WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 620 - Vince Gilligan

Episode Date: July 15, 2015

Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan has a reputation as one of the nicest showrunners in Hollywood. It's a deserved reputation based on this incredibly friendly conversation in the garage with Marc. They talk about Albuquerque, the South, used books, film vs video, George Lucas, The X-Files, meeting Bryan Cranston and spinning off Saul Goodman. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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When I die here, you'll never leave Japan alive. FX's Shogun, a new original series streaming February 27th exclusively on Disney+. 18 plus subscription required. T's and C's apply. It's hockey season and you can get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So no, you can't get an ice rink on Uber Eats. But iced tea, ice cream, or just plain old ice? Yes, we deliver those. Goal tenders, no. But chicken tenders, yes. Because those are ice yes we deliver those goaltenders no but chicken tenders yes

because those are groceries and we deliver those too along with your favorite restaurant food alcohol and other everyday essentials order uber eats now for alcohol you must be legal drinking age please enjoy responsibly product availability varies by region see app for details all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucking ears what the fucksters what the fucking avians this is mark maron that's me did i mention vince gilligan is on the show today vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Breaking Bad, arguably the best fucking television show ever. I've never been so compelled and engaged in a TV show in my life. I miss it.

There's shows I miss. The Sopranos. I miss The Wire and Breaking Bad now. But I've been watching Better Call Saul, which is Vince's new show, which is also amazing. Bob Odenkirk is doing an incredible job in the acting department, as is Michael McKean

and the supporting cast. But yeah, he's a genius in my mind, and I was nervous to talk to him. I didn't do any real research around how he talked or or even what he looked like necessarily before he came over and i was i was nervous like i was nervous when i met paul thomas anderson because these guys in my mind are fucking geniuses and i thought he'd be some dark wizard but he's just a pleasant smart polite southern dude had a great conversation i love meeting people who I think are wizards,

and they're humble and human and just great to talk to. So Vince Gilligan, that's today. It's going to happen momentarily. All right, okay. Also, before I forget, tonight on Marin, on IFC, me and my old friend Sam Seder co-star i made good on it all right me and sam go way back there's a very exciting tense aggravated comedic dynamic and it's a very fun show sam comes out to help me with the patent troll problem and that's that's and then it just gets kooky it's funny it's

funny to see us together and i had a great time That's at 10 o'clock tonight on IFC. Me and Sam Seder on the new Marin. Okay. Dave Anthony's there too. All right. Dave Anthony is there. He'll be there. Okay.

He's there being creepy. All right. So I just need to say that because sometimes I forget to plug my own show. Okay. Done. just need to say that because sometimes i forget to plug my own show okay done oh somebody asked uh for me to um to give you a cat update uh i forget that there's ongoing narratives in my life that i just leave hanging and i do have some updates i do have some updates on the cats monkey uh i last night see this is really when you know that you're too entrenched in the cats in the cat world in cat life i was last night sarah was over

the painter and we're about to go to sleep and and something smells and i thought you know sadly for a moment i thought it might be my balls because I hadn't showered in a couple of days. And I'm sorry if that's too much information, but you know, guys, you know, you pick up a little, you sweat a lot. It's hot out. Either my armpit. I just thought it was me. How is that better? Can we just put it that way? And then, you know, I'd eaten some ceviche. So it was a bad combination, you know? So I thought a mixture of the fish and the balls and my sweat. I blame myself.

Now, there's been a cat pee smell problem in the house, in my bedroom for a while. And I just haven't been able to track it. I knew it was by the hamper. I didn't know if monkey was peeing on the hamper, around the hamper. But last night it became very clear that that monkey was peeing on the curtains, somehow skillfully in the corner of the room and on the curtains. Now, this might be because Scaredy Cat, the wild feral, might be shitting and peeing under my house, right under my bedroom.

So monkey's picking up that smell and you decide that's a good place to go. Because usually cats, they start doing that shit when they don't feel well. But monkeys never seem better.'s eating he's got energy he's excited he's very warm he's nice cat but he's just peeing in my bedroom i've been sleeping in a room that smells like cat piss for months and sarah has like eight or nine cats that she feeds she has cats in her life they're all wild most of them but but we're just like we're those people like we didn't wait we couldn't track it it wasn't bothersome enough for us to fucking track it and then there was this other smell which i assumed was me and i and i woke up at 5 30 in the morning obsessed i

had to get rid of the curtains i had like clean down everything i got to go buy some of that you know don't pee here spray but then i found some fucking cat shit, fresh cat shit behind the hamper. I blame myself. I mean, could I have possibly smelled like months worth of cat urine and a fresh cat shit? I blame my balls for that. That's ridiculous.

I mean, I know that humans smell but nonetheless, some heavy cleaning went down. Some curtains had to go. The hamper's got to go i had to do some cleaning of the floor i got to figure out what's going on i don't know i i do think that window where the hamper is in that area is the only place that monkey sees the cats outside and that's a fine transition to the cats outside scaredy cat the striped cat the wild cat whose face was ripped

up at one point in time but has survived about a decade now. I've been feeding this cat. He's fine. He's around. He's fat. It's nice when the wild cats get fat. Big head. The big-headed black cat with the huge balls. He's still around. Still got a big head.

We got to trap him and get him fixed because God knows what he's done out there with the ladies. He comes around. He doesn't seem to know when to hiss or meow. It's one of the only cats I've ever met that hisses when he's happy to see you. It's a confusing thing. He's a little nuts. He hisses, he meows, but he's excited. He's around. He looks lean. His head is huge. Balls are huge. Frame tight. Nice cat though. Clearly somebody's cat who is neglecting him. Deaf black cat, the hero, the mystic, the true survivor, the warrior, back around. I see him hanging out. I watched him

approach the bowl last night. Now, for those of you who were just listening to the show, I've had a relationship with this cat on and off for a few years now. It's a wild cat. Can't hear a fucking thing. Nothing. Death as fuck. And lives out there among coyotes and other wildcats and disappears for months at a time. And right when I think he's gone, he's dead. How could he not be? He's deaf.

Boom. There he is on the deck, cleaning himself. It takes a lot for him to approach the bull because he's got to fight skunks. There's one baby skunk left of a skunk litter out there that seems to be lingering. He was abandoned. I guess this is his neighborhood. I don't know how skunks work.

Also, a side note. Thank you for all the information about birds, about those junky birds that hijack in my hummingbird feeder. I believe we're going with hooded orioole. A lot of emails and tweets with pictures. Seems to me an ornithologist. Is that what they are? Is that the right one? The birds? Ornithologist? Is that it? I'm going to go with that because I'm not going to Google anything. I hope that's right and that's not like some sort of specific type of cancer, doctor. Hooded Oriole. I think you're right. Hooded Oriole. Bad word for me with my rolling L's and my inability to say R's or S's. Is it too late for speech therapy? Vince Gilligan,

just a few minutes. I do want to share something with you. Can I? Can I share something with you? I don't know when one becomes funny. I know that i was pretty funny and disruptive in school but i don't like i don't know if i was always funny you know i know i was a somewhat sensitive kid i know i was a gregarious kid precocious even annoying to adults but my my father's sister linda my aunt linda who i don't see that side of the family much. They live down the Jersey Shore, and I'm not that in touch with them, which is sad, but it's my fault. They came to see me at the Red Bank show in Jersey, and she sent me a couple emails afterwards. And I hadn't talked to her in a long time, and I love them.

They're my cousins and my aunt, but I just don't see them. I'm detached. I'm not as connected to family as some other people are, or perhaps that I should be. But, but she shared these two, these two stories that I will share with you. This is very old material. This is very old Mark Marin material. And these are, these are emails from my aunt, Linda, dear Mark. Do you remember when my parents lived in a two family house in Jersey city. That would be my grandparents, obviously. The Olgin family lived upstairs, and we could hear them going up and down the stairs.

You were about three, and you would ask what the noise was. Your grandma and grandpa would say, it's the Olgins. One day, the Olgins stopped by to say hello. When you were introduced, you exclaimed joyfully, the Olgins are people. I always smile when I remember that story. You never know what kids are thinking. Love, Linda.

The Olgins are people. Solid tag. Solid tag. I told her I love that story, so she sent me another one. Dear Mark, do you also remember your grandma and grandpa buying you tickets to the circus in New York every year? You were scared of the clowns. Then one day you asked them if they loved you. They said that they certainly did.

Then you asked them, then why do you keep taking me to the circus? Boom! You were certainly a lovable little guy. Solid tags. Man. You know what? Had I known, I would have just started writing comedy then. Had I known.

I'm very proud of those stories, and I'm glad that she sent them along. I didn't know I was afraid of clowns. I think that when people are afraid of clowns, from far away, clowns are okay, but it's when you see them up close and you can see the person inside the makeup. You can just see the human eyes and, and some of the wrinkles under the clown makeup, you know, just the,

whatever, you know, sad life led them behind that makeup or, or you assume that, but it's, I think what really is the, the fundamentally frightening thing about clowns is that when they get close enough that you can see the whites of their eyes and the human heart behind

the clown makeup. That's terrifying. Again, can't say enough about this guy. Huge fan of his work. And I was just thrilled that he was such a sweet dude and very practical and and very collaborative, and willing to give other people credit. It's just an amazing guy. So let's talk to Vince. It's winter, and you can get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So no, you can't get snowballs on Uber Eats.

