Episode 620 - Vince Gilligan
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:What the fucking avians?
Marc:This is Mark Maron.
Marc:That's me.
Marc:Did I mention Vince Gilligan is on the show today?
Marc:Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.
Marc:Breaking Bad, arguably the best fucking television show ever.
Marc:I've never been so compelled.
Marc:and engaged in a tv show in my life i miss it there's shows i miss the sopranos i miss um the wire and breaking bad now but i've been watching better call saw which is uh vince's new show which is also amazing bob odenkirk is doing a incredible job in the in the acting department as is michael mckean and the supporting cast um
Marc:But but, yeah, he's a genius in my mind.
Marc:And I was nervous to to talk to him.
Marc:I'd not I didn't do any real research around how he talked or or even what he looked like necessarily before he came over.
Marc:And I was I was nervous.
Marc:Like I was nervous when I met Paul Thomas Anderson.
Marc:Because these guys, in my mind, are fucking geniuses.
Marc:And I thought he'd be some dark wizard.
Marc:But he's just a pleasant, smart, polite southern dude.
Marc:Had a great conversation.
Marc:I love meeting people who I think are wizards.
Marc:And they're humble and human and just great to talk to.
Marc:So Vince Gilligan, that's today.
Marc:It's going to happen momentarily.
Marc:All right, okay.
Marc:Also, before I forget, tonight on Marin on IFC, me and my old friend, Sam Seder, co-star.
Marc:I made good on it.
Marc:All right, me and Sam go way back.
Marc:There's a very exciting, tense, aggravated, comedic dynamic, and it's a very fun show.
Marc:Sam comes out to help me with the patent troll problem.
Marc:And then it just gets kooky.
Marc:It's funny.
Marc:It's funny to see us together, and I had a great time.
Marc:That's at 10 o'clock tonight on IFC.
Marc:Me and Sam Seder on the new Marin.
Marc:Okay, Dave Anthony's there too, all right?
Marc:Dave Anthony's there.
Marc:He'll be there, okay?
Marc:He's there being creepy.
Marc:All right, so I just need to say that because sometimes I forget to plug my own show.
Marc:Okay, done.
Marc:Oh, somebody asked...
Marc:For me to give you a cat update.
Marc:I forget that there's ongoing narratives in my life that I just leave hanging.
Marc:And I do have some updates.
Marc:I do have some updates on the cats.
Marc:Monkey, last night, see, this is really when you know that you're too entrenched in the cats, in the cat world, in cat life.
Marc:Last night, Sarah was over, the painter.
Marc:And we're about to go to sleep and and something smells.
Marc: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.
Marc:And I'm sorry if that's too much information.
Marc:But, you know, guys, you know, you pick up a little you sweat a lot.
Marc:It's hot out.
Marc:Either my armpit.
Marc:I just thought it was me.
Marc:Is that better?
Marc:Can we just put it that way?
Marc:And then, you know, I'd eaten some ceviche.
Marc:So it was a bad combination.
Marc:You know, so I thought mixture of the fish and the balls and, you know, my sweat.
Marc:And I blame myself.
Marc: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 uh that monkey was peeing on the curtains somehow skillfully in the corner of the room and on the curtains now this might be because
Marc: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 they start doing that shit when they don't feel well but monkeys never seem better he'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
Marc: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 fresh cat shit behind the hamper
Marc:I blame myself.
Marc:I mean, could I have possibly smelled like, you know, months worth of cat urine and a fresh cat shit?
Marc:Like I blame my balls for that.
Marc:That's ridiculous.
Marc:I mean, I know that, you know, human smell, but nonetheless, some heavy cleaning went down.
Marc:Some curtains had to go.
Marc:The hamper's got to go.
Marc:I had to do some cleaning of the floor.
Marc:I got to figure out what's going on.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I do think that window where the hamper is in that area is the only place that monkey sees the cats outside.
Marc:And that's a fine transition to the cats outside.
Marc:Scaredy cat, the striped cat, the wildcat, whose face was ripped up at one point in time, but has survived about a decade now.
Marc:I've been feeding this cat.
Marc:He's fine.
Marc:He's around.
Marc:He's fat.
Marc:It's nice when the wildcats get fat.
Marc:Um...
Marc:Big head, the big head black cat with the huge balls.
Marc:He's still around, still got a big head.
Marc:We got to trap him and get him fixed because God knows what he's done out there with the ladies.
Marc:He comes around.
Marc:He doesn't seem to know when to hiss or meow.
Marc:Like he's one of the only cats I've ever met that hisses when he's happy to see you.
Marc:It's a confusing thing.
Marc:He's a little nuts.
Marc:He hisses, he meows, but he's excited.
Marc:He's around.
Marc:He looks lean.
Marc:His head is huge.
Marc:Balls are huge.
Marc:Frame tight.
Marc:nice cat though clearly somebody's cat who is neglecting him deaf black cat the hero the mystic the the the true survivor the warrior back around i see him hanging out i watched him approach the bowl last night down 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
Marc:and lives out there among coyotes and other wildcats and disappears for months at a time.
Marc:And right when I think he's gone, he's dead.
Marc:How could he not be?
Marc:He's deaf.
Marc:Boom.
Marc:There he is on the deck cleaning himself.
Marc:It takes a lot for him to approach the bowl because he's got to fight skunks.
Marc:There's one baby skunk left of a skunk litter out there that seems to be lingering.
Marc:He was abandoned.
Marc:I guess this is his neighborhood.
Marc:I don't know how skunks work.
Marc:Also,
Marc:A side note, thank you for all the information about birds, about those junky birds that are hijacking my hummingbird feeder.
Marc:I believe we're going with hooded Oriole.
Marc:A lot of emails and tweets with pictures.
Marc:Seems to me an ornithologist.
Marc:Is that what they are?
Marc:Is that the right one?
Marc:The birds?
Marc:Ornithologists?
Marc:Is that it?
Marc:I'm going to go with that because I'm not going to Google anything.
Marc:I hope that's right and that's not like some sort of specific type of cancer doctor.
Marc:Hooded Oriole.
Marc:I think you're right.
Marc:Hooded Oriole.
Marc:Bad word for me with my rolling...
Marc:L's and my inability to say R's or S's.
Marc:Is it too late for speech therapy?
Marc:Vince Gilligan, just a few minutes.
Marc:I do want to share something with you.
Marc:Can I?
Marc:Can I share something with you?
Marc:I don't know when...
Marc:one becomes funny.
Marc:I know that I was pretty funny and disruptive in school, but I don't know if I was always funny.
Marc:I know I was a somewhat sensitive kid.
Marc:I know I was a gregarious kid, precocious even, annoying to adults.
Marc:But my father's sister, Linda,
Marc: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.
Marc:They came to see me at the Red Bank show in Jersey, and she sent me a couple emails afterwards.
Marc:And I hadn't talked to her in a long time, and I love them.
Marc:They're my cousins and my aunt, but I just don't see them.
Marc:I'm detached.
Marc:I'm not as connected to family as some other people are, or perhaps that I should be.
Marc:But she shared these two...
Marc:These two stories that I will share with you.
Marc:This is very old material.
Marc:This is very old Marc Maron material, and these are emails from my Aunt Linda.
Marc:Dear Marc, do you remember when my parents lived in a two-family house in Jersey City?
Marc:That would be my grandparents, obviously.
Marc:The Olgen family lived upstairs, and we could hear them going up and down the stairs.
Marc:You were about three, and you would ask what the noise was.
Marc:Your grandma and grandpa would say, it's the Olgens.
Okay.
Marc:One day, the Olgans stopped by to say hello.
Marc:When you were introduced, you exclaimed joyfully, the Olgans are people.
Marc:I always smile when I remember that story.
Marc:You never know what kids are thinking.
Marc:Love, Linda.
Marc:The Olgans are people.
Marc:Solid tag.
Marc:Solid tag.
Marc:I told her I love that story, so she sent me another one.
Marc:Dear Mark, do you also remember your grandma and grandpa buying you tickets to the circus in New York every year?
Marc:You were scared of the clowns.
Marc:Then one day you asked them if they loved you.
Marc:They said that they certainly did.
Marc:Then you asked them, then why do you keep taking me to the circus?
Marc:Boom!
Marc:You were certainly a lovable little guy.
Marc:Solid tags.
Marc:Man.
Marc:You know what?
Marc:Had I known, I would have just started writing comedy then.
Marc:Had I known.
Marc:I'm very proud of those stories and I'm glad that she sent them along.
Marc:I didn't know I was afraid of clowns.
Marc: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.
Marc:You can just see the human eyes and some of the wrinkles under the clown makeup.
