Breaking Bad: Vince Gilligan On Meth And Morals

The great AMC drama series Breaking Bad stars Bryan Cranston as Walter White, a high-school chemistry teacher with financial problems. When White discovers he is suffering from terminal cancer he snaps and decides to use his chemistry background to pay for his medical expenses and to take care of his family’s future: he goes into partnership with a former student, played by Aaron Paul, and starts producing and dealing crystal meth.

Breaking Bad premiered in January 2008 and introduced the character of Walter White (Brian Cranston), an otherwise average father who covertly cooks meth to support his family after a cancer diagnosis. Season 1 was shortened due to a writer's strike, however the series resumed in March 2009 for a second season. Once Walt and his associate Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) entered the drug trade on a full-fledged basis, the stakes increased and the series found its footing.

In its first season, "Breaking Bad" seemed to be a narrative of a midlife crisis run out of control. The concept — felonious father copes with job and family stress— was unmistakably influenced by "The Sopranos," and the clash of ordinary people with colourful and vicious gangsters owes much to the films of the Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino. While the narrative and desert backdrop were a reworking of the Western into a more contemporary setting.

It quickly became evident that "Breaking Bad" was a series both rewarding and complex: a ground-breaking reimagining of the serial drama, perhaps only rivalled by The Wire and The Sopranos in its depth of characterisation and moral sweep. What distinguishes the programme from its lesser small screen counterparts is a overwhelming metaphysical dimension. As Walter White nears damnation, Gilligan and his writers raise the stakes in their consideration about good and evil, how it relates to criminality, law, even to modern terrorism. The question is: do we live in a world where criminals go unpunished for their crimes? Or do those who commit evil acts eventually pay the price for their sins? 

Gilligan has offered his own personal response to this dilemma. “Breaking Bad” is set in a world where no one gets away with anything and retribution eventually rebounds on evil doers. 

Gilligan initially had the concept for Breaking Bad while unemployed and was casually discussing script ideas with a friend. Gilligan imagined a protagonist, a good man, a teacher, gradually morphing into a villain. Walter White’s transition was depicted in the notion of "Mr. Chips becoming Scarface," but he had difficulty pitching the concept to TV networks. Gilligan eventually wrote a framework and pilot to pitch to cable networks, but his proposal was not without its difficulties. The idea was turned down by Showtime who had the similarly themed Weeds on its roster, HBO expressed reservations about a show centreing on a meth dealer, while TNT also declined. Gilligan eventually found an interested buyer in FX — only for them to drop the idea in favour of the Courtney Cox drama Dirt.

Gilligan eventually found a home for Breaking Bad at AMC which was trying to expand its original programming beyond Mad Men. Gilligan eventually won over AMC executives who were intrigued by the concept of Breaking Bad. The project began production and the rest is television history. Since then, Breaking Bad has established an enduring  critical reputation as one of the greatest TV series ever made, spawning a spinoff, Better Call Saul, and a companion film, El Camino.

In September 2011 Gilligan was interviewed on the NPR programme Fresh Air by Terry Gross who asked him where the idea for the critically acclaimed show came from, how he came to write convincingly about chemistry and the drug trade, and the direction of the final season.

‘I suspect it had something to do with the fact that when I came up with the idea for Breaking Bad, I was about to turn 40 years old, and perhaps I was thinking in terms of an impending midlife crisis,’ he says. ‘To that end, I think Walter White, in the early seasons, is a man who is suffering from perhaps the world’s worst midlife crisis.’

‘[Because] Walter White was talking to his students, I was able to dumb down certain moments of description and dialogue in the early episodes which held me until we had some help from some honest-to-god chemists,’ says Gilligan. ‘We have a [chemist] named Dr. Donna Nelson at the University of Oklahoma who is very helpful to us and vets our scripts to make sure our chemistry dialogue is accurate and up to date. We also have a chemist with the Drug Enforcement Association based out of Dallas who has just been hugely helpful to us.’

‘My writers and I took a former drug dealer to lunch and picked his brain for a couple of hours,’ says Gilligan. ‘I think he was moving large quantities of marijuana – not methamphetamine – but a lot of the same general philosophies apply to both in the sense of: How do you stay one step ahead of the police? How do you launder large quantities of cash? So things such as that, we seek professional help – just as we do with the chemistry.’