But meatballs, mozzarella balls, and arancini balls? Yes, we deliver those. Moose? No. But moose head? Yes. Because that's alcohol, and we deliver that too. Along with your favorite restaurant food, groceries, and other everyday essentials. Order Uber Eats now. For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age.

Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See app for details. Calgary is a city built by innovators. Innovation is in the city's DNA. And it's with this pedigree that bright minds and future thinking problem solvers are tackling some of the world's greatest challenges from right here in Calgary. From cleaner energy, safe and secure food, efficient movement of goods and people, and better health solutions, Calgary's visionaries are turning heads around the globe across all sectors each and every day Calgary's on the right path forward take a closer look how at Calgary economic development calm Gilligan so you spend a lot of time in my hometown. I grew up in Albuquerque. Yes, you did, didn't you?

I did. And you went to high school at Highland High School. Highland High. And we shot a really memorable Breaking Bad scene in Highland High. You did? We did. Which one? I've seen all the Breaking Bads.

Right on. There was a scene at the beginning of season three, and in it, Walt is in his high school. He's still teaching there. And it's in the gym, and he's full of people in the gym. That was the gym? Yeah, that was the gym. That's why I didn't recognize it. I don't think I ever sat foot in there, in the gym.

I think maybe I went to one assembly. Certainly no sporting in my past. Me neither. But it's really bizarre to me, because I had Cranston in here, and it was one of the biggest regrets of my career as an interviewer that I was so nervous and I was so wanting to talk to Walter White, I think, for most of the interview. I thought in my mind, but for some reason, once we got talking,

he was intimidating to me, which he shouldn't be because he's a very polite. He's a sweet guy. Yeah, sweet guy. I didn't mention Albuquerque once. Oh, yeah? Yeah, and I knew he had a house there, and I grew up there. We could have bonded personally. Blew it.

Yeah. Why, well, let's go back to, like, who you are, because, you know, I'm a huge fan of Breaking Bad. Oh, thank you. I'm a huge fan of Better Call Saul. I love Bob, and I've known him for years. Oh, yeah, right. And, you know, Breaking Bad's one of those experiences you have, like, you know, it's

one of those things you turn people on to it like you would turn them on to meth if you were into meth you know like what do you mean you haven't watched breaking bad what the fuck dude you gotta try it man you gotta fucking try it thank you i thank you for that well they're not gonna get out thank you anyone proselytizing for sure man anybody who starts gets to anyone who watches two or three episodes of that and doesn't get hooked, I don't need to talk to that guy. Who the fuck needs that guy? I love it.

Thank you. But I can't say the same about The X-Files. Right. Okay. And I know you come from The X-Files. Yeah. I don't know why I never watched it, because I'm a fan of, of uh well conspiracies more than sure sci-fi sure sure but i just never i never locked in i guess i could i've watched a couple you know it uh

sometimes timing uh counts for a lot too sometimes you you come to something at a point in your life and you're into it and you might not have been into it a little bit earlier right later right or maybe it's just not your thing i but what now how did you where'd you grow up i grew up in uh virginia i was born in richmond and uh then i i lived for a big chunk of uh of my formative years in a little town called farmville which is 65 miles west of richmond really and it and it really it's it's it might as well be named mayberry right it's named farmville yeah and how old are you i was i am now uh 48 all 48. All right. So do you have siblings? Yeah.

I have a brother, Patrick, my brother Patrick. Is he older? He's four years younger than I am. Oh, younger. So you're the oldest. I'm the oldest of the two of us. It was on you. Yeah.

To be the guy, to be the leader. Where'd you lead that kid? I led him into a very different life. I didn't lead him anywhere. He was his own boss. He's a wonderful brother. But we're very different. Yeah. i i didn't lead him anywhere he was his own boss uh he's a he's a wonderful brother but we're very different yeah what's what's his thing he uh he's just a great guy who's now a father uh and i am not a father so now for the first time at age like she's uh about age 46 for me i became an uncle for the first time that's exciting uh my brother uh pat

and his uh lovely wife miho have a little daughter named Maya. And she is so cute. It's so wonderful spending time with the three of them and with her. That's nice. Now they did it. So you can go have time with the kid and leave. Yeah. It's really been a grandpa or something.

You get to spoil them. Are your folks still around? Both my folks are still around. They're back in Virginia still. And I'm lucky to have them around. Generations in Virginia you go back in virginia uh or you don't really know i guess you know what i you know i always wonder i see those commercials for like ancestry.com and stuff you ever do you do that do you know no because i i don't know how far like i know my the jewish thing you're only one or two generations back and then you're in russia poland okay or yeah right or germany you know that's that's it eastern europe i i'm kind of curious i am too i kind of am too

but i haven't i haven't actually gone and done it and i like if my mom uh my especially my mom if she's like when she'll listen to this she'll say you you know you know yeah you know you know you know all this and i mean mean, I know my grandfather. Yeah. I knew my grandfather, both grandfathers. But yeah, going back many generations, I don't know about that. Well, the South is like the South, though. Like, you know, I've become more fascinated with the South.

Yeah. Like, I used to be sort of snotty about the South. Yeah. A little condescending. But the more I go there, out of all the places visit in the in the country it's the most interesting like it just feels like there's a lot of there's a lot of weird history here well there's some some bad shit went down but there's some good people here yeah yeah it's a moral struggle every day in the south well yeah what was it like growing up for you there i mean did you feel that it was

great i i love i love virginia i love my home state i don't get back often enough now only get back once a year did you grow up with horses or anything i mean i grew up around them uh and cows mostly cows and horses it was called farmville and it was aptly named but uh but they weren't none of them were ours we grew grew up in a subdivision. How did you end up there? Well, my mom was from Virginia. But in Farmville. It seemed like you were in Richmond.

Yes, we were in Richmond. My dad met my mom in Richmond. And he was from Syracuse, New York. So my dad's side of the family was from upstate. Yeah, upstate. And the first thing, you know, when my – they moved – my dad moved – or my dad's – my grandparents on my dad's side, they moved to Richmond in like 1957, 56 or 57. And they got there because they wanted my grandfather, Vincent, who I'm partly named after. Partly.

Well, I'm George Vincent Gilligan, Jr., so my dad is george jr but uh my grandfather had worked at a at a gm uh subdivision i think making car parts making car parts and he wanted to be his own boss and he had the opportunity in the late 50s to uh buy a uh used bookstore in richmond virginia which he had never visited before so in the late 50s to buy a used bookstore in Richmond, Virginia, which he had never visited before. So in the late 50s, he bought this through, it was the back of an ad in a book dealer magazine. That was the big idea? It was a big idea. And he was a wonderful, he was wonderful at it.

And he was his own boss until he passed away from the late 50s till he passed away in the late 80s. He kept a used bookstore. Yeah, in Richmond. And the first thing they did, and so they moved, he and my grandmother, his wife, Jean, they moved and my dad went with him. My dad was about 17 or 18 and was, I think, just about to go into the Marine Corps. But they moved to Richmond from Syracuse.

And the first thing they did was put a big Confederate flag up in the window of the new bookstore, not because they believed in that or anything, but because they were afraid, you know, this must be a town where that will be important to do. Right, and we're from up north. Yeah. We just want to know that we want to sell some books here. We're not carpetbaggers. Right. We want you to know that.

How long did that stay in the window? Probably not too long, because they realized most folks were like, whatever, man. I think most folks would be like, what kind of bookstore is that? Yeah, right. Well, Richmond was different in the late 50s. Was it? Yeah. I mean, from what I hear, I was not around myself.

So he had the used bookstore for 30 years? At least from about... What was it called? People probably knew it. Richmond Bookshop, and it's still there, and the old sign is still up. Was he a character? Did people know him? Like, do you run into people who are like, I know that bookstore.

He was very well respected by the folks who knew him. He was a wonderful guy. He wasn't really a character per se. Right. I guess, I mean, he wasn't colorful in a character-y sort of sense, but he was a wonderful bedrock kind of a guy. Did you have experiences in that bookstore? Oh, yeah.

I mean, well, I think it gave me a great love of reading. My brother and I, you know, growing up and visiting, driving in from, or being driven in from Farmville on a hour-and-a-half drive and then staying the weekends with my grandparents in Richmond and visiting the bookstore. And my grandfather never really had two dimes to rub together because he didn't make a lot of money. But he made a living. Right.

He made a living doing this. Did he have a lot of good books? He had wonderful books. And I got into science fiction and I got into – In his bookstore. In his bookstore. And he was great because he would – we would just – my brother Patrick and I would go around and pile up books and say grampy

can we have them call him grampy yeah grampy grampy uh grampy can we have this one uh yeah sure we have that one only occasionally it'd be some really expensive book and he'd say well you know how about you just read that here but not take it with you he was he was wonderful he was so generous and and we got a love patrick and i both got a love of reading from that and he had a relationship with your grandfather yeah oh wonderful what was some of that first uh so sci-fi was your thing comic books except not the cool kind that everybody uh makes movies about now what do we mean richie rich that was what i was into richie richie rich all the harvey comic books so that must be the that these are the seeds of breaking bad rich richie Rich. Richie Rich was born rich.

Yeah. He didn't have to work for it like Walter White did. You liked Richie Rich? He was conflicted about being rich. When did you first start to sort of realize that, you know, because like to gravitate towards and even like, I don't know how you got the job on X-Files, but you must have some sense of science fiction. And you must have some love for that kind of abstract imagination that's sort of rooted in humanness. Yeah, no, definitely. I mean, I grew up loving Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov.