Marc:Just whatever sad life led them behind that makeup, or you assume that.
Marc:But I think what really is the fundamentally frightening thing about clowns
Marc:is that when they get close enough that you can see the whites of their eyes and the human heart behind the clown makeup.
Marc:That's terrifying.
Marc:Again, can't say enough about this guy.
Marc:Huge fan of his work.
Marc:And I was just thrilled that he was such a sweet dude and very practical and very collaborative and willing to give other people credit.
Marc:Just an amazing guy.
Marc:So let's talk to Vince Gilligan.
Marc:So you spend a lot of time in my hometown.
Marc:I grew up in Albuquerque.
Marc:Yes, you did, didn't you?
Marc:I did.
Guest:And you went to high school at Highland High School.
Marc:Highland High.
Guest:And we shot a really memorable Breaking Bad scene in Highland High.
Marc:You did?
Marc:We did.
Marc:Which one?
Marc:I've seen all the Breaking Bads.
Guest:Right on.
Guest:There was a scene at the beginning of season three, and in it, Walt is in his high school.
Guest:He's still teaching there.
Guest:And it's in the gym, and he's full of people in the gym.
Marc:That was the gym?
Marc:Yeah, that was the gym.
Marc:That's why I didn't recognize it.
Marc:I don't think I ever set foot in there.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Marc:In the gym.
Marc:I think maybe I went to one assembly.
Marc:Certainly no sporting in my past.
Guest:Me neither.
Marc: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.
Marc:I thought in my mind.
Marc:But for some reason, once we got talking, he was intimidating to me, which he shouldn't be because he's a very polite.
Guest:First-week guy.
Guest:Yeah, sweet guy.
Marc:I didn't mention Albuquerque once.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Okay.
Marc:Yeah, and I knew he had a house there and I grew up there.
Marc:We could have bonded personally.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Blew it.
Marc:Well, let's go back to who you are, because I'm a huge fan of Breaking Bad.
Marc:I'm a huge fan of Better Call Saul.
Marc:I love Bob, and I've known him for years.
Marc:Oh, yeah, right.
Marc:And Breaking Bad's one of those experiences you have.
Marc:It's one of those things you turn people onto it like you would turn them onto meth if you were into meth.
Marc:You know, like, what do you mean you haven't watched Breaking Bad?
Marc:What the fuck, dude?
Marc:You gotta try it, man.
Marc:You gotta fucking try it.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:Thank you for that.
Marc:Well, they're not gonna get out.
Guest:Thank you for proselytizing for our show.
Marc:Sure, man.
Marc:Anybody who starts, gets through, anyone who watches two or three episodes of that and doesn't get hooked, like, I don't need to talk to that guy.
Marc:Who the fuck needs that guy?
Marc:I love it.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:But I can't say the same about the X-Files.
Guest:Right, okay.
Marc:And I know you come from the X-Files.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I don't know why I never watched it, because I'm a fan of, well, conspiracies more than sci-fi.
Marc:Sure, sure.
Marc:But I just never locked in.
Marc:I guess I could, and I've watched a couple.
Guest:You know, sometimes timing counts for a lot, too.
Guest:Sometimes 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 or later.
Guest:Or maybe it's just not your thing.
Guest:Now, where did you grow up?
Guest:I grew up in Virginia.
Guest:I was born in Richmond.
Guest:And then I lived for a big chunk of my formative years in a little town called Farmville, which is 65 miles west of Richmond.
Marc:Really?
Guest:And it might as well be named Mayberry, right?
Guest:Really?
Guest:It's named Farmville.
Guest:And how old are you?
Guest:I am now 48.
Guest:all right so do you have siblings uh yeah i have a brother uh patrick my brother is he older he's four years younger oh younger so you're the oldest i'm the oldest of our of the two of us it was on you yeah to be the guy to be the leader where'd you lead that kid uh i i led him into a very different life that 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
Guest:He's just a great guy who's now a father, and I am not a father.
Guest:So now for the first time at age, she's about age 46.
Guest:For me, I became an uncle for the first time.
Guest:That's exciting.
Guest:My brother, Pat, and his lovely wife, Miho, have a little daughter named Maya.
Guest:oh and she is so cute it's it's so wonderful spending time with the three of them and with her and you got that's nice and now you gotta 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 and then uh are your folks still around uh both my folks are still around they're back in virginia still and uh they're it's uh i'm lucky to have them around generations in virginia like you go back in virginia
Marc: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 or germany you know that's that's it eastern europe i i'm kind of curious
Guest:I am, too.
Guest:I kind of am, too, but I haven't actually gone and done it.
Guest:And I, like, if my mom, especially my mom, when she'll listen to this, she'll say, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know all this.
Guest:And I mean, I know my grandfather.
Guest:I knew my grandfather, both grandfathers.
Guest:But, yeah, going back many generations, I don't know about that.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:Well, the South is like the South, though.
Marc:I've become more fascinated with the South.
Marc:I used to be sort of snotty about the South, a little condescending.
Marc:But the more I go there, out of all the places I visit in the country, it's the most interesting.
Marc:It just feels like there's a lot of weird history here.
Marc:There's some bad shit went down, but there's some good people here.
Marc:It's a moral struggle every day in the South.
Guest:well yeah well 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 uh horses or anything i mean i grew up around them uh and cows mostly cows 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 up in a little subdivision oh how'd you end up there
Guest:Well, uh, my mom was from Virginia, uh, but in Farmville, like it seemed like you were in Richmond.
Guest:Yes, we were in Richmond.
Guest:Uh, my dad met my mom in Richmond, uh, and he was from Syracuse, New York.
Guest:So my dad's side of the family is from, yeah, upstate.
Guest:And, uh, the first thing, you know, when my, uh, they moved, my dad moved or my dad's, my, my grandparents, uh, on my dad's side, uh,
Guest: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.
Guest:Partly?
Guest:Well, George Vincent Gilligan, Jr., so my dad is George, so I'm a junior.
Guest:But my grandfather had worked at a GM subdivision, I think.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Making car parts?
Guest:Making car parts, and he wanted to be his own boss, and he had the opportunity in the late 50s to buy a used bookstore in Richmond, Virginia, which he had never visited before.
Guest:So in the late 50s, he bought this through, it was the back of an ad in a book dealer magazine.
Marc:That was the big idea?
Guest:It was a big idea, and he was wonderful at it, and he was his own boss until he passed away from the late 50s until he passed away in the late 80s.
Marc:He kept a used bookstore.
Guest:Yeah, in Richmond.
Guest:And the first thing they did, and so they moved, he and my grandmother, his wife, Jean, they moved, and my dad went with them.
Guest:My dad was about 17 or 18 and was, I think, just about to go into the Marine Corps.
Guest: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.
Marc:Right, so then we're from up north.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:We just want to know that we want to sell some books here.
Guest:We're not carpetbaggers.
Guest:Right.
Marc:We want you to know that.
Marc:How long did that stay in the window?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Probably not too long, because they realized most folks were like, whatever, man.
Marc:I think most folks would be like, what kind of bookstore is that?
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:Well, Richmond was different in the late 50s.
Marc:Was it?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, from what I hear, I was not around myself.
Marc:So we had the used bookstore for 30 years?
Guest:at least uh from about what was it called people probably knew it richmond bookshop and it's still there uh and the old sign is still up was he a character do people know him like you run into people who are like i know that bookstore he was very well respected by the 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 in a charactery sort of sense but he was a wonderful bedrock kind of a guy did you have experiences in that bookstore
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I mean, well, I think it gave me a great love of reading.
Guest:My brother and I, you know, growing up and visiting, driving in for, or being driven in for Farmville on an hour and a half drive and then staying the weekends with my grandparents in Richmond and visiting the bookstore and
Guest:My grandfather never really had two dimes to rub together because he didn't make a lot of money.
Guest:But he made a living.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He made a living doing this.
Marc:Did he have a lot of good books?
Guest:He had wonderful books.
Guest:And I got into science fiction and I got into.
Marc:In his bookstore.
Guest:In his bookstore.
Guest: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?
Guest:We call him Grampy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Grampy, Grampy.
Guest:uh grampy can we have this one uh yeah sure can 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
Guest:Comic books, except not the cool kind that everybody makes movies about now.
Guest:What do we mean?
Guest:Richie Rich.
Guest:That was what I was into.
Guest:Richie Rich.
Guest:All the Harvey comic books.
Marc:These are the seeds of Breaking Bad.
Marc:Richie Rich.
Marc:Richie Rich was born rich.
Guest:He didn't have to work for it like Walter White did.
Marc:You liked Richie Rich.
Guest:He was conflicted about being rich.
