When the chemistry works – Vince Gilligan and Breaking Bad

Vince Gilligan admits that Breaking Bad may prove to be his career highlight. But with a spin-off now in production, his creative team just keeps on cooking.

‘It is a wonderful time to be working in television,” declares writer Vince Gilligan, as our audience with the man behind arguably the most critically exalted drama of our time – Breaking Bad – begins. ”One of the things that I love about television and, in fact, have always loved about television, is that it is a writers’ medium.”

At a time when the industry’s best writers, directors and, now, actors are drawn to television, Gilligan says the drawcard, especially for writers, is freedom. ”It still takes a village to make a movie and a village to make a TV show, but more often than not, one of the final arbiters of the actions of that village in movies is the director and in television is the writer,” he says.

”Most of the enjoyment and satisfaction that I’ve derived from working in this business has been from working in television as opposed to movies. Plain and simple, I get listened to more by the television business than the movie business.”

The 47-year-old writer-producer of Breaking Bad is heading to Australia as a guest of the Sydney Writers’ Festival. He says he’s not much of a public speaker and he’s honest enough to know exactly what’s on everyone’s mind: ”People want to know how my writers and I went about writing Breaking Bad and how we went about producing it,” he says. ”There’s not a lot of things I’m good at explaining in life, but that’s one thing that comes pretty easily.”

Before Breaking Bad, Gilligan’s credits included The X-Files, its spin-off The Lone Gunmen, and the 2005 reboot of the iconic 1970s horror-detective hybrid, Night Stalker. In fact, The X-Files was Gilligan’s first staff writing gig. As a young writer in Hollywood he found himself in a writers’ room working alongside the show’s creator, Chris Carter, and one of its key creatives, the acclaimed Frank Spotnitz. Most of Gilligan’s credited episodes were collaborations with Spotnitz and John Shiban, who has since gone on to write The Vampire Diaries, Torchwood and Hell on Wheels.

”Chris Carter taught us all how to write for television and how to produce for television,” he says. ”He was an excellent boss and teacher and mentor. John Shiban was very good in the editing room, he was excellent in post-production, and Frank Spotnitz was a wonderful storyteller. Working with those folks and also with Chris for seven years, I learnt an awful lot.”

The experience offered Gilligan the perfect training ground for Breaking Bad, the story of a high-school chemistry teacher, Walter White (Bryan Cranston), who resolves, after a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer, to become a methamphetamine manufacturer in order to secure his family’s finances. Though it dabbles in the crime genre, the execution more closely resembles a western, partly because of the bleak, arid landscape of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the series was set and filmed.

”I suspect that’s the luckiest I’m ever gonna get career-wise, including the perfect timing of this thing,” Gilligan says, laughing. ”And I don’t take credit for the perfect timing. Sometimes, you’re in the casino and you happen to pull the arm on the slot machine and it comes up three cherries and a bunch of silver coins come out. That’s what it felt like with Breaking Bad from beginning to end.”

Curiously, when the series premiered in 2008 it was not an immediate hit, either commercially or critically. In truth, it was something of a slow burn, accelerating during its second and third season, thanks to DVD sales and the emergence of online platforms such as Netflix, iTunes and Amazon, all of which carried the series. That was when, Gilligan says, ”the smouldering little ember suddenly caught flame”.

In hindsight, he says, ”that was a very good thing and a very healthy thing, because if we had been a so-called hit right out of the box, I was still learning the job”.

”I was learning it for a great number of years after we started. Having the extra pressure right out of the gate of the show being a hit would have been oddly hard to deal with. It would have caused more problems than it would have garnered benefits for us.”

And he is the first to concede the most intangible, and uncontrollable, aspect of crafting a television hit: timing. ”If Breaking Bad had gone on the air six months or a year sooner, or six months or a year later, it might have been a flop and might not have lasted,” he says. ”The timing with the advent of streaming video on demand was just perfect. That’s a technology that really launched us into the stratosphere in a way where if the show had been on a few years before that, we probably would have never really been noticed.”

It also allowed the series to mature properly, without the bruising attention drawn to a blockbuster. ”We weren’t an ant under a magnifying glass, as it were, at least in those early days, and that made that period of growth and learning much more

tolerable and much more civilised.”

During the show’s shelf life – 62 episodes broadcast between January 20, 2008, and

September 29, 2013 – it also rewrote the playbook on finishing a television series.

Barely a decade earlier it was the norm for shows to be axed late in their lives during

summer hiatus, leaving the story threads untied. But as writers stepped into the

centre of the room, more emphasis was placed on allowing shows to deliver closure

on characters and stories.

Notably, Gilligan’s choices were met with wide affection – a dramatic contrast to,

say, Dexter, which drew heavy criticism from its fans during its final season. And for

the creator now, almost a year after Breaking Bad concluded, he has no regrets. ”I

feel very at peace and serene about the ending of Breaking Bad,” he says. ”I felt a

huge amount of pressure to end this thing right, more creative pressure than I’ve ever

felt … ”

The final 16 episodes, he says, took a toll on the writing team as they struggled to dot

every i and cross every t.

”We agonised over getting those episodes right, getting them ‘perfect’, even where, in

point of fact, there is no such thing as perfect. The pressure to get it right, and more

importantly to not let down the audience, was intense.”

Far worse, he says, would have been staying on the air, and outlasting the show’s

welcome. ”It was better to go out boldly and a little early … but go down in a ball of

fire,” he says. ”The worst thing for Breaking Bad in my mind would have been to go

on too long and slowly sputter out creatively. Better to go out a meteor than fade out

into the night slowly.”

Besides, there is now Better Call Saul – the highly anticipated spin-off

featuring Breaking Bad’s unorthodox criminal lawyer – to think about.

”It’s a wonderful opportunity and we’re very excited about it,” says Gilligan. He isn’t

giving much away, except to say that the writing team is working on the fourth and

fifth episodes of the show’s first 10-episode season. ”We’re trying to create the show

with the same tools and skill sets and same working methods that we used

on Breaking Bad, and hopefully we can catch lightning in a bottle again,” he says. ”If

we don’t, it won’t be for lack of trying.”

But if Breaking Bad proves to be Gilligan’s best work ever, then that’s OK, too.

”I keep telling myself if I never come close to those heights again, so long as I do the

best I’m capable of and do work that I’m proud of, then so be it. If nothing ever

tops Breaking Bad, then so be it. I was lucky to have it. I give myself that pep-talk a

great many times; have given it to myself; will continue to give it to myself.”

Michael Idato – Tribal Mind – April 19, 2014

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