Those are like classic used books. Did you get those at the store? Yeah, absolutely. I read my first Frank Herbert and who else? I mean, you know, I read. I did not read as deeply. I read very broadly and very shallowly. Is that shallowly?

Sure. Why not? But you know what? When I started on X-Files, I mean, I'd written, I was writing for the movies before that, and I was really, I consider myself a comedy writer. I mean, I consider myself a writer of comedic movies. Well, I believe, and I said it from early on,

that Walter and Jesse were a comedy team you know what they were sort of the post-modern uh uh laurel and hardy weren't there was definitely i thought that element was definitely there yeah and i i don't know we can talk about it in a bit about you know how much of that was sort of planned but you know there were you know walter white is it was a classic straight man yeah yeah to jesse yeah and there's definitely funny in there oh yeah i mean there's stuff that's horrible but it was it was one of those weird lessons i think that i might have learned by watching breaking bad is that there is when you you know as terrifying as danny trejo's head on a tortoise might be right it's hilarious i mean yeah it's on some weird level. Oh, yeah. No, we made the show as funny as we could possibly make it.

And funny, of course, as we both well know, is in the eye of the beholder. But a lot of stuff that made us laugh hysterically in the room didn't necessarily make everybody laugh who was watching. But a lot of stuff made us laugh. And we tried to make it as funny as we could because we always figured if this thing is just a downer, if it's just about a guy dying of cancer and he's cooking this nasty drug and making money off that, you're just going to want to open a vein watching this thing. You're just going to be like, oh, this is not entertaining. Yeah. I want to laugh. You've got to leaven your drama with humor, with comedy.

Sure. Because that's the only way you get through life. You've got to leaven the real drama of your life. Buffer disappointment. Yeah. That's what life is, buffering disappointment. Yes, exactly. So we felt that way from the get-go on Breaking Bad.

I just figured this show has a possibility of being so relentlessly heavy and dreary the comedy was strong good yeah good i'm glad because even like you know even the characters that were the most frightening in a way were outside of gus but like tuco is kind of a clown yeah in a way yeah Yeah. As long as you're not there for him to cut your head off, yeah. He's funny from a distance. But even in Saul, where you meet Tuco, he's like kind of half a moron. Yeah. You know, like in there's...

Yeah, you're right. That moment where he's like, what should I do? And then the smart guy's got to sort of tell him. But okay, but going back, so what started the interest in in movies like how how old were you like what kind of kid were you in high school were you dungeon dragons yeah yeah i played dungeons and dragons i was just a loser who didn't go to the prom i don't know i don't know if that's a loser anymore i think that is the backstory that's a proud backstory now

then i was born too soon. Believe me, man. Back then I was being a loser. Nerds run the world now. They do. The sadness has transcended. Like you, a guy who comes from Dungeons and Dragons and Isaac Asimov books and sitting alone reading in your grandpa's bookstore, created one of the most gritty television series ever.

One of the best. Look at what you did. Richie Rich was a gritty comic book. What can I tell you? I never did the Dungeons and Dragons thing. I read some Richie Rich. Yeah, did you? Yeah, sure.

I mean, maybe a little bit. Casper the Friendly Ghost. Well, I mean, how old were you? I hope you were young, right? I was 17. No, no. I'm just kidding. No, I was, that was when I was eight or ten or seven or eight so you're

hanging out with the dungeon masters and yes and those kids playing chess i imagine no no i did not i was not smart i'm still i'm not smart enough for chess although uh tom schnauz one of our writer producers has two or three chess boards going in the uh in the office really and all the other not all of them but our my assistant Jen and my former assistant who's now one of my writers, Gordon, these folks play chess, and Tom has multiple games going. He's like Bobby Fisher or something.

That guy. Yeah, and it's just like... God, I wish I could do that with my brain. I want to knock that board over every time I walk past it. I think you should. You're the boss. Yeah. Take some liberty.

I hear you're too nice a guy in the writer's room yeah it's time to lose your shit i need to lose my shit pull a harman or a milch come on you need your right of passage yeah you send some writers crying yeah exactly yeah i'm gonna go do that yeah do it tomorrow up, Vince. It's time to ruin the whole thing. That's right. But in high school, did you play a band instrument? No, I wish I had. You know, my mom is wonderful.

I wish she's going to kill me, too, when she hears this. I wish she had made me take. And it's not on her, but I wish someone had made me take lessons because I love music, but I am not – you know, in the editing room, I said this before, and it bears repeating, in the editing room, it's the closest I feel I'll ever get to being able to write music. Sure. And I feel like in another lifetime, if I had learned to play some sort of instrument, I wouldn't have been wonderful at it. I wouldn't have been good enough to, I sort of know intrinsically, I wouldn't have been good enough to perform publicly. But it could have given me a grounding that I could have written music. Because I think I would have loved to have done that.

But I think what you're saying is that you, because of the medium you've chosen, which is film, really. And because I think that what you did with television, you know, in the tradition of what had been happening in television, The Sopranos, Deadwood, and what that, you know, finding the time and the sort of vision to create, you know, framing and take, you know, a certain amount of time to create filmic things. Oh, thank you. That, and also the way that sound works in Breaking Bad. I think that with film, you get to integrate all that. Yeah. Even if you have a guy, it's like you've got a musician you work with or you've got a composer. Right. Sure.

So, you're still the guy that goes, like, can you give me more of that? You know, like, I want more treble. I want more treble. Is it just treble or can you make that, do you have a more menacing bit of notes you know i always feel like an idiot we have this amazing composer uh dave porter who was on both shows breaking bad band also and i always feel i always feel like i'm talking to a uh uh to a brain surgeon like yeah could you cut here instead of cut there? Right. Could you resect this part instead of – I don't have the language, and I – but you

know what works? He's a wonderful down-to-earth guy, and what works with him and Thomas Golievich, our music supervisor, works with both those guys, is to speak – and they taught me this – speak in terms simply of emotion. What emotion are you trying to convey here? With – yeah, in the picture. Yeah. Instead of, you know, I want this in a four fifths time and blah blah blah i want an a sharp here

right i couldn't do that to save my life but but with those guys i talk emotion and that's good yeah that works well well yeah so you're making music on some level you're making decisions close to music as i will ever make and it feels good to do it. All right. So you're mad at your mom because she didn't make you play some instruments. It didn't make me learn to play the piano or something. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, you'll just have to let that go, and she's going to feel terrible. I know.

But maybe she'll call you and go, like, start now, Vince. I know. Well, she will. She will say, there's no time like the present. You're not dead yet. What's stopping you? And she'd be right. Now, your parents together or not together?

No, not together. They got divorced when I was 10 and my brother was 6 back in 1976. Did they get along after that, though? Well, I'm sure they would. They just don't see much of each other. But they did the right thing by you guys. You know, it probably didn't feel that way at the time. But, yeah, yeah, I think they did. Well, they don't see much of each other. But they did the right thing by you guys. You know, it probably didn't feel that way at the time, but yeah, yeah, I think they did. Well, they did the right thing for each other, and therefore it was the right thing for us.

But you saw your dad, and you know. Yeah, and the good thing is I still see my dad, still see my mom, still like my Pat, and I like to still have him. Yeah. And then I got my Uncle Gary. That's the other family we have who's a great guy, and he's in Virginia. So it's one fell swoop. I get to visit all of them.

Oh, that's good. Knock it all out in one day. Knock it all out. See the kids, see your brother, see mom and dad. Well, no, actually, Patrick and his wife, Miho, and my niece are out here. They're down in Garden Grove. Oh, so they all live here. Yeah, which is even better.

Oh, so it becomes less important to go back to Virginia. Well, no, you know, I love going back. I just only really, you know, it takes forever to get there. It's like, because, you know, it takes a flight to Atlanta and then a flight to Richmond, and it takes all day. On a little plane. Well, sometimes. Sometimes, yeah.

I do those a lot. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes they bother me. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes I'm like, oh, good. I can see the ground. I feel like I'm in a car. Oh, okay.

Like, I feel like I'm flying. Like, I, okay. Like, I feel like I'm flying. Like, I get that. Like, sometimes I feel better to know. I don't like it when I'm on a plane and you just sort of, all of a sudden, you're like, I forgot I was flying until we hit this turbulence. Okay, yeah. Yeah. And then you're like, oh, okay.

We're a mile in the air. I remember now. God damn it. Are you a nervous flyer? Do you not like flying? I can't afford to be because it's exhausting. But innately, like, I know the odds are in my favor. Yeah.

But there is that possibility. See, I'm not nervous about dying in the air. I'm nervous about being surrounded by going through TSA and taking my shoes off and all this stuff. And then you just never know who you're going to get sitting next to you. And the seats get smaller every month. You know what? I'm going to tell you something. I'm going to tell you a secret.

You're at a point in your life now where you can go ahead and get first class. You know what? It was not that long ago that I started doing that. No, I know. Because it's the goddamn, it's the principle of the thing. It's like how, you say to yourself, yeah, you know, I got the money. I the money i'm in the first class business class right and then you punch it up in the computer you're like it's like eight fucking times how much what yeah is it really worth it it's insane how much more it is i believe me i know and but like i don't have a wife i don't got no i don't got

i'm not complaining you know i don't have i don't i don't spend much money but now like if i'm going all the way coast to coast i'm like'm like, why not think about it in terms of a guy that can afford it? Yeah, yeah. See, we both come from a sort of like, I come from a comics background. So I'm always like, I don't know when my money's going to go away. And you come from pretty much working class background, right? Yeah, yeah.