Marc:When did you first start to sort of realize that... Because to gravitate towards... I don't know how you got the job on X-Files, but you must have some sense of science fiction.
Marc:And you must have some love for that kind of abstract imagination that's sort of rooted in humanness.
Guest:Yeah, no, definitely.
Guest:I mean, I grew up loving Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov.
Marc:Those are like classic used books.
Marc:Did you get those at the store?
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Guest:I read my first, Frank Herbert and who else?
Guest:I mean, you know, I read, I am not, I did not read as deeply.
Guest:I read very broadly and very shallowly.
Guest:Is that shallowly?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Why not?
Yeah.
Guest:But you know what?
Guest:When I started on X-Files, I mean, I'd written, I was writing for the movies before that.
Guest:And I was really, I consider myself a comedy writer.
Guest:I mean, I consider myself a writer of comedic movies.
Marc:Well, I believe, and I said it from early on, that Walter and Jesse were a comedy team.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know what?
Guest:They were sort of the postmodern Laurel and Hardy, weren't they?
Marc:Well, there was definitely... I thought that element was definitely there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I don't know.
Marc:We can talk about it in a bit about how much of that was sort of planned.
Marc:But Walter White was a classic straight man to Jesse.
Marc:Yeah, absolutely.
Marc:And there was definitely funny shit in there.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:I mean, there's stuff that's horrible, but it was one of those weird lessons, I think, that I might have learned while watching Breaking Bad is that there is...
Marc:As terrifying as Danny Trejo's head on a tortoise might be, it's fucking hilarious.
Marc:I mean, it's on some weird level.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:No, we made the show as funny as we could possibly make it.
Guest:And funny, of course, as we...
Guest:both well know is is in the eye of the beholder but but a lot of stuff that made us laugh hysterically in the room uh didn't necessarily make everybody laugh who was watching but but a lot of stuff made us laugh and and we tried to make it as funny as 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 yeah this nasty drug and making money off that it's just you're just going to want to open a vein watching this thing you're
Guest:yeah i want to laugh you got 11 your drama with humor with comedy because that's uh you know that's the only way you get through life you got 11 the real drama your life but for disappointment that's yeah that's that's that's what life is buffering discipline yes exactly so we felt that way from the first the from the from the get-go on breaking band i just figured this show has has a possibility of being so relentlessly heavy and dreary
Marc:The comedy was strong.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Good.
Marc:I'm glad.
Marc:Because even the characters that were the most frightening in a way were outside of Gus.
Marc:But like Tuco is kind of a clown.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:In a way.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:you know as long as you're not there for him to cut your head off yeah he's he's no no i know he's funny from a distance but even even in in sol where you meet tuco yeah he's like kind of half a moron yeah you know like and there's yeah no you're right that moment where he's like what should i do you know and then the smart guy's got to sort of tell him yeah uh but okay but going back
Marc:So, what started the interest in movies?
Marc:Like, how old were you?
Marc:Like, what kind of kid were you in high school?
Marc:Were you Dungeons and Dragons?
Guest:Yeah, I played Dungeons and Dragons.
Guest:I was just a loser and didn't go to the prom.
Guest:I don't know.
Marc:I don't know if that's a loser anymore.
Marc:I think that is the backstory.
Marc:That's a proud backstory now, Vince.
Marc:Then I was born too soon.
Guest:Because, believe me, man, back then I was being a loser.
Guest:No.
Marc:Nerds run the world now.
Guest:They do.
Marc:The sadness has transcended.
Marc: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.
Marc:One of the best.
Marc:Look at what you did.
Guest:Richie Rich was a gritty comic book.
Guest:What can I tell you?
Marc:I never did the Dungeons and Dragons thing.
Marc:I read some Richie Rich.
Marc:Yeah, did you?
Guest:Did you?
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Marc:I mean, maybe a little bit.
Marc:Casper the Friendly Ghost.
Marc:Well, I mean, how old were you?
Marc:I hope you were young, right?
Marc:I was 17.
Guest:No, no.
Marc:I'm just kidding.
Guest:no i was uh 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 schnau is 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 uh
Guest:My former assistant is now one of my writers, Gordon.
Guest:These folks play chess, and Tom has multiple games going.
Guest:He's like Bobby Fischer or something.
Marc:That guy.
Marc:Yeah, and it's just like- God, I wish I could do that with my brain.
Guest:I want to knock that board over every time I walk past it.
Marc:I think you should.
Marc:You're the boss.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Take some liberty.
Marc:I hear you're too nice a guy in the writer's room.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:It's time to lose your shit.
Marc:No, I need to lose my shit a little bit.
Marc:Pull a Harmon or a Milch.
Marc:Yeah.
Fucking-
Marc:Come on, guy.
Marc:You need to write a passage.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You need to send some writers crying.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:Oh, man.
Marc:I'm going to go do that.
Marc:Yeah, do it tomorrow.
Marc:Fuck it all up, Vince.
Marc:It's time to ruin the whole thing.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:But in high school, did you play a band instrument?
Guest:No, I wish I had.
Guest:You know, my mom is wonderful.
Guest:I wish... She's going to kill me, too, when she hears this.
Guest: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...
Guest: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.
Guest:It's that rhythm of editing.
Guest:And I feel like in another lifetime, if I had learned to play some sort of instrument, I wouldn't have been...
Guest: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 right but i think like what you're saying is that you because of the medium you've chosen which is a film really and because i think that what you did with television
Marc:In the tradition of what had been happening in television, The Sopranos, Deadwood, and finding the time and the sort of vision to create framing and take a certain amount of time to create filmic things.
Guest:Oh, thank you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And also the way that sound works in Breaking Bad.
Marc:I think that with film, you get to integrate all that.
Marc:Even if you have a guy, it's like you've got a musician you work with or you've got a composer.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So you're still the guy that goes, like, can you give me more of that?
Guest:I want more treble.
Marc:I want more treble.
Marc:Is it just treble or can you make that, do you have a more menacing bit of notes?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I always feel like an idiot.
Guest:We have this amazing composer, Dave Porter, who was on both shows, Breaking Bad.
Guest:And I always feel like I'm talking to a brain surgeon.
Guest:Like, yeah, could you cut here instead of cut there?
Guest:Could you resect this part instead of... I don't have the language.
Guest:But you know what works?
Guest:He's a wonderful down-to-earth guy.
Guest:And what works...
Guest:with him and thomas goliabich 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 in the picture yeah instead of you know i want this in uh four fifths time and blah blah blah i want an a sharp ear right i couldn't do that to save my life but but with those guys i talk emotion and
Marc:that's good yeah it works well well yeah so you're making music on some level you're making decisions close to a 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 yeah yeah all right well that you'll just have to let that go and she's gonna feel terrible i know but she maybe she'll call you and go like start now vince
Guest:I know.
Guest:Well, she will.
Guest:She will say, there's no time like the present.
Guest:You're not dead yet.
Guest:What's stopping you?
Guest:Right.
Guest:And she'd be right.
Guest:Now, are your parents together or not together?
Guest:No, not together.
Guest:They got divorced when I was 10 and my brother was 6 back in 1976.
Marc:Did they get along after that, though?
Guest:uh they're they well they just uh i'm sure they would they just don't see much of each other 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
Guest:but you saw your dad and you yeah and the good thing is uh you know still see my dad still see my mom still like my pat and i'm lucky to still have him and yeah and uh and then i got my uncle gary he's uh 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 see the kids see your brother see mom and dad well no actually patrick and and uh his wife miho and my niece are out here they're down in garden grove
Marc:Oh, so they all live here.
Marc:Yeah, which is even better.
Marc:Oh, so it becomes less important to go back to Virginia.
Guest:Well, no, you know, I love going back.
Guest:I just only really, you know, it takes forever to get there.
Guest:It's like, because, you know, it takes a flight to Atlanta and then a flight to Richmond, and it takes all day.
Guest:On a little plane.
Guest:Well, sometimes, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I do those a lot.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Sometimes they bother me.
Marc:Sometimes they don't.
Marc:Sometimes I'm like, oh, good, I can see the ground.
Marc:I feel like I'm in a car.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Marc:Like, I feel like I'm flying.
Marc:Like, I get that.
Marc:Like, there's sometimes I feel better to know.
Marc: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.
Marc:Okay, yeah.
Marc:And then you're like, oh, okay.
Marc:We're a mile in the air.
Guest:I remember now.
Guest:God damn it.
Guest:Are you a nervous fly or do you not like flying?
Marc:I can't afford to be because it's exhausting.
Marc:But innately, like, I know the odds are in my favor.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But, you know, there is that possibility.
Yeah.
