Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan reflects upon TV series 10 years on: 'Walter White was in my head 24 hours a day'

The showrunner on the two things he'd change about the series and the future of Better Call Saul

In 2008, a small television series made it to air after a bold pilot episode featuring a high school chemistry teacher turning to crime, namely meth-cooking, after being diagnosed with cancer.

Ten years on – and five years after it drew to a close – that same series, titled Breaking Bad, is now considered one of the greatest US dramas in TV history, freely mentioned alongside the likes of The Sopranos, The Wire and recent addition The Leftovers whenever such conversation arises.

A decade later is the perfect time for series creator Vince Gilligan to reflect upon his series. Sat in a London hotel, the showrunner greets me, all smiles, in evident awe over still getting to talk about Breaking Bad to people in similar awe to be talking to the creative mind behind it.

Below, Gilligan reveals the terrifying extent of how much Walter White got into his head, the two mistakes that bug him about the series and the future of prequel spin-off Better Call Saul, which will see Bob Odenkirk return for a fourth season later this year.

Vince Gilligan (AFP/Getty) (AFP/Getty Images)

Is it strange to still be talking about Breaking Bad 10 years on?

It’s super strange. It’s wonderful. It always sounds like false modesty – I hope it doesn’t, it’s just the truth – but I never thought this show would succeed. At every step. I thought, ‘They’re not really going to make the pilot, are they? OK, well all right then. They’re not really going to let me direct it, are they? Wow, OK – but they’re not really going to order it to series..?” In the best possible way it’s confounded expectations, and now we’re talking about it 10 years on here in marvellous London. I can’t get over it. I keep wanting to pinch myself.

Do you reflect upon Breaking Bad differently now than maybe you did when it finished in 2013?

A lot of times people say, “What would you change about the show?” Maybe I’m not being imaginative enough or as self-lacerating as an artist but I really wouldn’t change much – and thank goodness, because that’s a bad feeling; you wake up in the middle of the night, sit up in bed and say, “Oh my god, we missed a big opportunity!” However, we now have the opportunity with Better Call Saul to add to the universe, so to speak, and we take full advantage of that. We are pressing on with the story of particular characters – Mike Ehrmantraut and Gustavo Fring – although it does not spring from necessity in terms of “do we have to explain this?”. It feels like a cherry-on-top situation where we get to delve deeper within these certain characters out of continuing interest. I couldn’t be more proud of that show.

You have so many characters to choose from – how do you know where to begin?

We don’t know where to begin! So much of this job is just sitting in a room with a bunch of smart people and just staring at each other until you come up with an idea. Someone else, a smarter person than me, said a writers room is very much like a sequestered jury that never ends. It really is – if you put enough smart people in a room and you bar the door so to speak, work will get accomplished. You will start wasting time at a certain point and start watching YouTube videos but if you know you’re gonna be in a room for an indefinite number of hours, work will get done.

Are there any moments you wish you could go back and, not change, but add in?

You know, and I’ve probably given this answer before, but details are the things I get hung up on. Oddly enough, broad strokes stuff – no, there’s nothing broad strokes I could point to that I feel I would want to revise or change. But there are little detail moments. I can even think of little detail things on The X-Files that I let slip past.

In terms of Breaking Bad, Jesse’s teeth were possibly too perfect. Aaron Paul has a beautiful set of teeth, and good for him because you need them in life. But as a character, Jesse got the living hell beaten out of him more times than I could even count and he smoked a lot of meth which plays hob with the enamel of your teeth so his teeth would have been pretty awful to behold. They are unrealistically unnaturally healthy and attractive and that, in hindsight, bothers me a bit.

Oh, and one that kills me that I really wish I could fix. Not one of my writers, myself included, are Spanish speakers which in general we made do and had a lot of help with expert translators and quite a few of our actors spoke fluent Spanish. But in a scene we wrote, the character in the wheelchair – Hector “Tio” Salamanca {Mark Margolis) – we refer to him in one scene as Don Salamanca. The proper usage is “don” goes with the first name, not the last name so it should have been Don Hector. In real life, Giancarlo Esposito doesn’t speak a word of Spanish – he was doing it phonetically – so he was referring to the character as Don Salamanca when it should have been Don Hector. It bothers me. I wish I could wave a magic wand and fix it.