So it just seems like an extravagance. You know what it is? It really is a principle thing. I don't understand the pricing. The tiered- No, there's no pricing. It's just ripping you off. Yeah, they are.

We've gotten far away from our agenda here. Yeah. I think we're good on the airline. I think the people didn't know this. Yeah. I think we're good. We know where you stand airline-wise. Okay.

Fair enough. Burbank's not so bad. No, Burbank's the best. Yeah. As far as- I fucking love it. Yeah. It's like you can get there a half hour before without even freaking out.

That's an old school pre-9-11 type. Yeah. You can valet your car. Wow. They have that. You just pull up. That's right. They do.

I mean, it's like 20 a day, but who cares? Oh, no. It's worth it. For three days, four days? Do you remember pre-9-11? This is even before. This is like 20, 30 years ago. Do you remember you could get on the plane with your friend.

And then the steward. They'd come get your tickets. They would say they'd come on the intercom. And they'd say, okay, everybody who's not actually going to Jackson, Mississippi. Or they could walk you. Not only walk you to the gate, but sit on the plane with you. You could literally go on the plane. People listening to this who didn't live through it are going to be like, what?

You could get on the plane. And at a certain point, the flight attendant, they call them stewardesses back then. Sorry. She would get on and she would say, usually she, and she would say, okay, everybody is not going to Buffalo. Get off. Better get off the plane now.

It was like, it was such a different world. We could smoke. Oh, yeah. I smoked on planes when I was in high school. Oh, yeah. I used to love smoking on planes. You'd have the back four, the back two rows. I don't know.

On a plane now, could you imagine? Like, what the fuck? How different was the world that everything must have smelled like cigarettes? Oh, yeah. Like, if someone lit a cigarette on an airplane right now, it'd be like, what is happening? The air marshal would just shoot you in the head before the plane even landed. The smell. Like, everyone was so acclimated to the smell, I guess, because every plane had it.

Oh, yeah. And I had a sixth grade teacher in elementary school. Wonderful, wonderful teacher. Mr. Guthrie. I loved him. Great teacher. Yeah. He smoked a pipe in class, and it smelled so good.

The best. They would take him away and just summarily shoot him against a wall now for doing that. It's like, we loved it. It smelled good. Did you smoke? No, I didn't. I never did. Pipes do smell better than cigarettes. Cigarettes are nasty. good. Did you smoke? No, I didn't. I never did. Pipes do smell better than cigarettes.

Cigarettes are nasty. Yeah. Cigars and pipes, I like. You know what? I like, I smoke the occasional cigar. Yeah, right? Yeah, I like that. It's good.

One couple times a year. Nice. Yeah, yeah. The good ones? Sony cigars? I'm happy just with the flying on the occasional Sony jet ride. Okay. But, I don't know.

Anyway, it's a cigarette. So, yeah. They're bad. My brother and my mom used to smoke. And you're right. We'd be in that little living room we had, and they'd both be smoking away. And I didn't even notice. And now it would bother me now.

Yeah. It would drive everyone crazy. But it was everywhere. Yeah. So, all right. So now you're playing Dungeons and Dragons. You're not smoking, not playing any instruments. You're reading Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov yeah you know where

does the interest uh you know in in where does your creativity start you know was it in film uh was it in I I loved doing I just I had a rich uh imagination and uh it's held me in pretty good stead I've been I was lucky I I loved I lucky. I had a wonderful art teacher named Jackie Wall. The best, very important. She was a wonderful, and her son is two-time Oscar-winning editor Angus Wall, who won for co-editing Social Network, and was it Girl with to drink and tattoo anyway he

cuts for fincher and uh he and his uh editing this guy you grew up with in this group in the town of farville which had like 4 500 people and his mom was your art teacher and his mom was my art teacher he's a wonderful guy she was a wonderful teacher and she and i loved i loved drawing painting sculpting uh and she she turned us on to so many things. We got to make little pewter sculptures. And we got to fire stuff in the kiln that she had. And she was a wonderful teacher. Did you do brass?

Did you do any of that stuff? I did some of that later. I went to a school called. With the wax? And then you put it in the thing and it melts out the wax. The lost wax process? I made a pair of silver earrings. With that?

At a school called Interlochen, which was great. Where the hell is that? That's in Interlochen, Michigan, right near Traverse City. I went there one year. It was ninth grade. And Mrs. Wall helped me get into that. That was after elementary school. So what is that, like an exchange program?

It was a boarding. It still exists. It's an excellent boarding school. it was a boarding it still exists it's a excellent boarding school uh the uh the uh national music camps there in the summer and then during the school months it's uh interlochen arts academy and uh what else did you do there uh again didn't date girls what i was more of the list of what i didn't do was was was was was was longer and but how did you you tried sculpting, you tried, you drew, you painted. I did metalsmithing, did blacksmithing, made some pottery, painted, stuff like that. I was a visual arts student.

Most of the kids there were music and performance arts students. So you're always heading that way. I kind of always was. I was always headed in. Thank God for Mrs. Wall. Yeah, yeah. But I just always was into that stuff. And that's what I was doing all through high school, being a nerd.

I was writing scripts and I was making little short films. For movies? Yeah, I had little short films on Super 8 film. You made them? You had a Super 8 camera? I didn't have one. You had another wonderful thing about her is she loaned me hers every summer. So I got to keep it for three months over the side with the little reels like yeah a little super eight

film yeah and you were cutting it too you had an editor cut it she let me use the the janitor at the school it was called the jp win campus school in farville virginia doesn't exist anymore it was a great great school and that she let me use a janitor's closet as an editing room and she lent me her editing uh machine and i would cut the Super 8 film. And it was great. What were those early films? What were those early Vince Gilligan films? I did the one that was my magnum opus for elementary school.

It was called Space Wreck. And my brother Pat starred in it. And he is in a spaceship, which I had so much fun building. Yeah. A full one. How did you build it? Well, it was a little foot long or less than a foot. Oh, so you were using effects.

And I shot it against a piece of black fabric with little grains of salt glued on it for stars. It looked like shit. You didn't poke holes and put a light source behind it. No, because that would have been too smart. That would have looked too good. Yeah. You know, I had to do it the harder and crappier looking way. And my brother's in the spaceship, and he lands on a planet, and then he finds the wreckage

of a ship, and he's checking it out, and some weird space slime is eating through this other ship and made it crash. So he has to take off in a hurry to avoid it. But then you see, dun, dun, dun, to the bottom of the ship as it lifts off. There's slime all over the bottom. Oh, he's in trouble. Yeah, he's in trouble. And that's it?

Yeah, that was it. That's pretty dark. It doesn't work out for that guy. No, it didn't. But it's pretty ambitious for a Super 8 film. If you saw it, you wouldn't think so. Well, you decided that you had the capacity to go to another planet. Yeah, that's true.

You know, like on film, you're like, we're doing full-on sci-fi. That's true. Yeah. That's true. And what were some of the other ones? Do you remember? I made something with a little stop-motion gremlin who was giving trouble to some guy. Yeah.

Stuff like that. That was called Gremlin. Oh, good name. Yeah. You didn't get anything. It was actually before Gremlins. Oh, so maybe you should maybe. I should have sued those bastards yeah joe dante shouldn't hear about that whoever who wrote that it was it was joe dante yeah that first gremlins movie is good he has the coolest office as i recall i had a meeting with him years ago he i could have hung around

that office for days because oh really filled with props from his movies and other famous movies. Yeah. Awesome office. Yeah, good eye, that guy. Yeah, yeah, good director. So you do these different schools, you're in the arts, and when did you sort of realize it was film that was going to be?

I just, I love movies. My dad, George, senior, he would wake me up. This was way before VHS tape and obviously way before DVRs and all that. The late movie would be on at 2 in the morning. He'd wake me up and he'd say, Hey, hey, come on, wake up.

You've got to watch this. We've got to watch Bad Day at Black Rock. Really? What's that? It's a great movie. You've got to watch it. Spencer Tracy's this one-armed guy and he's just come from the war.

And he said, Watch him karate chop this guy in the throat. This guy named Ernest, and he said, watch him karate chop this guy in the throat. This guy named Ernest Borgnine. Yeah. He just, watch him chop this guy in the throat. It's great. Yeah. You know, it was that kind of thing.

So it was a regular occurrence where he'd wake you up and you'd watch these great movies? Yeah, well, every night. Probably only a couple times, but I have such a fond memory of that. And he turned me on to these great movies. Like what other ones? What else? Westerns? Oh, God, yeah.

Westerns. You know, the Spaghetti Westerns, the John Ford Westerns, The Searchers. The Searchers, right? The Searchers were great. movies like what other ones uh what else westerns oh god yeah westerns uh you know the spaghetti westerns the john ford westerns the searchers the searchers right searches because i realized like you know like there are there are shots that you got oh yeah in albuquerque and outside albuquerque yeah so you're thinking that oh yeah yeah oh yeah it was it it dawned on me when i directed the pilot of breaking bad yeah i was i was William Friedkin a bit from The French Connection, which is another one of my favorite movies. What part? The steady but nonetheless handheld camera.

