Vince Gilligan speaks on stage during the “Better Call Saul” panel at the AMC 2015 Winter TCA on Saturday, Jan. 10, 2015, in Pasadena, Calif. Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP
“Why is this so hard?” Vince Gilligan mutters. No one offers an answer.
It’s February 2014. In a bland conference room on the top floor of an undistinguished office building near Burbank, Gilligan, five writers, and an assistant are “breaking” the first three episodes of Better Call Saul, a prequel-cum-sequel to Breaking Bad, one of the most beloved TV shows of the last 20 years. And right now, they’re stuck.
Gilligan stares at a piece of paper and strokes his goatee with his left hand. He shakes his head in frustration. Work can’t resume until he makes a decision. Finally, after a sigh, he speaks: he’ll have the bacon-potato soup for lunch.
There are seven central components to each workday in the writers’ room, in varying degrees: frustration, silence, proposals, excitement, agreement, levity, distractions, and food. The task is to break an episode into an opening teaser of three to five minutes, and four acts, with a beginning and end to each. When the writers agree on an idea, Gilligan carefully writes a brief description in black Sharpie on an index card, then pins the card to a corkboard. A teaser is seven cards. An act is fourteen cards. Some cards are incomprehensible to anyone new to the room: SAUL GIVES KAZOO WARNING. There’s also a corkboard with names of characters, and a few with pending ideas, currently in limbo.
Creating the universe of a TV series is difficult, but creating a show that’s constrained by the details of a previous series is even more difficult. “We were surprised by how little we knew about Saul,” says Tom Schnauz, who wrote the Emmy-nominated episode “Say My Name” from Breaking Bad‘s final season, and is a co-executive producer on Saul. “We hadn’t ever thought about his backstory.”
For instance, today the writers are trying to figure out how Saul meets Mike Ehrmantraut, the savvy, brusque ex-cop who did most of Saul’s dirty work in Breaking Bad. Every time a writer suggests an idea, the assistant types it into a laptop, so no idea ever goes missing. “At the end of the day, the show is about Saul,” announces Gilligan, a thoughtful, analytic Virginian who disproves the legend that creative people are impetuous and emotional. “If Saul has no part of making Mike who he is, it lessens Saul.” Silence returns to the room.
“What is this episode about?” asks Gordon Smith, who’s been creating long rows of pushpins, separated by color, on the conference table. There’s some talk about movies, TV shows, food, then an idea comes up: Saul and Mike met in a bar. Most of the conversation is between co-showrunners Gilligan and Peter Gould, who created the character of Saul. “That just seems like bullshit,” Gilligan says, shooting down the idea. After lunch, though, another solution appears; everyone likes it, discusses it, refines it.
The day’s yield is seven cards—a full teaser. “That’s probably a better than average day for us,” Gilligan tells me the next day, during an interview in his office. Throughout our conversation, he’s characteristically chatty, incisive, and candid about everything from the pitfalls of spinoffs to why running a show is like an episode of I Love Lucy.
Ed: It’s nearly a year later, and with Better Call Saul premiering this Sunday on AMC, the writers’ room has certainly broken not just the Saul-Mike teaser, but many more as well. As for spoilers: There are plenty, but keep in mind that any of them could also be a red herring. At the time of this interview, Gilligan and the writers were just getting started, and any specific detail might have subsequently changed.
There’s a card in the room that caught my eye. It says, “Saul’s story is an addiction story.”
That was a bit of an epiphany. It’s not an addiction story in the sense of he’s addicted to drugs or alcohol or gambling or sex. It occurred to us that Saul’s addiction is to the world of outlaws. The biggest concern for me going forward with this show was that Saul Goodman, as a character on Breaking Bad, is very happy-go-lucky. He’s comfortable in his own skin. That is what we all, in a sense, strive to be. And that’s great for self-actualization, and it’s great for real life. But that’s terrible for drama.
After a lot of fits and starts, we came to this idea that for Saul’s whole life, he’s struggled with the question of who he is. He has an innate understanding of life’s less fortunate people—because he’s been unfortunate himself, we’re going to learn. And he wants to do right, but he does not want to be a chump, or a victim. And partly because of that, he’s drawn toward the outlaws of the world. Not the petty crooks, but the big thinkers, the guys who dream.
So he’s an idealist?
If Saul were asked, he’d say, “You know, criminals are an important part of the ecosystem. Picture the blue whale. It’s a magnificent creature, 100 feet long, graceful and gorgeous as it coasts through the ocean. And yet, if you said to me, ‘All the blue whales disappeared from the earth,’ I’d be really sad … for about half an hour. And then I’d say ‘Hey, what’s on TV?’ But if all the maggots disappeared from the earth, we’d be fucked! All the garbage would pile up everywhere; there’d be dead horses and half-eaten Big Macs and turnips and heads of lettuce. Everything would stink to high heaven, because the maggots aren’t digesting it down to topsoil again. We can live without blue whales, but we can’t live without the maggots.” That’s his philosophy.
On the corkboard with names of characters, one card says Lalo. Can you explain where Lalo comes from?
When we first met Saul Goodman in season two of Breaking Bad, Walt and Jesse kidnap him, put a bag over his head, and take him out into the desert. They take the bag off his head next to a grave they’ve dug. And he immediately gets fearful and starts jabbering something about, “Oh, no, Lalo, please, don’t do it.” It was just a funny throwaway, to show that this guy was so sleazy that being kidnapped wasn’t even surprising to him. Then Jesse Pinkman, under his ski mask, starts yelling at Saul to shut up and speak English, because he’s talking in sort of broken Spanish, begging Lalo for his life—that reminds me, I have to mention that to the writers. Lalo should speak a lot of Spanish.
So we thought, as we often did with Breaking Bad, let’s keep close tabs on what our characters have done in the past and make good use of it here in the present and the future. Hence, we’re going to make Lalo something of a major character, we feel.
I keep calling him Saul, by the way, but his name is still Jimmy McGill. That’s his real name. We know he’s going to change his business name to Saul Goodman at a certain point—we just don’t know when or how. It’s fun to know certain story points and landmarks we need to hit, and then work toward them. It’s challenging.
No comments:
Post a Comment