‘There will be 16 more episodes in Season 5. How much darker can Walt get? Is his journey complete – his journey along that arc from good guy to bad guy? At this point, it’s a tricky thing to answer,’ he says. ‘Probably a casual viewer to the show might think [the show is] about morality or amorality. I suppose that there are things that Walt does probably need to atone for – and perhaps he will, when it’s all said and done.’

In an extensive interview in 2010 Vince Gilligan discussed in detail his attitude towards writing and the writing process on Breaking Bad with Kasey Carpenter:

VG: I always like hearing how other writers work. The way we do it is that the breaking of the episode is the hardest part, and the single most important part. We spend the most time on that. It’s very much an all hands on deck scenario. Back on The X-Files, when we did episodes that were stand alone episodes, writers could retreat to their separate offices and brainstorm, take walks, whatever - to figure out their episode. But with a show as serialized as Breaking Bad that just doesn’t work, so what we do is we sit around a big conference table in our very un-fancy offices here in Burbank, and it’s very much like being on a sequestered jury that never ends. Six writers and myself plus our writer’s assistant who, sort of like a court reporter, takes down the notes of what we’re saying on her laptop as we talk so every now and then if we need to pick through the chaff, we can find something good that we would’ve missed if she hadn’t have typed it down. It takes us about two weeks per episode to break it out, five days a week, Monday through Friday, seven to ten hours a day. And the average is pretty consistent, two weeks to break out an episode. We stare at these four three-by-five corkboards that ring the room, we fill one at a time, and when we get to the fifth episode in the cycle, we take number one down from the board and replace it, and so on. Two weeks per corkboard. Each board has: teaser, act one, act two, act three, act four - and brick by brick we build out these episodes, we write out on index cards with sharpies, and each card represents not necessarily a scene, but a beat within a scene so that a teaser will be five or six index cards, and each act will be somewhere between sixteen and eighteen cards, and we try to put as much detail as possible into this portion of the creating of the episode.

KC: If you write better in the beginning, you have less to clean up later.

VG: Exactly. In other words, we try to build the best architectural drawings in the beginning so that any of the writers in the room can go off and write a particular episode by themselves. We cycle through the writers, everyone gets their name on at least two scripts, one by themselves and one shared towards the end of the season. The idea being that it is a group effort. And as I said before, we are asking ourselves those two questions, except we’re asking them over and over again, where is each character’s head at, and what happens next. We can spend a whole day just talking through where Walt’s head is at. He’s done this, he’s done that, and he’s responsible for a plane crash, what is he afraid of, what is he hoping for, what is his goal? And we are trying to think thematically, but we’re employing simple showmanship as well. We want to keep the audience interested, we want to keep the thing moving along like any good cliffhanger/potboiler story. But also, we’re trying to be true to the characters.

KC: What advice do you have for writers?

VG: Well I don’t have any advice that hasn’t been heard a hundred times before, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t good. Writers should write, whether or not you’re getting paid to do it. You’re not a writer unless you’re writing. Then the only differentiation is ‘am I writer who’s making a living off of it, or am I a writer who is currently unsold?’ – and that isn’t a big differentiation. The real differentiation is, are you a writer...?

KC: [laughs] And you can fall in and out of those two pretty easily.

VG: Yes you can, very easily. So that’s not a differentiation worth making. The only one worth making is: are you a writer? Do you write every day? Are you actively involved in creating something, whether you sell it or not. Or are you someone who likes to think about being a writer, but doesn’t actually get much done. That is the only differentiation worth noting. Read as much as possible, view as much as possible. As far as the literary end of things, I don’t have as much experience with novels and short stories, but I can speak to how it is to get a job in the movie and television end of things, although someday I would like to write a book. I don’t know if I’d be any good at it, but that’s always the reason to try something new, to see if you’d be any good at it.

KC: Well it is a lot more solitary than your current situation.

VG: Very true. I like the idea that you can do it anywhere in the world.

KC: And you don’t have to worry about budgetary constraints, CGI, casting, or any of that - it’s just you and the paper, you create your own world and it doesn’t cost you a thing.