Right. The French Connection is shot with the cinema verite, this sort of newsreel way way of it's as if as if someone's running around following poppy doyle right and he doesn't have time to set up a tripod so everything has to be handheld right but it's not this caffeinated handheld that's moving artificially it's it's someone holding the cameras as steady as they humanly can but they're still breathing to it and you did that uh i was i was ripping off freaking there and uh and i was doing that because when i was doing the pilot and the scene where we see him naked well actually throughout the whole the throughout the whole series really that you did a lot of that that that state you were aware

of that you're like i was yeah i was thinking of freak and then the french connection where do you know where'd you learn that he did that just from watching the movie i mean just when you watch it and i've seen it a bunch of times it's one of my favorites but when you watch french connection you sort of notice that it's i watched it again recently it holds up man oh it's a great movie and it and it you know what it feels like it could have been made today you know it's it's one of those kind of movies yeah it's great but uh my point being when i wrote the pilot for breaking bad i was thinking of california i was thinking of shooting it here yeah in california and one of the luckiest happenstances, aside from getting the yes from Sony and AMC in the first place, was when the Sony guy said, what do you think about shooting it instead of California? What do you think about shooting it in Albuquerque, New Mexico? And I said, why? And they said, because, honestly, because New Mexico has this wonderful rebate this tax incentive and they got this did you use those studios out there well yeah we shoot at q studios right near the airport and they were they're great too but they said you will have more money at your disposal that you can put

on film and i said i thought about it and they said and you can still make it california just put california license plates in the cars and i said no we'll we'll do it but we'll make it albuquerque because unfortunately there's a meth problem everywhere pretty much all of the 50 states you get the great landscapes and and so this is what i'm heading toward it was such a wonderful stroke of good fortune among many others because directing the pilot like i say i'm thinking of the french connection but but i'm looking around halfway through the pilot saying this looks like a western this This is a Western landscape. I can think of John Ford.

I can think of Sergio Leone. I can think of Bud Bedeker and all these wonderful, you know, Howard Hawks, all the guys directing these wonderful Westerns. We can make this a modern Western. And that's exactly what we did. And we got to a point, michelle mclaren who was our producer director and directed more episodes of of breaking bad than anyone else she and i would show we would show the first 15 minutes of once upon a time in the west to all incoming directors yeah and say we were kind of looking for this kind of a look you know you did oh yeah

we did we were very much going for a western at that point well at what point right at the beginning well i mean you evolve you realize i guess what i'm saying i was thinking more of like i say thinking more of friedkin and and at the beginning and then realizing my god look at these endless skies with these beautiful white puffy you shot it beautifully well that way i know we had a we had amazing dps, starting with John Toll, double Oscar winner, shot the pilot, and then we had Ray Villalobos, an excellent DP for the first season, and then Michael Slovis for the remainder of the series. They must have loved the opportunity to shoot out there. I mean, when we started, film was still not rare like it is now. But we shot film, too, 35-millimeter film, all the way to the end of Breaking Bad. And that was another.

Now that's a fading opportunity. It's all shot on film? Every bit of Breaking Bad. Well, yes, the show's shot on film. We had a couple shots here and there we did with little video cameras, just to grab. So that's how you got the depth, I guess, and the richness. What was the primary difference outside of being, you're beholden to nailing it a little more consistently?

Oh, well, yeah, you don't have that monitor that shows you exactly what you're doing. Right, and you can't just sort of like, yeah, it's video, we can shoot as much as we want. It's video, it's not, it's just a chip it's a card well when we started uh in 2007 video i mean video hd video certainly existed it didn't seem like as much of a of a good idea at the time i mean guys didn't have the red camera they didn't have any like any of those uh high end i don't know if the red existed then or not. But guys like Michael Mann were shooting Collateral and Miami Vice and stuff like the movie on HD.

But it was still like a big deal. Like, we're trying this out. Yeah, it was a little more. I may be getting my history wrong. Maybe it was a little less experimental than I recall. But it never occurred to me to do that. You're always going to go shoot on film and honestly to the point that peter gould and i peter's my partner on better call saul and he was a writer producer on breaking bad we we are a bit heartsick that we're not

shooting film on on better call saul we're shooting on the red we're shooting on the red dragon and we miss film and the red dragon looks great and it's one of many cameras the f55 by sony looks great but the the alexa by ari but we miss film why you know it's i don't have a great reason for you other than i miss the the history of it i miss when i think of film i think of all the wonderful movies that that made me interested in this medium in the first place. They were all shot on film. It just has a romance to it. A lot of people will tell you it has a look that video can't replicate.

I hate to say this, being such a lover of film as I am, but we had a very detailed test we took before Better Call Saul. We shot Arthur Albert, our DP on Better Call Saul, shot footage on 35mm film, the F-55, a couple of the Reds, the Alexa. And then we had a blind taste test, as it were. He showed us all this footage. Had it all colored time to look similar and whatnot, showed us all this footage, and I figured if I could pick out the film, if Peter and I could pick out the film,

we'd shoot film, even at the cost of, you know, a hundred grand more an episode, which is what they tell us we're saving, more or less. And I hate to say it, but we couldn't pick it out. Couldn't pick out the

film so damn and i and i felt so heartbreaking all of this long-winded way of saying when you say to me what do you miss about film i can't say that video is inferior uh i can't even say that it's fundamentally different at this point right in its look right i can just say that i miss film i miss it and i i still want to be shooting on it but i can't sit here and tell you why it's better but you miss it's it's uh you can feel it yeah it's a palpable thing i guess uh you know it's of course you know no one has cut on film for quite a while uh they've been you know so you just immediately transfer well i mean we we always cut on the avid and and even on x-files back in the mid-90s we're cutting on the avid and and even on x files back in the mid 90s we're

cutting on the avid so uh you're shooting on film with that we shot a film on that but we cut on the avid so a lot of guys you know the the guys the real proponents of video the guys like uh george lucas had an interesting cover the one time i ever met him had an interesting conversation with him someone told him who i was and he said i'm breaking bad i hear that's yeah that's good and then uh my boss steve mosco uh runs sony television he said hey george you know vince uh and he knew he was stirring up the shit when he said this he said george you know vince uh vince shoots breaking bad on film and he turned around on his heel and came back and he said why would you do that and he started he was like he was like angry like why would you shoot on film why would you do that and he started he was like he was like angry like why would you shoot on film

why would you yeah you know video so much better and what'd you say i i just listened because i'm like it was just cool talking to george lucas being yelled at by george lucas i mean i'm overstating a little bit he was pleasant about it he wasn't he wasn't angry but he but he was proselytizing to someone who who someone who he could pull out of the depths of ignorance and show the light to, you know. Sure. And, you know, but, and he said, and he's right when he says this, he says, you know, when these guys say this, they say, if you're shooting, if you're capturing photochemically,

which is to say on film, and you're immediately transferring the negative into ones and zeros and cutting on it and finishing on it. What's the point? Unless you're doing, unless the production chain, post-production chain is photochemical from start to finish. And that's a good argument. You know, I don't have good arguments to the George Lucas of the world. You just like it. I just like it.

It's like me listening to records. I don't know why I went back to that. It's sort of a trend. But who the hell knows if it's better? There's a certain grain crawl, I guess, that film has, because it's the grain in video is in the grain, as it were, the pixel locations are in the same spot with every frame. And in film, it's always crawling, because the grain, which is to say that the crystal structure is different in a different spot on every frame.

So there's that. But these guys will say, well, if you want that look, you can burn that into the video. You can bake that into the video, you know. We can do that. You know, so. You can add it. It's like, yeah, but it's just not as romantic. I know.

You wanted to be Howard Hawks. Yeah. I didn't want to be. William Friedkin. Yeah, yeah. The big camera. Yeah. Sure, man.

Yeah, you know. You know, check the gate. Yeah, check the gate. Well, we still say that. Sure. And then every time I say it, because you'll say, okay, that was you know check the gate yeah check the gate well we still say that sure nice every time i say it because you'll say okay that was great check the gate and then i'm like why am i even still saying that that's nice nostalgia yeah so your dad showed you all these movies and got you 11 movies did you end up going to school for film uh yeah uh and my mom i can't leave her out she was so

a bit more than my dad in fact was was very supportive of me going to film school. My dad did say, as I recall, why don't you just be an electrician? Right, sure. Well, they get nervous. And I don't blame them. I'd be nervous for my kid if I had one. Right, that's usually what it is. Like, I've never met, like, every time a parent who has a creative kid says something like that, they don't know better they just they just all they hear is like no not gonna make a living doing that yeah yeah

yeah interesting which in in his world people did what he do he uh my dad was an insurance claims adjuster and my mom was a school teacher uh reading teacher in elementary school and and they were they were both supportive i don't mean to make it sound like he wasn't but my mom was more supportive of me going to film school and went to nyu under good one yeah it was a good school went to undergrad never never went past undergrad but uh but you got it with the with the tish school tish school of uh tish school of the arts yeah but you learned how to shoot and cut i learned how to shoot and cut i mean i'd been doing that in high school but i learned a lot more than i already knew and i learned how to you know got. I mean, I'd been doing that in high school, but I learned a lot more than I already knew. And I learned how to, you know, got to shoot 16 millimeter for the first time.