Guest:See, I'm not nervous about dying in the air.
Guest:I'm nervous about being surrounded by, you know, going through TSA and taking my shoes off and all this stuff.
Guest:And then you just never know who you're going to get sitting next to you.
Guest:And the seats get smaller every month, you know.
Marc:You know what?
Marc:I'm going to tell you something.
Marc:I'm going to tell you a secret.
Marc:You know, you're at a point in your life now where you can go ahead and get first class tickets.
Guest:You know what?
Guest:I, it, it, it was, it was not that long ago that I started doing that because, because, because it's the, it's, it's the goddamn, it's the principle of the thing.
Guest:It's like how you say, you say to yourself, yeah, you know, I got the money.
Guest:I'm going to be first class business class.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then you punch it up in the computer and you're like, it's like eight fucking times how much what it is.
Guest:Is it really worth it?
Marc:It's insane how much more it is.
Marc:believe me i know and but like i don't have a wife i don't got 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 let's just why not think about it in terms of a of a guy that can afford it yeah yeah see we both come from a sort of like uh like i come from a comics background you know so i'm always like i don't know when my money's gonna go away yeah and you come from pretty much working class background right yeah so it just seems like an extravagance
Guest:You know what it is, though?
Guest:It really is a principle thing.
Guest:I don't understand the pricing.
Guest:No, there's no pricing.
Marc:It's just ripping you off.
Marc:Yeah, they are.
Marc:We've gotten far away from our agenda here.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I think we're good on the airline.
Marc:I think the people need to know this.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I think we're good.
Marc:We know where you stand airline-wise.
Okay, fair enough.
Yeah.
Guest: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 that's part 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 for three days four days do you remember uh pre-9 oh this is even before this is like 20 30 years ago remember you could get on the plane with your friend and then the the steward of the
Marc:They come get your tickets.
Guest:They would say they'd come on the intercom and they'd say, okay, everybody who's not actually going to, you know, going to Jackson, Mississippi.
Marc:Or they can walk you, not only walk you to the gate, but sit on the plane with you.
Guest:You can literally go on the plane.
Guest:People listening to this who didn't live through it are going to be like, what?
Guest:You can get on the plane and at a certain point, the flight attendant, they call them stewardesses back then.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:She would get on and she would say, usually she, and she would say, okay, everybody is not going to Buffalo.
Guest:Get off.
Guest:Better get off the plane now.
Guest:It was like, it was such a different world.
Guest:We could smoke.
Marc:I smoked on planes when I was in high school.
Marc:I used to love smoking on planes.
Marc:You'd have the back two rows.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:On a plane now, could you imagine?
Marc:Like, what the fuck?
Marc:How different was the world that everything must have smelled like cigarettes?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:like if someone lit a cigarette on an airplane right now it'd be like what is happening the air marshal just shoot you in the head before the plane even 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 they would take him away and just summarily shoot him against a wall now for doing that i
Guest:It's like, we loved it.
Guest:It smelled good.
Guest:Did you smoke?
Guest:No, I didn't.
Guest:You never did.
Guest:Pipes do smell better cigarettes.
Guest:Cigarettes are nasty.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Cigars and pipes, I like.
Guest:You know what?
Guest:I like, I smoke the occasional cigar.
Guest:Yeah, right?
Guest:Yeah, I like that.
Guest:It's good.
Marc:One couple times a year.
Marc:Nice.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:The good ones?
Marc:But it's like- Sony cigars?
Yeah.
Guest:I'm happy just with flying on the occasional Sony jet ride.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:But I don't know.
Guest:Anyway, it's a cigarette.
Guest:So, yeah.
Guest:They're bad.
Marc:They're bad.
Guest:My brother and my mom used to smoke.
Guest:And you're right.
Guest:We'd be in that little living room we had.
Guest:And they'd both be smoking away.
Guest:And I didn't even notice.
Guest:And now it would bother me now.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Drive everyone crazy.
Marc:But it was everywhere.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So, all right, so now you're playing Dungeons & Dragons.
Marc:You're not smoking.
Marc:You're not playing any instruments.
Marc:You're reading Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, where does the interest, you know, where does your creativity start?
Marc:You know, I just... Was it in film?
Guest:Was it in...
Guest:I love doing... I just... I had a rich imagination, and it's held me in pretty good stead.
Guest:I was lucky.
Guest:I loved... I had a wonderful art teacher named Jackie Wall.
Guest:This was an elementary school.
Guest:She was a wonderful... And her son is...
Guest:Two-time Oscar-winning editor Angus Wall, who won for editing – co-editing – what did he – it was Social Network and – was it Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?
Guest:Anyway, he cuts for Fincher and he and his editing partner.
Marc:This guy you grew up with.
Guest:And this group in the town of Farmville, which had like 4,500 people.
Marc:And his mom was your art teacher.
Guest:And his mom was my art teacher.
Guest:He's a wonderful guy.
Guest:She was a wonderful teacher.
Guest:And I loved drawing, painting, sculpting.
Guest:And she turned us on to so many things.
Guest:We got to make little pewter sculptures.
Guest:And we got to fire stuff in the kiln she had.
Guest:And she was a wonderful teacher.
Marc:Did you do brass?
Marc:Did you do any of that stuff?
Guest:i did some of that later i went to a school with the wax and then you put it in the thing and it melts out the last wax process i i made a pair of silver earrings uh at uh at a school called interlocken which was great where the hell is that that's in interlock in michigan right near traverse city i went there one year it was ninth grade it was and and mrs wall helped me get into that uh that was after elementary school so what is that like an exchange program
Guest:It still exists.
Guest:It's an excellent boarding school.
Guest:The national music camps are in the summer, and then during the school months, it's Interlochen Arts Academy.
Guest:What else did you do there?
Guest:Again, didn't date girls.
Guest:The list of what I didn't do was longer.
Marc:But you tried sculpting, you drew, you painted.
Guest:I did metalsmithing, did blacksmithing, made some pottery, painted, stuff like that.
Guest:I was a visual arts student.
Guest:Most of the kids there were music and performance arts students.
Marc:So you're always heading that way.
Marc:I can't always was.
Marc:I was always headed.
Marc:Thank God for Mrs. Wall.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And she, you know, but I always, I just always was into that stuff.
Guest:And I always, that's what I was doing all through high school, being a nerd.
Guest:I was writing scripts and I was making little- For movies?
Guest:Yeah, I had little short films on Super 8 film.
Marc:You made them, you had a Super 8 camera?
Guest:I didn't have one.
Guest:Yet another wonderful thing about her is she loaned me hers every summer, so I got to keep it for three months over the summer.
Marc:Like with the little reels, like film?
Guest:Yeah, a little Super 8 film, yeah.
Marc:And you were cutting it too?
Marc:You had an editor?
Guest:Yeah, I would cut it.
Guest:She let me use the janitor at the school.
Guest:It was called the J.P.
Guest:Wynn Campus School in Farmerville, Virginia.
Guest:It doesn't exist anymore.
Guest:It was a great, great school.
Guest:And she let me use a janitor's closet as an editing room.
Guest:And she lent me her editing machine, and I would cut the Super 8 film and...
Guest:It was great.
Marc:What were those early films?
Marc:What were those early Vince Gilligan films?
Guest:I did the one that was my magnum opus for elementary school.
Guest:It was called Space Wreck.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Guest:And my brother, Pat, starred in it.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And he is in a spaceship, which I had so much fun building.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:A full one.
Marc:How'd you build it?
Guest:Well, it was a little foot long or less than a foot.
Guest:Oh, so you were using effects.
Guest:And I shot it against a piece of black fabric with little grains of salt glued on it for stars.
Guest:It looked like shit.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, you didn't poke holes and put a light source behind it.
Guest:No, because that would have been too smart.
Marc:That would have looked too good.
Guest:You know, I had to do it the harder and crappier looking way.
Guest: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 has eaten through this other ship and made it crash.
Guest:So he has to take off in a hurry to avoid it.
Guest:But then you see...
Guest:Dun, dun, dun, to the bottom of the ship as it lifts off.
Guest:There's slime all over the bottom.
Marc:Oh, he's in trouble.
Marc:Yeah, he's in trouble.
Marc:And that's it?
Guest:Yeah, that was it.
Marc:That's pretty dark.
Marc:Doesn't work out for that guy.
Guest:No, it didn't.
Marc:But it's pretty ambitious for a Super 8 film.
Guest:If you saw it, you wouldn't think so.
Marc:Well, you decided that you had the capacity to go to another planet.
Marc:Yeah, that's true.
Marc:You know, like on film, you're like, we're doing full-on sci-fi.