VG: That’s true too. I like that. But as far as making it into television or movies, my best advice I give when I’m asked how to get an agent, how to get your stuff read – which is a time-honored question – my answer to that, to speak to how I got started, is to enter screenwriting contests. I was entering these competitions from college on, and I would enter every contest that came down the pike, and once I started writing feature-length things, I would enter these screenplays in every competition I could find. That is how I got my start in the business because of one of those contests, The Governor’s Screenwriting Competition, in my home state of Virginia. I was lucky enough to be one of the winners of it back in 1989, and it was small contest with only thirty or forty entries...

- Extract from ‘Terry Gross: Breaking Bad: Vince Gilligan on Meth And Morals’. NPR article and audio link here

- Extract from ‘Kasey Carpenter: The Voice in Walter White’s Head: An interview with Breaking Bad's creator Vince Gilligan’. Full article here.

Robert Altman: On Inspiration and Dreams

Three Women (Directed by Robert Altman)

Three Women directed by Robert Altman is set in a dry, sparsely populated California resort town, where a naive southern lost soul, Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), worships and befriends her fellow nurse, the would-be sophisticate Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall). When Millie takes Pinky in as her flatmate, Pinky’s hero worship gradually evolves into something far stranger and more sinister than either could have expected. 

Clearly borrowing its structure from Bergman’s masterly Persona, Altman’s film has typically fine performances from Spacek and Duvall. Often overlooked in Altman’s prestigious oeuvre, it’s now recognised as a a dreamlike triumph that veers from the witty to the frightening and to the surreal, resulting in one of the most remarkable and gripping films of the 1970s.

The following extract is from an interview with the director Robert Altman by Leo Braudy an Robert P. Kolke in front of an audience in Baltimore, Maryland, on March 28, 1981 in which he discusses his inspiration for Three Women, the ending of McCabe and Mrs. Miller and his thoughts on his Raymond Chandler adaptation The Long Goodbye.

AUDIENCE: What kind of preproduction plans do you make?

RA: When we start, when we think about a project and get it to the point where we say we are going to make a film out of this, the first decision I’ll make will be the cinematographer. I’ll set that person or at least do a lot of thinking about it and try to work out what my limitations are, or, in other words, what is out of my control. Then I decide what the visual and audio style of that film is going to be. For instance, in Nashville, or Health, or Brewster McCloud [1970] we were dealing with a real city and real places and we couldn’t control what people wore. We couldn’t say, “All right, nobody in St. Petersburg can wear a red shirt tomorrow.” We have no control, so I know I have to change the style of how that’s going to look, and I have to blend my film in with what is there. A lot of times that will determine the type of cameraman I want to use. In the case of Popeye, Three Women, and Images [1972], where we control, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, where we create the whole environment, then we can decide how we want this to look to the audience because we do the wardrobe and the construction. Then we start putting our crew together based on what we can’t control and how we are going to do it, and we cast it...

AUDIENCE: Was Three Women based on a dream and how did you cast it? I think it should have won awards.

RA: Thank you. It did, though. Shelley Duvall did win best actress at the Cannes Film Festival for it and the film itself came awful close that year except for three women who were on the jury: [director] Agnes Varda, who felt that the film was dangerous to women and should not be released, [actress] Marthe Keller, and [film critic] Pauline Kael, who loved the first two-thirds of the movie and hated the last third. I tried to point out to her that I don’t make movies in sections, but she just hated the film. But anyway, it did happen from a dream. I dreamed that I was making a film in the desert with Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall and that it was called Three Women and it was a character stealing, personality theft kind of thing. I woke up and made some notes on this yellow pad next to my bed and went back to sleep, and then I dreamed some more that I was sending my pro- duction manager out to look for desert locations and I woke up and made more notes on it and went back to sleep. Then I woke up and realized that I don’t keep a yellow pad next to my bed—the whole damn thing was a dream, but it was a dream about making a picture, not of what the picture was, but suggestions came from it. The next day was Sunday. I was depressed at the time. A film had been cancelled that we were going to do, or I chose to step out and cancel it myself. My wife was in the hospital and she was very ill at the time—we didn’t know how seriously. (She is fine now.) I called up the girl who does the casting for me and wardrobe and is probably the top creative associate I have, and I said I read a short story last night and let me tell you what it’s about, and I kind of faked through the thing. I said, do you think it could make a good movie and she said, “Yeah, can you get the rights?” And I said, “Yeah, I think so.” Within nine days of that time I went in to Alan Ladd Jr. That was the first film I did with him and I told him that story. I said I won’t write a script, but I’ll do an outline, and we had the deal for making the picture.