And when I was there from 85 to 89, it was still film. And I'm really glad I didn't miss out on that. Although we also had a video class. We shot beta 2 or whatever it was at the time. But we got to shoot film, and that was great. So how did you get the gig on? What was the first gig out of college? Did you make movies in college?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, made little, you know, mostly crude on other people's movies. Made little forgettable student films and whatnot myself. Sci-fi? Did you do better? No, no sci-fi. I did something. My thesis film was called Mime Pays.

Uh-huh. It was, get it? Crime Pays? Yeah, right. Good one. So you are a comedian and it was uh these uh three street clowns who get pissed off at this mime for for uh smaking business from their corner where they panhandle so you were you wanted to do comedy

i did i really did no and i thought of myself as a comedy person i mean the sci-fi early on but i i really thought of myself when I got into my 20s as someone who wrote movie scripts and that's what I did. I wrote the first movies, feature-length movie scripts I wrote were comedic.

I wrote a script called Home Fries as my thesis screenplay at NYU my final year and I was lucky enough to sell it and it got made a couple years later with Drew Barrymore and Luke Wilson. I don't remember that movie.

I wrote it in 89. I won a screenwriting contest in my home state of Virginia with it, and the judge, one of the judges of the contest, was a guy named Mark Johnson, who had just produced Rain Man. Oh, yeah. And he was an alumnus of UVA where the contest was held, and he contacted me after. And this was in late 89 or early 90. He said, hey, I like that script that you wrote. Do you have any others?

And thank God I did at that point. And cut to, like, 1998. I guess it was about nine years later. He produced it, and it got made, and they shot it down outside of Austin, Texas. And it was Drew Barrymore, luke wilson uh jake bucey uh catherine o'hara yeah and it's uh two brothers who uh uh are really wrapped around their mother's finger and they they murder their stepfather uh at the behest of their mother but dark comedy dark very dark because uh the murder it opens with this murder they scare their uh their stepfather to death they they fly a huey cobra for the uh texas uh

uh air national army national guard and they scare him to death by chasing him around through the woods with this helicopter and shooting blanks at him and so the cops find him dead of a heart attack and and so it looks like the perfect crime except that it sounds so goddamn stupid pitching it now and i'd say but uh drew barrymore was in her uh was in her booth at the uh at the fast at the mcdonald's at the fast not literally mcdonald's but the fast food restaurant yeah with her headset on and she overheard the whole thing and she happened to be the woman who was having an affair with the with the uh with the older man who gets murdered and when you pitch it it sounds so ridiculously convoluted it's fun though it

didn't do well no it didn't do well but it was well made the actors were wonderful and the guy who directed it a guy named dean paraso did an excellent job any failings of this movie were strictly on the part of the screenwriter oh you, you take the hit. Yeah, no, I'm taking the hit because it's, you know. And did that get you to L.A.? That winning that contest got me. It didn't get me to L.A., honestly. It got me a career, which I fulfilled from Virginia. I moved back from NYU a year out of college, moved back to Virginia, bought a house, and

had a girlfriend back, who's still my girlfriend, back in Virginia. I love the idea of living in Virginia and owning a house. Could I get to own a house there? You going to get married soon? We've been together 25 years, but we're still kicking the tires. All right. Her name is Holly. Okay.

She's wonderful, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it. All right. Yeah. But, you know, I was dating her, and we were – and I bought a house and all that. And I was writing movie scripts in Virginia and then going to Kinko's and photocopying them and putting them in a FedEx shipper and shipping them out. This was before, you know, the Internet and all that or before I knew how to use it. And were you selling them? Yeah. before the internet and all that, or before I knew how to use it. And were you selling them? Yeah, and Mark Johnson, on the other end, he'd get them in the mail,

and I think I sold the first two or three, or he sold for me, the first two or three to TriStar. Yeah. And the first one to get made actually was something called Wilder Napalm, which I guarantee you've never heard of. No. That was Dennis Quaid and Deborah Winger and arliss howard damn two brothers two brother brothers again yeah uh this is like my blue period or something my brother period but

two brothers who are in love with the same woman and they can start fires with their minds oh good a little sci-fi action yeah a little sci-fi a lot of fire yeah a lot of fire a lot of yeah exactly but that got made and i so i was living living in Virginia for the first five years of my career and making money in Hollywood. And I thought, you know, I was like, it was great. It was a good deal. Yeah. But the writing, the movie writing started to dry up at that point. But five years in started to dry up.

How many got made? At the point things started to dry up, only one had been made, which is Wilder and Apalm. That was 93. Oh, okay. So the other one came later. Yeah. How many movies have you had made that you've written total? With my name on them, three.

And then the third one being, so Wilder and Apalm, Home Fries, and the third one being Hancock, which a writer named Vi Vincent Ngo wrote the first draft of that, did a great job. And then I was sort of hired to – Wait, was that the – Will Smith. Will Smith, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Will Smith is a superhero. That's pretty good.

It was a big credit, yeah. The reluctant superhero. He'd given it up or he was homeless. Yeah, kind of homeless, drunk superhero. Yeah, The reluctant superhero. He'd given it up or he was homeless. Yeah, kind of homeless drunk superhero. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was pretty good. Will Smith has got great charisma, so he could read a phone book and make it interesting. So it starts drying up and you're like, TV.

Well, yeah. You know what? Yes, exactly. Because things were drying up, I lost my Writer's Guild insurance. Oh, that's the worst. When you go on Cobra. Oh, yeah. I was like, paying for your insurance. Well, like an idiot. I didn't eveniter's Guild insurance. Oh, that's the worst. When you go on Cobra, you're like, holy fuck, paying for your insurance.

Well, like an idiot, I didn't even go on Cobra. I just sort of said, you know what, I'm just going to take a risk here. Roll the dice. Yeah, roll the dice. Still in my early 20s at that point, but I wouldn't roll the dice now, that's for sure. But anyway, then the show called The X-Files came along in 93. And you loved it? I loved it as a fan.

I didn't have anything to do with it the first two years. I was just a fan. I just loved it. Yeah. And I called my agent, my agent at the time. She retired since then, but she was my agent until she retired, a woman named Rhonda Gomez. And I said, I was just talking movie business. When am I coming out again? Is there another meeting for me, this and that and the other.

And I said, by the way, there's this new show called The X-Files. They've been on maybe six months at that point. I said, you really ought to watch it. It's great. And she said, well, as luck would have it, I'm related to the creator of it by marriage. I am related by marriage, some convoluted fashion. She was related to Chris Carter's wife, Dory. And Rhonda, my agent, said, I'll get you a meeting with him next time you're out on movie business, if you'd like.

And I said, that'd be great. Not to pitch to him, just to shake his hand and tell him, I love your show. That's literally all I wanted to do. And one thing led to another, and they were really desperate for writers that season, too. Yeah, because they had to do 26 episodes in season two. And they were they needed help. And I was just at the right place at the right time. And Chris Carter gave me this job, which is the second greatest job I've ever had, which was in a close second of that, which was writing and producing, being a producer, learning to produce, learning to direct, and learning to write, really, on television for the X-Files.

So it was like the best film school ever, and they paid me to be there. And how many episodes did you end up doing? I mean, the show did 202 episodes over nine years. I was there for about six and a half. No, I was there seven years out of the nine. I can't even tell you how many i i had a hand in i mean it uh i mean because i i sort of my thing toward the end was rewriting scripts and uh and then writing my own originals and i can't even remember how many you directed you wrote i directed two produced uh just two uh just two as far as

directing but the first time i ever got to direct professionally was for the X-Files. So in three, you're boned. Like, all right, let the kid do it. Yeah, well, you know, and Chris was a great boss because he let us all take on as much responsibility as we could handle. And I learned so much. I can't say enough good about that job. And I wish I had a hand in the upcoming reboot that he's doing for Fox. They're doing six new episodes this coming year. Why don't you have a hand in the upcoming reboot that he's doing for Fox. They're doing six new episodes this coming year.

Why don't you have a hand in it? I just don't have the time. Were you asked? I was asked. And I had a wonderful lunch with Chris, and he said, do you want to be a part of this? And it just broke my heart. I said, man, I want to.

I got Better Call Saul going on. I'm not a multitasker. I haven't figured out to do that well it's hard it's hard you know something's going to suffer sometimes yeah yeah unless yeah i don't know how people do it so now well well you're multitasking you got this great podcast you got your own show it's exhausting i bet it is like you don't you know it kind of shreds your brain a little bit. And, you know, your responsibilities, I think, are a little larger. But, you know, maybe not. No, you're the boss, man. Right.

Yeah. But it's tough. Yeah, it is. And also, you know, you have a, I have to be honest with you, you have a bigger budget than I do. Well, yeah, but budget, what does budget mean? Budget is actually, it makes things easier, not harder. I mean, if you have less of a budget and you still got to get it done.

Well, you want a little more time. Maybe a little more time. Time is money. Money is time. A little more time. Yeah. You know what I mean? That's what it really comes down to.

That's what it comes down to. Because if I'm doing my show, I'm writing and I'm producing and I'm in every scene. Yeah. So we got to have the writing done before we start shooting. Yeah. And then it's just like in it. Yeah. And we're shooting two episodes in six days.

They're like, Jesus. It's crazy, dude. Holy crap. It's crazy. I don't know how you do it. I don't either. That's insane.