Marc:That's true.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:That's true.
Marc:And what were some of the other ones?
Marc:Do you remember?
Guest:I made something with a little stop-motion gremlin who was giving trouble to some guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Stuff like that.
Guest:That was called Gremlin.
Marc:Oh, good name.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You didn't get anything.
Guest:It was actually before Gremlins.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, so maybe you should maybe.
Marc:I should have sued those bastards.
Marc:Yeah, Joe Dante shouldn't hear about that.
Marc:Whoever, who wrote that.
Guest:It was, it was Joe Dante.
Marc:Yeah, that first Gremlins movie is good.
Guest:He has the coolest office, as I recall.
Guest:I had a meeting with him years ago.
Guest:I could have hung around that office for days.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Filled with props from his movies and other famous movies.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Awesome office.
Marc:Yeah, good eye of that guy.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, good director.
Marc:So you do these different schools, you're in the arts, and when did you sort of realize it was film that it was going to be?
Guest:I love movies.
Guest:My dad, George Sr., he would wake me up.
Guest:This was way before VHS tape and obviously way before DVRs and all that.
Guest:The late movie would be on at 2 in the morning.
Guest:He'd wake me up and he'd say, hey, hey, come on, wake up.
Guest:You've got to watch this.
Guest:We've got to watch Bad Day at Black Rock.
Guest:Really?
Guest:What's that?
Guest:It's a great movie.
Guest:You've got to watch it.
Guest:Spencer Tracy is this one-armed guy, and he's just come from the war.
Guest:And he said, watch him karate chop this guy in the throat.
Guest:This guy named Ernest Borgnine.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He just, watch him chop this guy in the throat.
Guest:It's great.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You know, it was that kind of thing.
Marc:So it was a regular occurrence where he'd wake you up and have you watch these great movies?
Guest:Probably only a couple times, but I have such a fond memory of that.
Guest:And he turned me on to these great movies.
Marc:Like what other ones?
Guest:uh what else westerns oh god yeah westerns uh you know the spaghetti westerns the john ford westerns the searchers the searchers right i realized like you know like there are there are shots that you got oh yeah in albuquerque outside albuquerque yeah so you're thinking that
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:It dawned on me.
Guest:When I directed the pilot of Breaking Bad, I was ripping off William Friedkin a bit from The French Connection, which is another one of my favorite movies.
Guest:What part?
Guest:The steady...
Guest:but nonetheless handheld camera uh french connection is shot with this the cinema verite this sort of newsreel right uh way of it's as if as if someone's running around following popeye 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
Guest:I was ripping off Friedkin there, and I was doing that because when I was doing the pilot.
Marc:And the scene where we see him naked?
Guest:Well, actually throughout the whole series, really.
Guest:You did a lot of that.
Marc:But you were aware of that.
Guest:Yeah, I was thinking of Friedkin and the French Connection.
Marc:Where did you learn that he did that?
Guest:Just from watching the movie.
Guest:I mean, just when you watch it, and I've seen it a bunch of times.
Guest:It's one of my favorites.
Guest:But when you watch French Connection, you sort of notice that.
Marc:I watched it again recently.
Marc:It holds up, man.
Guest:Oh, it's a great movie.
Guest:And you know what?
Guest:It feels like it could have been made today.
Guest:You know, it's one of those kind of movies.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest: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 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
Guest:Well, yeah, and we shoot at Q Studios right near the airport.
Guest:And they're great, too.
Guest:But they said, you will have more money at your disposal that you can put on film.
Guest:And I said, I thought about it.
Guest:And they said, and you can still make it California.
Guest:Just put California license plates in the cars.
Guest:And I said, no, 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.
Marc:But you get the great landscape.
Yeah.
Guest:And so this is what I'm heading toward.
Guest: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 I'm looking around halfway through the pilot saying, this looks like a Western.
Guest:This is a Western landscape.
Guest:I can think of John Ford.
Guest:I can think of Sergio Leone.
Guest:I can think of...
Guest:But Baedeker and all these wonderful, you know, Howard Hawks, all the guys directing these wonderful westerns, we can make this a modern western.
Guest:And that's exactly what we did.
Guest:And we got to a point, Michelle McLaren, who was our producer-director and directed more episodes of Breaking Bad than anyone else, she and I would show the first 15 minutes of Once Upon a Time in the West to all incoming directors.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:and say we're 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
Guest:Well, we had amazing DPs, starting with John Toll, double Oscar winner, shot the pilot, and then we had Ray Villalobos, who's an excellent DP, for the first season, and then Michael Slovis for the remainder of the series.
Marc:They must have loved the opportunity to shoot out there.
Guest:They did, and they got to, I mean, when we started, film was still, was not rare like it is now, but we shot film, too, 35mm film, all the way to the end of Breaking Bad, and that was another, now that's a fading opportunity.
Marc:It's all shot on film?
Guest:Every bit of Breaking Bad.
Guest:Well, yes, the show's shot on film.
Guest:We had a couple shots here and there we did with little video cameras.
Marc:So that's how you got the depth, I guess, and the richness.
Marc:What was the primary difference outside of being you're beholden to nailing it a little more consistently?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, well, yeah, you don't have that.
Guest:You don't have that monitor that shows you exactly what you're going to do.
Guest:Right, and you can't just sort of like, yeah, it's video.
Guest:We can shoot as much as we want.
Guest:It's just a chip.
Guest:It's a card.
Guest:Well, when we started in 2007, video, I mean, video, HD video certainly existed.
Guest:It didn't seem like as much of a good idea at the time.
Marc:They didn't have the RED camera.
Marc:They didn't have any of those high-end.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:if the red existed then or not but it you know guys like michael mann were shooting collateral and miami vice and stuff like the the movie uh on on 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 i it never occurred to me to do that and i 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
Guest:We are a bit heart sick that we're not shooting film on Better Call Saul.
Guest:We're shooting on the red.
Guest:We're shooting on the red dragon.
Guest:And we miss film.
Guest:And the red dragon looks great.
Guest:And it's one of many cameras.
Guest:The F55 by Sony looks great.
Guest:But the Alexa by Arri.
Guest:But we miss film.
Marc:Why?
Why?
Guest:You know, I don't have a great reason for you other than I miss the history of it.
Guest:When I think of film, I think of all the wonderful movies that made me interested in this medium in the first place.
Guest:They were all shot on film.
Guest:It just has a romance to it.
Guest:It has a...
Guest:A lot of people will tell you it has a look that video can't replicate.
Guest: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.
Guest: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...
Guest:we had a blind taste test as it were.
Guest:He showed us all this footage, had an all color time to look similar and whatnot, showed us all this footage.
Guest:And I figured if I could pick out the film, if Peter and I could pick out the film, we'd shoot film at, even at the cost of,
Guest:you know 100 grand more an episode which is what they tell us we're saving yeah more or less yeah and i hate to say 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
Guest:I miss film.
Guest:I miss it, and I still want to be shooting on it, but I can't sit here and tell you why it's better.
Marc:You can feel it.
Guest:Yeah, it's a palpable thing.
Guest:Of course, no one has cut on film for quite a while.
Marc:Oh, so you just immediately transfer?
Guest:Well, I mean, we always cut on the Avid, and even on X-Files back in the mid-'90s, we were cutting on the Avid.
Guest:You were shooting on film with that?
Guest:We shot a film on that, but we cut on the Avid.
Guest:So a lot of guys, you know, the guys, the real proponents of video, the guys like George Lucas, had an interesting conversation.
Guest:The one time I ever met him, had an interesting conversation with him.
Guest:Someone told him who I was, and he said, I'm breaking bad.
Guest:I hear that's good.
Guest:And then my boss, Steve Mosko, runs Sony Television,
Guest:He said, hey, George, you know, Vince, and he knew he was stirring up the shit when he said this.
Guest:He said, George, you know, Vince shoots Breaking Bad on film.
Guest:And he turned around on his heel and came back and he said, why would you do that?
Guest:And he started, he was like angry.
Guest:Like, why would you shoot on film?
Guest:Why would you, you know, video's so much better.
Guest:and what did 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 was getting yelled 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 he could he could pull out of the depths of ignorance and and show the light to you know sure and and uh
Guest:And he's right when he says this.
Guest:He says, when these guys say this, they say, 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?
Guest:Unless the production chain, post-production chain is photochemical from start to finish.
Guest:And that's a good argument.
Guest:You know, I don't have good arguments to the George Lucas.
Guest:You just like it.
Guest:I just like it.
Marc:It's like me listening to records.
Marc:I don't know why I went back to that.
Marc:Sort of a trend.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But who the hell knows if it's better.