Mark Margolis‘s character is the source of one of Gilligan’s biggest regrets (AMC Studios)

Believe me, I get the impulse, but I think about how far you can go awry if they let you change things. I think about George Lucas’s recut of the original Star Wars movie and suddenly Greedo was shooting Han Solo first and it’s like, “No, for god’s sake, don’t add all this crap in here! Leave it alone.” It bothers me. One of my favourite movies of all time is Apocalypse Now and if you try to buy a Blu-ray, I don’t know if you can find the original version – it’s Apocalypse Now Redux. That bothers me more than I can say. It’s not as a good a movie – it’s longer, it’s flabbier and the original is much more of a classic. The Redux version is too much of a good thing.

My point is people like myself – creators of movies and TV shows – should probably be the last people allowed to recut and fix, quote unquote, something that perhaps wasn’t broken in the first place.

You recently described Better Call Saul season four as ‘darker” – do you mean it’s closer in tone to Breaking Bad?

If you think of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul in terms of a Venn diagram, the overlap is getting bigger and bigger, and therefore Better Call Saul is getting darker in season four. It’s funny – Peter Gould and I would have long walks at the end of Breaking Bad where we’d discuss Better Call Saul and we really assumed it’d be an out-and-out comedy, we really did. Now it could be nothing but what it is. I’m not as actively involved but I’m watching from afar as a fan and I am really impressed with the storytelling. In season four, I mean, it’s… it’s… it’s very much like Breaking Bad. There’s some great stuff coming up. As with Breaking Bad, there’s humour wherever we can find it provided it’s legitimate and well-earned. but those moments of earning it are now fewer and far between.

Are there any characters you think wouldn’t work in Better Call Saul?

We have those discussions all the time: wouldn’t it be great if? What we’ve learned is you have to be self-disciplined. God bless everybody for asking and being interested in the first place but I think we’ve exhausted everybody now that no one even asks if Bryan Cranston or Aaron Paul are gonna be on the show. We’ve made them wait too long. I just want everyone to know that we are fans of both series even though we’re actively creating them – we start off as the first fans so to speak and as fans we’re greedy. We want to see all the characters – we want to see Walter White, Jesse Pinkman and all these folks! Hank Schrader, Skylar White, Betsy Brandt [Marie Schrader], Walt Jr. We want to see them all, but that’s where the discipline comes in. You have to say to yourself, ‘As much as we desire to see these characters, where does the story need to go?’ As writers, we try in fact to say, ‘Where is the story taking us?’ So when do we figure out, for instance, we can bring Gus back, we’ve earned it; it’s such a good feeling. It feels legitimate. You don’t feel like you’re cheating or forcing the issue. So when these segments arise – and they do arise – it feels very good.

How long do you envision Better Call Saul going on for?

I think in my mind’s eye we’re about halfway through now. That’s my general feeling – that we’re at the halfway point, that we have two or three more seasons in us. If indeed that does come to pass, that means we’ll have about the same number of episodes that we had for Breaking Bad which I think will be a nice counterpoint to the first show.

Bryan Cranston was a big hit as the lead character Walter White in ‘Breaking Bad’ (Sony)

At times, I found Breaking Bad so dark that I could only manage one episode at a time. How was it for you as showrunner? Were there moments you struggled to go home and detach?

I had such a great time making the series – sometimes when I say that, my writers need to be here in the room to laugh at me because they would remind me I was in hell for the most of it! I enjoy it more in hindsight probably. I was on edge.I had anxiety all the time towards the end.

I’ll give you a good example. We’d spend a lot of late nights working on the show and I was driving home one night from the writers’ room and it was very late, it was midnight or so. I was waiting at the stoplight on a very quiet street and a car pulls up next to me – I could see it in the corner of my eye. I suddenly had this weird vivid imagining that the person next to me was going to pull out a gun and take a shot at me. Of course, it wasn’t true, it was just a regular law-abiding citizen going about their evening. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to look. It was all this vivid imagining because we’d been working on some very dark material earlier that day.

I thought to myself, “This character, Walter White, that I’m spending so much time residing within his head, this is not necessarily healthy in terms of mental wellbeing.” Bryan Cranston had a similar experience, he fretted to Walter White as wearing a very heavy overcoat. The good news for him is he would take off the overcoat at the weekends and he would back to being Bryan. I’m glad for him in that sense – he’s more mentally squared away than I am. I feel like Walter White was in my head 24 hours a day. It was a sad thing when the show ended, it was bittersweet, but it also felt necessary for it to end when it did in terms of structure and in terms of not overstaying our welcome, but it also aided my mental health. It was kind of a good thing.

Breaking Bad airs Wednesdays at 9pm on AMC on BT TV

Are you a longtime fan of Lost? Or looking for a new series to start? Subscribe to new podcast ‘The LOST Boys’. Follow two of our writers on their journey watching from the very beginning – one for the first time, the other for the eighth.

Follow Independent Culture on Facebook