It's a little insane. That's good for, my head is off to you. Yeah, well, the problem is, is if you pull it off, the network's like, great,

you can do it like that? We've hit gold. Yeah, do three in seven days now exactly right yeah so you met cranston on the set of x files i met cranston uh uh we had i wrote an episode uh it was called drive and it was the beginning of season uh hell i don't even remember but it was uh it was when we first moved the production from vancouver to california and we had this i had this part i'd written where molder agent molder had to be stuck in a car with this crazy guy who's trying to who's

threatening to kill him and the part was tricky because he needed to be a real scary badass guy but at the end of the hour he had to feel sorry for him when he died and we had all these scary actors come in who could pull off the scary right Right. But they couldn't pull off the human part where you felt bad for them. Right. Until, and we were scared because we were nervous because it was like only a few days before it was going to start shooting. Yeah. And this guy, Bryan Cranston, walks in.

And it was just like this weight lifted off of us as soon as he read. Really? Because he was so good. This was like 99. Yeah. And he, I said, my God, that guy. As soon as he walked out the door, I said, off to wardrobe. YeahW. I said, this guy is the guy. And everybody in the room, all the other producers said, yeah, he was the guy. He's the guy. And I never forgot him. He was wonderful in this role. I had never, I had forgotten him. And I said, even as the shoot was progressing for that episode, and we, you got to understand understand we worked with a lot of great actors on x-files but i never had that eureka experience of saying i want to work with this guy again in the future right i know i mean there's plenty of people i would want to work with right but i never had that experience of i've got to find something for this particular guy

right like i had with him yeah and uh a year and a half later after that episode airs i'm seeing commercials on fox for this new show called malcolm in the middle and i i see this clean-shaven guy i didn't recognize and i'm like that guy looks familiar and then i realized oh my god it's that guy for my drive episode x-files and i'm watching it i swear to god my first reaction i think i said it out loud to no one. I was alone in the room. I said, I didn't know he could be funny. Because all I knew him as was this dramatic guy. This really intense, dramatic guy.

He's a real actor. And that's the first way I knew him. Because when we started pitching actors, when I pitched, there was only one actor as far as I was concerned. When I pitched to AMC, they said said who do you want to play walter white i said brian cranston uh the the the the folks at amc all they knew him from was was malcolm the middle yeah and they said seriously yeah and to their credit once i showed them this x-file episode they had the opposite they had the opposite take on in my head they said wait a minute this guy could be serious he could be dramatic I only thought he could be funny.

But he's the whole package. He could do it all. So where was the idea born? I mean, because the thing that fascinates me as we get into what you're doing now in Breaking Bad was that the landscape and the story scape of this idea seems simple on one level. And the story scape of this idea seems simple on one level. But the thing that made it so compelling outside of the facts of the story was that you really didn't know what the fuck was going to happen after every episode. Like, every episode. Like, was this.

Well, before we get to that agenda, how did you come up with this idea? What was the kernel of it? You know, I just. I'm sure you've been asked that before. Oh, no. And it's cool. It's just I always, every time I do get asked, I wish I had a more satisfying answer. I don't know where the idea came from.

I just know the minute it hit me. I remember distinctly. I was talking to my buddy, Tom Schnauz, I had mentioned earlier, who I had met when we were both going to NYU film school. Right. And he wrote for a spinoff series of the X-Files we had called The Lone Gunman, and he wrote a little bit for the X-Files. And this was like 2004, two years after the X-Files ended. And he and I were talking on the phone saying, you know,

you got any work lately? Yeah. You writing work now? How about you? Nah, nothing in the offing, nothing in the pipeline. What are we going to do, man? We're not fit for anything else. Yeah.

What kind of work? And he, apropos of nothing, he was just mentioning something he had read in the New York Times about someone who built a meth lab in an apartment and made some kids sick. And he said, well, we could put a meth lab in an RV, drive around and make meth, see the sights, make some money. He said that. And, of course, every time I tell this story, everyone who hears it says, wait a minute. How come he said that and uh of course every time i tell the story everyone who hears it says wait a minute how come how come he wasn't the creator of right i could but i as soon as he was pitching this he was basically why don't we do that when we drive around america and cook meth and he was joking of course but uh as soon as he said that i just

had this eureka moment where i was like because I was thinking of a straight arrow guy doing this, because I was picturing me doing this. And when I say straight arrow, I mean it in the most boring, scared of authority sense. But that would describe Tom and I, or especially, I shouldn't speak for him, describes me, you know, a law abiding citizen. Why would I actually do that? That intrigues me to think, is there a situation in which I i actually do that right that intrigues me to think is there a situation in which i would actually do that yeah and then i thought well if i had if i had to make money for my family i might and uh if i had a grounding in chemistry and had a real pressing financial need because i was let's say dying of cancer and it was like it hit like a thunderbolt it was like boom you know and uh that was the

moment it hit now where it came from the you know i in hindsight hindsight being 2020 i was about to turn 40 years old and i was uh i was already thinking man what kind of midlife crisis am i gonna have it's probably gonna be a bad one since i never really sowed any wild oats to begin with right you know how crazy am i going to go here and luckily uh for me i got to go crazy by proxy by writing this guy for for seven six years you know this guy walter white how does a character like that you know evolve though in the sense that because like the you know one of the the pivotal dynamics was his pride and his very personal resentment against his former partner. Yeah, well, all of that stuff, all of that juicy, meaty center of the character came later. This is the great thing about TV, and i never get tired of talking about what a

wonderfully collaborative medium yeah this is as as you well know and and uh as we both know it's it's and it's it's it's like for instance i mean the walter white of the pilot of breaking bad and that was the only time i ever worked on this character completely by myself i came up with this character, and he was somewhat schematic, somewhat mechanical in that he was basically a good guy who needed money for his family because he was dying of cancer. It was as simple as that. And there was a little bit in there about him being somewhat jealous

of his brother-in-law's, you know, hail-fellow-well-met abilities and somewhat resentful of those. And so there's a little bit of that as extra fuel as to why he would cook meth, his DEA brother-in-law. The Hank, the DEA agent brother-in-law. There was a little extra fuel for the engine, dramatically speaking. But you didn't have the backdrop of the – I didn't have him being a prideful man.

I didn't have him being – Walking away from – Yeah, and one of the best moments. And then once I had these wonderful writers around me and this amazing actor playing Walter White, Brian Cranston, that collaborative nature of the medium starts to kick in. And ideas start percolating that I would have never had by myself in a million years. And one of the most important moments was the fourth episode of that first season, because what I had come up with was rather schematic, and was going to quickly, I could see the writing on the wall,

it was quickly going to be in danger of danger of okay he makes uh he makes forty thousand dollars this week uh next week he makes uh sixty thousand dollars but you know two steps forward one step back maybe someone steals his money okay so now he's got to make another eighty thousand and very schematic like no moral struggle no no struggle just no nichian superman yeah and and in the fourth episode it dawned on us as a group. We said to ourselves, is this enough for a guy just to, yeah, I don't really love cooking meth, but I got to make the money. But, you know, crows stole my money and flew off and made a nest with it. Now I got to make more money or whatever.

You know, all that schematic stuff. What's really at this guy's heart? And we had this idea that only came from this collaborative beast that is the TV storytelling process, which was so wonderful. We came up with this moment where we introduced these two characters who are rich and good looking and run their own company. And they used to work with Walt years ago. And they find out he's dying of cancer. And they say, oh, my God, this is this is terrible we're gonna pay for your cancer treatment we're gonna give you a job with us no strings attached we love you walt we care about you and he says no thank you and he goes off and he cooks meth again but that was just the basics of it you didn't have the

backstory no no we didn't have any that he was responsible for the company's success no yeah we had just and and the truth is if you watch if you watch breaking bad again very closely if the folks the the fascinating sociological thing about the characters these two rich characters so gretchen and elliot yeah if you watch the show very closely they do nothing wrong and yet for pretty much to a man and a woman, to every viewer who's ever watched Breaking Bad, sees them as villains, as bad guys. Who pushed him out. Who pushed him out, left him in the cold, stole his ideas, stole his patents. So you don't know why he left. Well, you get very clearly from him that he feels wronged and abused.

Right. But if you watch very closely, it can be very easily, if you're open-minded to it, it can very easily be interpreted as that was his hang-up. They didn't do anything wrong. There's an episode much later in the run of the series where he sits down with this woman and you realize they used to be a couple they used to date right and something happened between them and and her interpretation of events is is that is that uh is vastly different than his and we believe the sociologically interesting thing about this is he's our hero come what may no matter that he watches a young woman choke to death or on her own vomit no matter that he that he poisons a young

boy with lily of the valley no matter what this guy does we we go with him it's interesting at some point i i was like that's that's the trick here yeah is that this is not this is this guy should not be winning no No, he shouldn't. But you can't help but root for him because he's got cancer. And he's so fucking smart. Yeah. And he's his own guy who outsmarts everybody. But it's funny, all the way right up to the end, there's plenty of people.

Because at some point, I started sympathizing with Hank. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, you're supposed to yeah yeah well and and and there is no as far as i think they're both prideful yeah oh yeah absolutely it became sort of a weird moral study it of everybody and i wish i i'd love to sit here and take credit for oh yeah i knew it'd be like this and i i we got so lucky along the way it was such a lightning in the lightning in a bottle kind of a situation.