Guest:There's a certain grain crawl, I guess, that film has because it's the grain.
Guest:The grain in video is in the grain, as it were, the pixel locations are in the same spot with every frame.
Guest: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.
Guest:So there's that.
Guest:But, you know, these guys will say, well, if you want that look, you can make that into the video, you know.
Guest:We can do that.
Guest:You can add it.
Guest:It's like, yeah, but it's just not as romantic.
Marc:I know.
Marc:You want to be Howard Hawks.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You want to be... William Friedkin.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:The big camera.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Sure, man.
Guest:Yeah, you know.
Guest:You know, check the gate.
Guest:Check the gate.
Guest:Well, we still say that.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And then every time I say it, because you'll say, okay, that was great.
Guest:Check the gate.
Guest:And then I'm like, why am I even still saying that?
Guest:Yeah, it's not...
Guest: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 uh a bit more than my dad in fact was very uh supportive of me going to film school my dad
Marc: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 you know i'd be nervous for my kid if i had one you know right you know 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 any better they just they just all they hear is like no not gonna make a living doing that yeah yeah yeah interesting
Guest:Which, in his world, people did make a living.
Guest:What did he do?
Guest:My dad was an insurance claims adjuster, and my mom was a school teacher, a reading teacher in elementary school.
Guest:And they were both supportive.
Guest:I don't mean to make it sound like he wasn't.
Guest:But my mom was more supportive of me going to film school and went to NYU undergrad.
Guest:A good one.
Guest:Yeah, it was a good school.
Guest:Went to undergrad, never went past undergrad.
Marc:But you got it with the Tisch School?
Marc:Tisch School of the Arts, yeah.
Marc:But you weren't at a shoot and cut?
Guest: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 to shoot 16 millimeter for the first time and when i was there from 85 to 89 it was still it was still film and i'm really glad i didn't miss out on that uh although we also had a video class we shot beta beta 2 or whatever it was at the time but we got to shoot film and that was great
Marc:So how'd you get the gig on?
Marc:What was the first gig out of college?
Marc:Did you make movies in college?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I mean, made little, you know, mostly crude on other people's movies.
Guest:Made little forgettable student films and whatnot myself.
Marc:Sci-fi?
Marc:Did you do better?
Guest:No, it was sci-fi.
Guest:I did something.
Guest:My thesis film was called Mime Pays.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:It was, get it?
Guest:Crime Pays.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:Good one.
Guest:So you are a comedian.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, there you go.
Guest:And it was these three street clowns who get pissed off at this mime for making business from their corner where they panhandle.
Marc:So you wanted to do comedy.
Guest:I did.
Guest:I really did.
Guest:And I thought of myself as a comedy person.
Guest:I mean, the sci-fi early on, but I really thought of myself when I got into my 20s as someone who...
Guest:Wrote movie scripts.
Guest:And that's what I did.
Guest:I wrote the first feature-length movie scripts I wrote were comedic.
Guest:I wrote a script called Home Fries as my thesis screenplay at NYU my final year.
Guest:And I was lucky enough to sell it.
Guest:And it got made a couple years later with Drew Barrymore and Luke Wilson.
Marc:I don't remember that movie.
Guest:I wrote it in 89.
Guest:I won a screenwriting contest in my home state of Virginia with it.
Guest: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 where the contest was held and he contacted me after and this was in late 89 early 90 he said hey i like that script uh that you wrote do you have any others and thank god i did at that point yeah and cut to like 1998 i guess it was about nine years later he
Guest: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 katherine 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
Guest: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 yeah
Guest:pitching it now in hindsight 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 does it do well
Guest:no it didn't do well but it was well made the actors were wonderful and the guy who directed a guy named dean paraso did an excellent job any failings of this movie were strictly on the part of the screenwriter oh you take the hit yeah no i'm taking the hit because it's you know and did that get you to la that winning that contest uh got me it didn't get me to la uh honestly it it got me a career which i which i uh fulfilled from virginia
Guest: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.
Guest:I love the idea of living in Virginia and owning a house.
Guest:Could I get to own a house there?
Marc:You're going to get married soon, or?
Guest:We've been together 25 years, but we're still kicking the tires.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Her name is Holly.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:She's wonderful, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I was dating her, 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.
Guest:This was before the internet and all that, or before I knew how to use it.
Marc:And were you selling them?
Guest: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.
Guest:And the first one to get made actually was something called Wilder Napalm, which I guarantee you've never heard of.
Marc:No.
Guest:That was Dennis Quaid and Deborah Winger and Arliss Howard.
Marc:Damn.
Guest:two brothers two 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 in virginia for the first five years of my career and and making money uh in hollywood and i thought you know i was like uh i was it was great it was a good deal yeah but um
Guest:uh the the writing the movie writing started to dry up at that point yeah but five years answered how many got made uh at uh at the point things started dry up only one had been made which is wilder napalm but it was 93 okay so the one came other one came later yeah yeah how many movies have you had made that you've written total
Guest:uh with my name on them uh three uh and then uh the third one being so wilder napalm home fries and the third one being uh hancock which i which i i uh a writer named vi vincent no wrote wrote the the first draft of that did a great job and then i was sort of hired to
Marc:wait was that the uh 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's homeless and kind of homeless drunk superhero yeah yeah yeah that was pretty good will smith has got great charisma so he could he could you know he could read a phone book and make sure interesting so it sort of starts drying up and you're like tv
Guest:Well, yeah, you know what?
Guest:Yes, exactly, because things were drying up.
Guest:I lost my Writer's Guild insurance.
Marc:Oh, that's the worst.
Marc:When you go on Cobra, you're like, holy fuck, paying for your insurance.
Guest:Well, like an idiot, I didn't even go on Cobra.
Guest:I just sort of said, you know what, I'm just going to take a risk here.
Guest:Roll the dice.
Guest:Yeah, roll the dice.
Guest:Still in my early 20s at that point, but I wouldn't roll the dice now, that's for sure.
Guest:But anyway...
Guest:Then the show called The X-Files came along in 93.
Marc:And you loved it?
Guest:I loved it as a fan.
Guest:I didn't have anything to do with it the first two years.
Guest:I was just a fan.
Guest:I just loved it.
Guest:And I called my agent.
Guest:My agent at the time, she retired since then, but she was my agent until she retired, a woman named Rhonda Gomez.
Guest:And I said, I was just talking movie business.
Guest:When am I coming out again?
Guest:Is there another meeting for me?
Guest:This and that and the other.
Guest:And I said, by the way, there's this new show called The X-Files.
Guest:It had been on maybe six months at that point.
Guest:I said, you really ought to watch it.
Guest:It's great.
Guest:And she said, well, as luck would have it, I'm related to the creator of it by marriage.
Guest:I am related by marriage, some convoluted.
Guest:fashion she was related to chris carter's uh wife dory uh-huh and she's ronda my agent said i'll get you 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 sure and tell him i love your show that's literally all i wanted to do uh-huh
Guest:And one thing led to another, and they were really desperate for writers at that point.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Season two.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because they had to do 26 episodes in season two, and they needed help.
Guest:And I was just at the right place at the right time.
Guest:And Chris Carter gave me this job, which is the second greatest job I've ever had, and a close second of that, which was writing and producing, being a producer, learning to produce, learning to direct, and learning...
Guest:to write really on television for the X files so it was it was it was like the best film school ever and they paid me to be there and how many episodes you end up doing I mean the the show did 202 episodes over nine years I was there for about like six and a half 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 I mean cuz I I sorta my thing toward the end was rewriting
Guest:scripts and then writing my own originals and I can't even remember how many.
Marc:But you directed, you wrote, you produced.
Guest:I directed two of them.
Marc:Just two?
Guest:Just two as far as directing, but the first time I ever got to direct professionally was for the X-Files.
Marc:Someone threw you a bone, like, all right, let the kid do it.
Guest:Yeah, well, you know, and Chris was a great boss because he let us all take on as much responsibility as we can handle.
Guest:And I learned so much.
Guest:I can't say enough good about that job.
Guest:And I wish I had a hand in the upcoming reboot that he's doing for Fox.
Guest:They're doing six new episodes this coming year.
Marc:Why don't you have a hand in it?
Guest:I just don't have the time.
Guest:And it breaks my heart to say that.
Guest:Were you asked?
Guest:I was asked.
Guest:And I had a wonderful lunch with Chris.
Guest:And he said, you want to be a part of this?
Guest:And it just broke my heart.
Guest:I said, man, I want to.
Guest:I got Better Call Saul going.
Guest:I'm not a multitasker.
Guest:I haven't figured out how to do that.
Marc:Well, it's hard.
Marc:It's hard.