Three Women (Directed by Robert Altman)

LB: You were talking about actors before and the large creative input that they give to films. In Three Women and Images you were attracted to themes about people turning into other people, robbing personalities. I wonder if actors inspire you that way, the ease with which they go from role to role. Is there something fragile about the actor’s temperament?

RA: I don’t know where that comes from. It is very easy in retrospect for me to see that I make those kinds of pictures. That Cold Day in the Park [1969] was that kind of a picture, Images was that kind of picture, and so was Three Women. They are all very closely akin, what I would call an interior film—where I am dealing with the inside of the person’s head, and what they see or what you see or what I show you that they see may not necessarily be what’s happening. I have some fascination with that. Obviously, I don’t know what it is and I don’t want to know because I keep dealing with that.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Directed by Robert Altman)

LB: When the camera at the end of McCabe and Mrs. Miller goes into Julie Christie’s eye, are we to take that as the film having been seen in some great part from her point of view?

RA: No. I don’t know what that was. I was trying to do the opposite of the normal ending because there is no way to end a film. I mean, life doesn’t stop. The only way I really know to end a film is with the main character’s death. That is the easiest way, so usually you do this big pull back, but I thought why not just go inside of somebody’s head. That little vase that she was using and looking at—we brought that into a studio or garage in order to shoot it, to get as close as we did with that—suddenly it seemed to me when we shot it that it looked like another planet. It’s just the idea that occurs. I’m sure you didn’t see it in Popeye, but if you see Popeye again, you will notice that when Popeye first comes in to the bordello looking for Wimpy and Sweet Pea, we go around that room and in one of those bottom bunks you will see the woman who I call Cinderella, the wash woman, the raggedy woman who is kind of around in the background, who also I think is probably Sweet Pea’s mother. She is lying in that bunk. The preacher is above her smoking an opium pipe and she is look- ing at this same vase, and that’s just fun for me. If it became obvious to an audience, it would be destructive.

The Long Goodbye (Directed by Robert Altman)

AUDIENCE: Was The Long Goodbye [1973] difficult to make?

RA: That was a successful film and should have been much more successful. That film was hurt originally because United Artists wanted to release it as a serious film. They had a poster of Elliot with a cat on his shoulder and a smoking gun and it looked like the ad for The Postman Always Rings Twice [1946]. People went in to see that kind of a film and they were disappointed, and they didn’t like it. We got them to pull the film, and we redid the campaign, opened it several months later in New York, and had that been the original opening, it would have been a very, very successful film. The real dyed-in-the-wool Raymond Chandler fans didn’t like it because, they said, it wasn’t true to the book or to Raymond Chandler, that wasn’t Philip Marlowe. But they weren’t thinking about Raymond Chandler, they were thinking about Humphrey Bogart. I would love to show that film to Raymond Chandler because I think that what I tried to do in The Long Goodbye was the same thing he did in the book. He used those crappy plots that he couldn’t follow himself—I never finished that book either, by the way—but he used them as a device to hang a bunch of thumbnail essays on, observations, and that’s the approach that we took on that picture.

RK: Visually it is your most elaborate film. There is not one shot in that film in which the camera is not moving.

RA: That was another experiment we tried. The camera is constantly moving, but not moving with something, not moving the way it should. You know how you would be in a crowd. You are trying to watch something and it moves and somebody is here and you are just always kind of at the wrong place at the wrong time. That was the kind of tension or attitude I was trying to get in that film. The idea came from a small sequence that we did in Images, where we did the same kind of thing in a short slice, so I felt safe with it, but it seemed to work so well in Images that we thought maybe we could do a whole film that way and The Long Goodbye was the film that followed Images.

– Leo Braudy and Robert P. Kolke. Interview with Robert Altman, In Gerald Duchovnay (ed): Film Voices.