA agent I did as a matter of fact I I I uh I as part of where I got the idea from originally speaking of the DEA portion of it uh I was lucky on the X Files and then I I did one episode of Robbery Homicide division for my friend Frank spotnet who used to be one of the guys who ran the xfiles shortlived Michael man CBS show I got to ride around with some real cops a couple times which was very exciting riding around uh uh Lynnwood uh unincorporated area sort of south of downtown LA that was rode around with sheriff's deputy for uh early morning shift one night and that was this guy kept apologizing for how quiet the night was this guy I'd heard my whole life that a cop draws their gun maybe once maybe twice in a career this guy had his gun out three or four times that night and he keeps apologizing for quiet it was you know but uh that was exciting and getting the vehicle for the the basic car whatever whatever unit what the squad you know the deputy's car I get in it the first thing he's telling me is how to unlock the shotgun and how to you know call an emergency in and he says I got an extra gun in my back pocket here if if I'm down roll me over and grab it and I'm like holy well that that was also something I loved is like that Walt could couldn't even kill himself cuz he didn't know how to take the safety off the gun yeah yeah the only reason he's alive and we have a show at all is cuz he was so ignorant about how to take the safety off a pistol but uh um what's my point uh a lot of the idea I have to give credit to Frank spot it's a guy I worked with in the xfiles one of the executive producers on that show has a brother-in-law who is a DEA agent in at the time he was in Riverside I think he's in Downtown LA now great guy named Grant uh who um is Hank is not based on him Hank is a very different person than Grant is but Grant is you know there's a similarity in the sense that both these guys are winners certainly when we meet Hank uh Hank is character-wise structure-wise is a winner to Walt's loser and Grant is one of life's winners as well he's this good-looking macho guy who loves his job loves what he does is very good at it very good DEA agent and I got to go visit him I didn't get to ride along with with those guys cuz at the federal level they don't do ride alongs you can actually lose your job for doing that but he he and his partner uh took me out to lunch one time in Riverside and sort of gave me the poop on how things work and whatnot and did they have that kind of dark sense of humor because that's another thing it's like that whole thing where where Hank wants his picture taken with like when the guy's arm comes off and I love that it seems so real it doesn't seem like you know these guys you know are serious all the time well they're they're not Ser I mean Grant I can he's very was very professional around me and and uh you know of of the utmost professionalism but and never did anything like that around me I didn't base any of that stuff on on on Grant but you can it's not that hard to extrapolate that uh guys in close proximity men women in close proximity doing that kind of a tough job you cannot emotionally inv in it uh which is again one of the tropes of TV that you know you emotionally invest in every case that comes down the pike you kind of have to tell a story that way except in real life I don't believe it's that way so it wasn't that hard to extrapolate you know you don't have you only have so much emotion within you you can't spend it on strangers and also it's such a great I mean you know from being in a writer's room you know um inappropriate humor is just a great stress release you know it's it's a way you get through this pressure cooker situation we're going to take one more question yes this gentleman right here um first thank you for being here first and foremost I'm sorry did you already have a question me yeah did you already ask one no I'm so sorry okay go on cool I was having a flashback no worries um thanks for being here um uh you mentioned weeds earlier and you know there that shows about a really sexy drug dealer um having really like you know just Affairs just all over the place and uh you know your show is about a kind of average guy who just sells drugs and you know Dexter is about a serial killer and we're all these are the heroes of the show do you ever feel though a kind of sense that when you're writing you need to make it where it doesn't seem So Glamorous or such a good thing to be doing this I I do and uh um there's a lot of good a that's a good question um well starting off you know again back to my philosophy of it's awfully hard to reinvent the wheel you're probably never going to be fully successful at it but whenever you possibly can take your knowledge of what's typically done and turn it around so Miami Vice is a good example I love Miami Vice back when it was on the mid 80s I probably watched every episode uh that was my idea of a show about drug dealing you know it's obviously Miami viice is from the point of view of the cops trying to stop the drug dealing but you saw plenty of drug dealers on that show and they're driving around in tester rois and they're you know they've got the bodyguards with the uzi's and they fly in in the sea planes and it's all very chic and Rich and high dollar and Glamour and and I thought it was yeah I love that show I enjoyed the hell out of it but I knew that it already been done so I figured what's the opposite way to approach it you know crime doesn't really crime kind of pays maybe sort of if you're work problems it's like it doesn't pay that well we got so much you know either the money's getting lost or it or we can't spend it or all that stuff yeah and uh so that was a starting point now now uh the other part of your question uh you know the best thing you can do is be as honest as you can be when you're telling when you're telling a story and I in no way shape or form want to glamorize meth but the other side of the coin is you don't want to knee-jerk uh say you know you don't want to kneejerk on anything you want to you want to you don't want to glamorize meth cuz it's awful and it it really destroys entire communities it ruins people's lives there's nothing good about meth there just isn't so you don't go around presenting meth as a good thing but on the other hand it would be it's sort of like the War on Drugs uh my girlfriend's brother who's a chemist actually and in some ways he's nothing like Walt but in some ways the idea of of a chemist is kind of based on my girlfriend's brother a little bit he said A very wise thing to me once he said you know the trouble the War on Drugs is they they kind of present it to kids in high school as drugs are terrible drugs are bad there's nothing good about drugs they're they're leaving out a crucial Point drugs and this is just a fact it's not a good thing but it's just a fact drugs make you feel really good when you take them at least in the initial stages if heroin didn't feel so damn good nobody'd be on it if meth didn't make people feel like they could dance and have sex all night no body be taking it it would be a lie to leave that out of a complete story on the subject what you need to do is say yeah it makes you feel really good but damn it's got some terrible consequences and you need to know about that all this to say kind of got off on a tangent but I guess my point is you you just you be as honest as you can be you try to be as honest as you can be and if you're telling a story about two meth de dealers there's obviously I've heard you know we've done a lot of we've talked to meth dealers we've talked to law enforcement we've read every book in the subject my my talking about myself and my writers we've done all the research we can do short of going out and living that life which you know is not worth doing for a damn TV show but uh but uh if you're being honest if you're telling the story as honestly as you can tell it you realize that uh there is a there's there's incentives for doing drugs and they're huge and we all know about them there's incentives too that that if if if it weren't exciting to live this life of crime people wouldn't do it it's not just about the money in other words if it didn't feel good to take meth people wouldn't take it it doesn't mean it's a good thing it doesn't mean we think it's a good thing it doesn't mean we're glamorizing it but if you if you're being honest you're going to paint a complete picture of the and I think that that's more valuable rather than the you know let's pretend this doesn't exist you know just say no Society um but I just want to get really briefly back to something that you said before which is after a while Walt says he's doing it for his family but he's not but I really did feel like ultimately that his addiction was the action was the adrenaline rush of doing all of this stuff and um and that you know that you know you read about um people coming back from war and they can't adjust or if you've seen herlocker which is a wonderful movie or even the writers you know doing a show you know you're in production it kind of feels like a war you don't have quite enough time you know everything is really intense you know you feel like you're going to die of exhaustion or you know whatever and then it ends and it's like uh the runner is high at a certain point yeah you do you do um I want to thank Vince Gilligan this has been incredible thank you so much thank you very much e h

Channel: Writers Guild Foundation

Views: 228,993

Keywords: writers guild foundation, writing, writers guild, screenwriting, screenplay, writers, screenwriters, television writers, Vince Gilligan, Breaking Bad (TV Program), i am the danger, the one who knocks, AMC (TV Network), Screenwriter (Profession), television writing

Id: hx8ETtHxO9o

Length: 132min 2sec (7922 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 14 2013