Great writers. Well, we had great writers. We had great actors. And I was blessed with these great writers and actors and directors. And everyone was pulling the rope in the same direction. But even with all of that, I didn't know, I couldn't have guessed Walter White would remain so sympathizable for people. Because in a weird way, perversely, I was trying to shake people off in the early going. I was saying, I wonder how bad we can make this guy before everybody just tunes out,

and then the show ends, and then I'll find another show to do. And lo and behold, I lost sympathy for Walter White before most viewers did. Some people stayed with him the whole way through. Yeah. Well, I think that's a testament to how stable Cranston is in his work. Well, it goes back to that first thing I ever cast him in, that X-File episode. I needed a guy who could be villainous and mean and nasty. And yet, when he died, you had to have sympathy for the devil.

You had to feel sorry for him. And he pulled that off. He could do it. And I saw that in him. We all saw it in him in that early audition. And there was no other guy who could have played this. Now, the other question I have about specifically the work of it. I mean, how much much because i always wonder this

having you know just finished the third season of my own show like i i always assume that i'm doing something wrong even though i'm working with guys in terms of like do i should i know what every season's supposed to happen do you have a bible for the entire no no if it makes you feel any better so you didn't't know the whole arc of the series? No, and let me tell you, people who know the whole arc for the series, and by the way, there's no one way to do this job, which is simultaneously what's wonderful about it and what's scary and maddening about my series. If only they'll let me do it. I know season one, season two. There's going to be this thing in season three. And then here's how it all ends.

For me, if that works for you, go with God. That's wonderful. But for me, if I knew, I never thought I knew. But even if I thought I knew, that has the potential. I knew, but even if I thought I knew, that has the potential. That's the risky downside to that is there's going to be a better idea that comes along because invariably they do. Some writer, some actor, somebody, some director is going to throw an idea your way and it's going to be better, but you're not going to be open to it because you're going to have

blinders on and you're going to say, no, no, but see, I already know how season five is. I got the vision. So there were times, plenty of times, I wish we knew further ahead than we did, but see, I already know how season five ends. I got the vision. So there were times, plenty of times, I wish we knew further ahead than we did. But we really were making it up as we went along. And great things came from that because we were very rigorous about consistency. Most importantly, consistency. Visual consistency? Every kind of emotional consistency, first and foremost.

How did you cast Aaron Paul? Aaron Paul, I mean, I knew I wanted Brian in this role, but all the other actors came from Bialy and Thomas, Sharon Bialy and Sherry Thomas are casting folks. They brought in Aaron Paul, for instance. And I was talking to Aaron in the audition, and suddenly I realized he'd been in an x file i didn't realize that it was an x file my friend tom schnauz uh wrote a few years before

that and he's a bit of a chameleon too so i hadn't even recognized him but but that was bianni and thomas who found him and he came in and he auditioned a couple years ago he said to me do you remember how bad that audition was and i said what do you mean he says you remember i flubbed my line so bad i had to start over i said no you didn't do that you're because he's a he's a sweet he's a wonderful actor and a sweet guy who's tough on himself sometimes i said you're just being tough on yourself you didn't flub the lines and he said i'm telling you i did and i said no no my friend you didn't and then someone showed me the tape and damned if he wasn't right he flubs his lines so terribly in the audition and i didn't and then someone showed me the tape and damned if he wasn't right he flubs his lines so terribly in the audition and i didn't even remember that because he was electric in this

audition he was the guy and it didn't matter remotely to me that he didn't get the lines right do you hear that actors it's it's and it's true yeah you know the tough thing my hat is off to all actors i i've never done it i couldn't i. I mean, not in any way that counts. And I couldn't do it for a living. And it's such a tough job. And it takes so much out of you, I got to think. And it takes so much willingness to risk defeat and risk rejection. And so much of it is, the trouble is, I as a producer, I usually know when the actor walks in the door before they

even open their mouth if they're right for the part but the thing is the reason to keep going in for those auditions from from a lay person's from a producer's point of from a non-acting producer's point of view the reason to keep doing it is that guys like me men and women like producers like me uh in in my position we we often, we love someone, we instantly know they're wrong for the role at hand, but we love them nonetheless, and we file them away. And we say, when they walk out the door, we say to the casting folks, completely wrong for this role, but please put an asterisk by that name, and i want to see them again in the future if we have thus and so right and and that you know and that's that's that's the reason one of the many reasons to keep putting yourself out there now was aaron paul was he was the plan to keep him i mean like because no originally no it was i was going to kill him i i rather the part of jesse i was going

to kill the character off at the end of the first season. And this is one of those, you know, this is an interesting, back to the last question you asked me. Did I know the ending of season one, for instance? I thought I did. This is a great example of being open to better ideas. Because I thought I knew that at the end of season one, the character Jesse should die. Having fulfilled his purpose of teaching him how to do this job,

he would get killed horribly. And Walt, that would propel us into season two because Walt would say, would feel guilty and he would feel angry at the guys who murdered his former student and he would get revenge. And that would be an engine of drama for season two. But as soon as we had Aaron Paul paul he was so good he was

the two of them i mean was oh and and the chemistry no pun intended between the two of them was so outstanding that that i would have been a fool to kill off this character i would have been biting off my nose to spite my face you know i thought it was a pretty beautiful bit of cinema at the very end when you showed aaron how how it ended up for aaron good well thank you you know because i've met guys like that you meet guys where you know because i'm a recovery guy so you know you hear these stories horrible stories and then they're sort of like well yeah now i just do this job and like and they live this life and it's and you can go on yeah and you can you know you can't put it behind you uh that was a beautiful beat i'm i'm so glad i i you know it came from as much as anything it came from our

love for aaron and our love for the character of jesse and jesse would not have been as lovely a character if not for aaron this is yet yet again, the collaborative nature of this business, of this job, is that, you know, someone else playing him would have had a different path and a different ending. Someone who wasn't as sweet of spirit and as lovely a person as Aaron Paul would have become a different character and might have been killed off sooner and might have been. But we fundamentally wanted him to survive. We the writers yeah he's the only one yeah and we we we felt we talked about him getting killed because everything was on the table everything was possible uh in those final days final weeks and months in the writer's room but we

realized we just wanted to see him get away right off into the sunset such as it was that was the ending yeah for him yeah but the ending of the series yeah yeah yeah last thing you see right last time you see him yeah yeah so well genius stuff and i and i like that you give so much credit to everybody involved it was just a you know mind-blowing experience that i miss i miss it and thank you i miss it. I miss it too. So what compelled you to build a series around that character, Saul? We, well, you know

Bob. I do, but like, is it a comedy? You know what? I thought it was, well, you know what? The best way of putting it is Breaking Bad. I thought it was a drama with a little bit of comedy in it. When we started this, Peter Gould and I thought Better Call Saul would be the flip of it.

We thought it would be a comedy with a little bit of drama. There's actually much more drama. Just like there was much more comedy to Breaking Bad than I ever would have guessed, there was much more drama to Better Call Saul than I ever would have guessed there was much more drama to better call Saul than I ever would have guessed but but it it uh the genesis of it stemmed uh from uh loving working with you know I should say I was about to say loving working with Bob Odenkirk and that is true but that in and of in and of itself doesn't answer the question because I love working with Aaron Paul I'm working with uh you know uh Betsy Brand and and and and Dean Norris andris and Anna Gunn and R.J. Mitty. Any of them I would have loved, I want to work with in the future. But also with the character of Saul Goodman, he is fun to generate dialogue for.

He has such a gift of gab that most of us don't possess. And it's fun putting those words in his mouth. That was part of the fun of it and part of the interest in it initially. And also, this is someone who becomes morally challenged and somehow compromises himself and has to justify that. Yeah. Although, having said that, we had so little. I'm embarrassed to say how little understanding we had of Saul Goodman, Peter and I, when we started talking about doing a spinoff series. We didn't realize that he was a nice guy and somewhat heroic, in fact, in his past.

We didn't know any of that. You discovered that. We discovered it as we went, you know, as a group, as a group of writers. But with Bob's help as an actor portraying the character. Well, it's great, man. You're off to a good start. I'm excited about the second season. Thank you.

Thank you, Mark. So you're writing that now? We are halfway through episode five out of ten episodes, breaking the story. And the writers of those episodes are plugging away. And, yeah, we'll be shooting through the summer and into the fall. Okay.

Well, if you need me in Albuquerque for a bit part, you let me know. Anytime you're in town, please let us know. We would love love to have you come visit we'd love to put you in the show okay i'll do it do you get back do you get back to albuquerque yeah my dad's there when we're getting along i go back all right yeah yeah i'll come out i'll just i'll plan my trip around when you're shooting and be like hey vince i'm coming down for as long as you need me right on man we would love that we'd be honored i'd love to work with bob that'd be a blast he's great and thanks for taking time from the writing process to do

this i appreciate it thanks for having me mark great guy right right that was i lying love it Was I lying? Love it. What a great conversation. Okay. Yeah. WTFpod.com for that merch and the dates and everything else. Some of you missed my guitar playing. I found that very touching. So let's do it. Thank you. Boomer lives! need delivered with uber eats well almost almost anything so no you can't get a nice rank on uber eats but iced tea ice cream or just plain old ice yes we deliver those goaltenders no but chicken tenders yes because those are groceries and we deliver those too along with your favorite restaurant food alcohol and other everyday essentials order uber eats now for alcohol

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