Marc:Because something's going to suffer sometimes.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:I don't know how people do it.
Marc:So now.
Marc:Well, you're multitasking.
Guest:You got this great podcast.
Guest:You got your own show.
Marc:It's exhausting.
Guest:I bet it is.
Marc:Like you don't, you know, it kind of shreds your brain a little bit.
Marc:And, you know, your responsibilities, I think, are a little larger.
Marc:But, you know, maybe not.
Guest:No, you're the boss, man.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But it's tough.
Marc:Yeah, it is.
Marc:And also, I have to be honest with you, you have a bigger budget than I do.
Guest:Well, yeah, but budget, what does budget mean?
Guest:Budget actually makes things easier, not harder.
Guest:I mean, if you have less of a budget and you still got to get it done.
Marc:Well, you want a little more time.
Marc:Maybe a little more time.
Guest:Time is money.
Guest:Money is time.
Guest:A little more time.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:That's what it really comes down to.
Marc:That's what it comes down to.
Marc:Because if I'm doing my show, I'm writing and I'm producing and I'm in every scene.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So we got to have the writing done before we start shooting.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then it's just like in it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And we're shooting two episodes in six days.
Marc:They're like, Jesus.
Marc:It's crazy, dude.
Marc:Holy crap.
Marc:It's crazy.
Guest:I don't know how you do it.
Guest:I don't either.
Guest:That's insane.
Guest:It's a little insane.
Guest:That's good for my head is off to you.
Marc:Yeah, well, the problem is if you pull it off, the network's like, great, you can do it like that.
Marc:We've hit gold.
Guest:Yeah, do three in seven days now.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:So you met Cranston on the set of X-Files?
Guest:I met Cranston.
Guest:I wrote an episode.
Guest:It was called Drive, and it was the beginning of season.
Guest:Hell, I don't even remember.
Guest:But it was when we first moved the production from Vancouver to California.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:And I had this part I'd written where Mulder, Agent Mulder, had to be stuck in a car with this crazy guy who's threatening to kill him.
Guest:And the part was tricky because he needed to be a real scary, badass guy.
Guest:But at the end of the hour, you had to feel sorry for him when he died.
Guest:And we had all these scary actors come in who could pull off the scary, but they couldn't pull off the human part where you felt bad for them.
Guest:And we were scared because we were nervous because it was like only a few days before I was going to start shooting.
Guest:And this guy, Bryan Cranston, walks in.
Guest:And it was just like this weight lifted off of us as soon as he read.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Because he was so good.
Guest:This was like 99.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I said, my God, that guy.
Guest:As soon as he walked out the door, I said, off to wardrobe.
Guest:OTW.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I said, this guy is the guy.
Guest:And everybody in the room, all the other producers said, yeah, he was the guy.
Guest:He's the guy.
Guest:And I never forgot him.
Guest:He was wonderful in this role.
Guest:I had never forgot him.
Guest:And I said, even as the shoot was progressing for that episode, and you've got to 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.
Guest:I know...
Guest:I mean, there's plenty of people I would want to work with.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But I never had that experience of I've got to find something for this particular guy.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like I had with him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And 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.
Guest:And I see this clean-shaven guy I didn't recognize.
Guest:And I'm like, that guy looks familiar.
Guest:And then I realize, oh, my God, it's that guy from my Drive episode, X-Files.
Yeah.
Guest:And I'm watching it.
Guest:I swear to God, my first reaction, I think I said it out loud to no one.
Guest:I was alone in the room.
Guest:I said, I didn't know he could be funny.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Because all I knew him as was this dramatic guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This really intense, dramatic guy.
Marc:He's a real actor.
Guest:And that's the first way I knew him.
Guest:Because when we started pitching actors, when I pitched, there was only one actor as far as I was concerned.
Guest:When I pitched to AMC, they said, who do you want to play Walter White?
Guest:I said, Bryan Cranston.
Guest:And the folks at AMC, all they knew him from was Malcolm in the Middle.
Guest:And they said, seriously?
Guest:And to their credit, once I showed them this X-File episode, they had the opposite take on him.
Guest:I had.
Guest:They said, wait a minute.
Guest:This guy could be serious.
Guest:He could be dramatic.
Guest:I only thought he could be funny.
Guest:But he's the whole package.
Guest:He could do it all.
Marc:So where did –
Marc:Where was the idea born?
Marc:Because the thing that fascinates me as we get into what you're doing now in Breaking Bad was that the landscape and the storiescape of this idea seems simple on one level.
Marc: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.
Marc:Every after every episode, like every episode, like was this?
Marc:Well, before we get to that agenda, how did you come up with this idea?
Marc:What was the kernel of it?
Marc:You know, it's just I'm sure you've been asked that before.
Guest:No, it's cool.
Guest:It's just I always every time I do get asked, I wish I had a more satisfying answer.
Guest:I don't know where the idea came from.
Guest:I just know the minute it hit me.
Guest:I remember distinctly.
Guest:I was talking to my buddy, Tom Schnauz, I'd mentioned earlier, who I had met when we were both going to NYU film school.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he wrote for a spinoff series of the X-Files we had called The Lone Gunman.
Guest:And he wrote a little bit for the X-Files.
Guest:And this was like 2004, two years after the X-Files ended.
Guest:And he and I were talking on the phone saying, you know, you got any work lately?
Guest:You writing work now?
Guest:How about you?
Guest:Nah, nothing in the offing, nothing in the pipeline.
Guest:What are we going to do, man?
Guest:We're not fit for anything else, any other kind of work.
Guest: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.
Guest:And he said, well, we could put a meth lab in an RV, drive around and make meth, see the sights, make some money.
Guest:He said that.
Guest:And, of course, every time I tell this story, everyone who hears it says, wait a minute, how come...
Guest:How come he wasn't the creator of Breaking Bad?
Guest:But as soon as he was pitching this, he was basically saying, why don't we do that?
Guest:Why don't we drive around America and cook meth?
Guest:And he was joking, of course.
Guest:But as soon as he said that, I just had this eureka moment where I was like,
Guest:because I was thinking of a straight arrow guy doing this, because I was picturing me doing this.
Guest: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, a law-abiding citizen.
Guest:Why would I actually do that?
Guest:That intrigues me to think, is there a situation in which I would actually do that?
Guest:And then I thought, well, if I had to make money for my family, I might.
Guest:And if I had a grounding in chemistry and had a real pressing financial need because I was, let's say, dying of cancer.
Guest:And it was like it hit like a thunderbolt.
Guest:It was like, boom.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that was the moment it hit.
Guest:Now, where it came from.
Guest:And, you know, in hindsight, hindsight being 2020, I was about to turn 40 years old.
Guest:And I was already thinking, man, what kind of midlife crisis am I going to have?
Guest:It's probably going to be a bad one since I never really sowed any wild oats to begin with.
Guest:You know, how crazy am I going to go here?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Luckily for me, I got to go crazy by proxy by writing this guy for six years, this guy Walter White.
Marc:How does a character like that evolve, though, in the sense that because one of the pivotal dynamics was his pride and his very personal resentment against his former partner.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, all of that stuff, all of that juicy...
Guest: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 the walter white of the pilot of breaking bad and that was the only time i ever worked on this character completely by myself uh-huh
Guest: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.
Guest:It was as simple as that.
Guest:And there was a little bit in there about him being somewhat jealous of his brother-in-law's
Guest:you know, hail fellow well-met abilities and somewhat resentful of those.
Guest:And so there's a little bit of that as extra fuel as to why he would cook meth, his DEA brother-in-law.
Guest:The Hank, the DEA agent brother-in-law.
Guest:There was a little extra fuel for the engine, dramatically speaking.
Marc:But you didn't have the backdrop of the... I didn't have him being a prideful man.
Guest:I didn't have him being resentful.
Guest:Walking away from... Yeah, and one of the best moments.
Guest:And then once I had these wonderful writers around me and this...
Guest:amazing actor playing Walter White and Bryan 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.
Guest:And one of the most important moments was the fourth episode of that first season because what I had come up with was rather...
Guest:schematic and was was going to quickly i could see the writing on the wall it was quickly quickly going to we'd be in 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
Guest:No struggle.
Marc:No Nietzschean Superman.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And in the fourth episode, it dawned on us as a group.
Guest: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.
Guest:But, you know, crows stole my money and flew off and made a nest with it.
Guest:Now I got to make more money or whatever.
Guest:You know, all that schematic stuff.
Guest:What's really at this guy's heart?
Guest:And we had this...
Guest:this idea that only came from this collaborative beast that is the TV storytelling process, which was so wonderful.
