Q: Since this is a prequel, how much earlier than “Breaking Bad” does it start? Does that make it a period piece of the late ‘90s or early ‘00s?
Vince Gilligan: I think we can talk about that, right? It’s 2002. Yeah, it is period. It is. We never completely nailed down when “Breaking Bad” took place. The show we shot I was shooting we were shooting the pilot in 2007. We tried hard on “Breaking Bad” if you noticed, we tried hard to not be too specific as to when it was, but now we have to kind of be a little more specific than sometimes we’re comfortable with. But I think we’re about in the year 2002.
And, yeah, you’re right. It’s funny, you learn so much from your from doing this job. You learn so much from your actors and from your crew and everybody, and like in one of the first meetings, all our our Teamster captain who was in charge of finding picture vehicles and our hair and makeup folks and our and everybody was saying to us, “So 2002?” And I said, “Yeah,” and they said, “Well, we need period specific cars.” I’m like, “Oh, yeah, right.” So I hesitate to say it, but it is indeed a period piece that was, I can’t believe it myself, it feels like it was yesterday, but it was 12 years ago. So it is yeah, there is a certain amount of effort and blood, sweat, and tears that goes into making it as factual, related to the period as possible.
But are you staying strictly in the past, or could you overlap with “Breaking Bad” sometimes too?
I think the best way to answer this and not get yelled at and not get in trouble is that you saw from “Breaking Bad” that we like nonlinear storytelling. We like jumping around in time. I would definitely point you in the direction of anything that was possible on “Breaking Bad” storytelling-wise is possible on “Better Call Saul,” because it’s fun. It’s fun for us. It’s fun for us to be as nonlinear as possible.
Who are some of the other directors you’re bringing on for season one?
Michelle MacLaren, our wonderful, wonderful director and producer from “Breaking Bad,” who we love so much, just finished up shooting episode 2. It was great having her back. She came to us she had a hell of a year. She did two episodes of “Game of Thrones” over in Belfast and Iceland and all over Europe, and then she did I think the season ender [of] “The Walking Dead,” and then she came to us. “The Leftovers” is a new Damon Lindelof show, which I’m very much enjoying. She did one of those. I can’t wait to see [her episode].
So we got her. We’re grateful that she squeezed us in, and we got Terry McDonough doing I think today’s his last day shooting episode 3. Great British director. And then we got two Brits in a row. We got Colin Bucksey who starts shooting on Monday, episode 4, and he has directed of course Terry and Colin directed three or four or more episodes each of “Breaking Bad.” I can’t remember even how many they did. And we’ve got Adam Bernstein.
And Tom Schnauz is doing one, a wonderful writer/producer, the guy who I was talking to in 2004 on the phone about what to do next after “The X Files” ended, and said, “How about we buy an old RV and put a meth lab in the back of it and drive around America and see the sights and make some money,” and that’s he’s on the show as a writer. He will be directing the second to the last one.
You worked on a spin off of secondary characters from a long running show in the past that didn’t go for very long. What sort of lessons did you are you maybe taking from your “Lone Gunmen” experience and either applying or not applying here?
Well, I may be kind of hard headed or slow to learn lessons, but I still maintain that “The Lone Gunmen” was a show, I had such a good time working on along with Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz and John Shiban. I still am proud of those 13 episodes that we made for that show. I still think in my heart of hearts that FOX missed a trick by not re-upping it for a second season. And I think a lot of television and a lot of life, really, when you think about it, is timing. I think, given a different set of circumstances, really a different time that that show might have been released, it could have been a hit.
And I still maintain that it was a show it’s certainly a show that I’m proud to have been associated with and would love to have seen to go longer. So as far as lessons learned, the only lesson I’ve learned was what I would have learned, I think, just as much if it had been a success, which is work really hard, do your best work, try to come up with the most entertaining characters as possible and just go forward with courage. And that’s what we’re doing here, and the chips will fall wherever they may. But we have no control over that. The only control we have is how good a show we can we can give to viewers.
One of the lessons from “Breaking Bad,” for the character of Skyler and her relationship with Walter and some of the misogyny sort of spread in the fan base as you sort of articulated where that character fit into the plot of things, as you approach the female characters and sort of the role of women in this show, where do you see them fitting in that and what lessons can you take from what happened on “Breaking Bad” in terms of how you articulate those characters?
I learned my lesson. I’m never going to write for less than perfect women, ever again, less than likeable. You know, that’s a good question. Not to get off on a tangent, but yeah. As you can tell from your question, I was always kind of scratching my head at the whole anti Skyler bias because to me she was a much more likable character than Walt was. But, you know, I don’t say that to go tisk-tisk to any viewers who didn’t like her. I don’t know. There’s probably a whole other panel or a whole some sort of Ph.D. doctoral thesis to be written on this subject.
There’s really no lesson to learn, other than I don’t know if there is a lesson to learn. Every show is different. This show is, you would think, it’s the same universe. It’s going to be pretty similar to “Breaking Bad,” and in some ways it will. In other ways it won’t, and in other ways it’s completely every day we get to work we’re like, “Now what do we do with this scene?” It’s completely different and yet similar. And what I’ve noticed is when I’m writing episodes, even “The X Files” I wrote, God knows. I couldn’t keep count, and every time I started on a new one, it was like I had never written an episode of television before.
And a lot of writers I hear that from. It’s a strange thing, and it’s disconcerting that how few lessons you seem to learn from the previous job or even the previous week’s episode, but I guess that’s what keeps it worth coming back to. That and the money.