Guest:We came up with this moment where we have these, we introduce these two characters who are rich and good looking and run their own company and
Guest: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 terrible.
Guest:We're going to pay for your cancer treatment.
Guest:We're going to give you a job with us.
Guest:No strings attached.
Guest:We love you, Walt.
Guest:We care about you.
Guest:And he says, no, thank you.
Guest:And he goes off and he cooks meth again.
Marc:But that was just the basics of it.
Marc:You didn't have the back story.
Guest:No, we didn't have any of this.
Marc:That he was responsible for the company's success.
Guest:No, yeah.
Guest:We had just... And the truth is, if you watch Breaking Bad, again, very closely, the fascinating sociological thing about the characters, these two rich characters, Gretchen and Elliot, if you watch the show very closely, they do nothing wrong.
Guest: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.
Marc:Who pushed him out.
Guest:Who pushed him out, left him in the cold, stole his ideas, stole his patents.
Marc:So you don't know why he left.
Guest:Well, you get very clearly from him that he feels wronged and abused.
Guest:But we...
Guest:If you watch very closely, they never – that's – it can be very easily – if you're open-minded to it, it can very easily be interpreted as that was his hang-up.
Guest:They didn't do anything wrong.
Guest: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 –
Guest:They used to date, and something happened between them, and her interpretation of events is vastly different than his.
Guest: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 on her own vomit, no matter that he poisons a young boy with lily of the valley, no matter what this guy does, we go with him.
Marc: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 he shouldn't and and you know but you can't help but root for him because he's got cancer and he's so smart yeah and you know he's like you know he's his own guy yeah who outsmarts everybody but it's funny you know all the way right up to the end there's plenty of people
Marc:Because, like, at some point, I started sympathizing with Hank.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, which is, you're supposed to.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Well, and there is no, as far as I'm concerned.
Guest:But they're both prideful.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Absolutely.
Marc:It became sort of a weird moral study of everybody.
Guest:And I wish I'd love to sit here and take credit for, oh, yeah, I knew it'd be like this.
Guest:And I...
Guest:We got so lucky along the way.
Guest:It was such a lightning in a bottle kind of a situation.
Guest:Great writers.
Guest:Well, we had great writers.
Guest:We had great actors.
Guest:And I was blessed with these great writers and actors and directors.
Guest:And everyone was pulling the rope in the same direction.
Guest:But even with all of that, I didn't know...
Guest:I couldn't have guessed Walter White would remain so sympathizable for people.
Guest:Because in a weird way, perversely, I was trying to shake people off in the early going.
Guest:I was saying, I wonder how bad we can make this guy before everybody just tunes out.
Guest:And then the show ends, and then I'll find another show to do.
Guest:And lo and behold, I lost sympathy for Walter White before most viewers did.
Marc:Some people stayed with him the whole way through.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I think that's a testament to how stable Cranston is in his work.
Guest:Well, it goes back to that first thing I ever cast him in, that X-File episode.
Guest: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.
Marc:You had to feel sorry for him.
Guest:Right, yeah.
Marc:he pulled that off and i i i saw that in him we all saw it in him in that in that early audition and and he was there was no other guy who could have played this now the other question i have about the specifically uh the work of it i mean how how 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
Guest:no no if it makes you feel any better so you didn't know the whole arc no of the series no and and let me tell you people who who know the whole arc for this and by the way there's no one way to do this job yeah which is simultaneously what's wonderful about it and what's scary and maddening about it is is is there's no one way to do it and there are folks who say i know the ending of my series if they if only they'll let me do it i know i know season one season two the
Guest:There's going to be this thing in season three, and then here's how it all ends.
Guest:For me, if that works for you, go with God.
Guest:That's wonderful.
Guest:But for me, if I knew – I never thought I knew, but even if I thought I knew, that has a potential.
Guest:That's a risky downside to that is –
Guest: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.
Guest:I got the vision.
Guest:So there were times, plenty of times I wish we knew further ahead than we did, but we were really were making it up as we went along.
Guest:And, and,
Guest:Great things came from that because we were very rigorous about consistency.
Guest:Most importantly, consistency.
Marc:Visual consistency?
Guest:Emotional consistency first and foremost.
Marc:How did you cast Aaron Paul?
Guest:Aaron Paul, I mean, I knew I wanted Brian in this role, but all the other actors came from Bialy and Thomas.
Guest:Sharon Bialy and Sherry Thomas are casting folks.
Guest:They brought in Aaron Paul, for instance.
Guest:And I was talking to Aaron in the audition, and suddenly I realized he had been in an X-File.
Guest:I didn't realize that.
Guest:It was an X-File my friend Tom Schnauz wrote a few years before that.
Guest:And he's a bit of a chameleon, too, so I hadn't even recognized him.
Guest:But that was Bialy and Thomas who found him.
Guest:And he came in and he auditioned.
Guest:A couple years ago, he said to me, do you remember how bad that audition was?
Guest:And I said, what do you mean?
Guest:He says, you remember I flubbed my line so bad I had to start over?
Guest:I said, no, you didn't do that.
Guest:Because he's a wonderful actor and a sweet guy who's tough on himself sometimes.
Guest:I said, you're just being tough on yourself.
Guest:You didn't flub the lines.
Guest:And he said, I'm telling you, I did.
Guest:And I said, no, no, my friend, you didn't.
Guest:And then someone showed me the tape.
Guest: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 mean i'm not not in any way that counts and i couldn't do it as for a living
Guest:And it's such a tough job.
Guest:And it takes so much out of you, I got to think.
Guest:And it takes so much willingness to risk defeat and risk rejection.
Guest:And so much of it is, the trouble is...
Guest: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.
Guest:But the thing is, the reason to keep going in for those auditions from a layperson's, from a producer's point of view, from a non-acting producer's point of view, the reason to keep doing it is...
Guest:That guys like me, men and women, producers like me, in my position, we very often, we love someone.
Guest:We instantly know they're wrong for the role at hand, but we love them nonetheless, and we file them away.
Guest:And we say, when they walk out the door, we say to the casting folks, completely wrong for this role.
Guest:But please put an asterisk by that name, and I want to see them again in the future if we have thus and so.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that's one of the many reasons to keep putting yourself out there.
Marc:Now, was Aaron Paul, was the plan to keep him?
Marc:No.
Guest:Originally, no.
Guest:I was going to kill him.
Guest:Rather, the part of Jesse, I was going to kill the character off at the end of the first season.
Guest:And this is one of those, you know, this is an interesting, back to the last question you asked me.
Guest:Did I know the ending of season one, for instance?
Guest:I thought I did.
Guest:This is a great example of being open to better ideas.
Guest:Because I thought I knew that at the end of season one, the character Jesse should die.
Guest:Having fulfilled his purpose of teaching him how to do this job, he would get killed horribly.
Guest:And Walt would propel us into season two because Walt would say...
Guest: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.
Guest:But as soon as we had Aaron Paul, he was so good.
Marc:Within the two of them.
Guest:Oh, and the chemistry, no pun intended, between the two of them, was so...
Marc: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
Guest:Good.
Guest:Well, thank you.
Marc:Because I've met guys like that.
Marc:You meet guys where, because I'm a recovery guy, so you hear these stories, horrible stories, and then they're sort of like, well, yeah, now I just do this job.
Marc:And they live this life.
Marc:And you can go on.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you can put it behind you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That was a beautiful beat.
Guest:I'm so glad.
Guest:You know, it came from, as much as anything, it came from our love for Aaron and our love for the character of Jesse.
Guest:And Jesse would not have been as lovely a character if not for Aaron.
Guest:This is, yet again, the collaborative nature of this business, of this job, is that...
Guest:You know, someone else playing him would have had a different path and a different ending.
Guest: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.
Guest:But we fundamentally wanted him to survive.
Guest:We meaning the writers.
Marc:Yeah, he's the only one.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we we we felt we talked about him getting killed because everything was on the table.
Guest:Everything was possible in those final days, final weeks and months in the writer's room.
Guest:But we realized we just wanted to see him get away right off into the sunset, such as it was.
Marc:That was the ending.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:For him.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But the ending of the series.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Last thing you see.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Last time you see him.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So, well, genius stuff.
Marc:And I like that you give so much credit to everybody involved.
Marc:It was just a mind-blowing experience that I miss.
Marc:I miss it.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:I miss it, too.
Marc:I miss it, too.
Marc:So what compelled you to build a series around that character, Saul?
Guest:Well, you know Bob.
Marc:I do, but is it a comedy?
Guest:You know what?
Guest:I thought it was...
Guest:Well, you know what?
Guest:The best way of putting it is Breaking Bad.
Guest:I thought it was a drama with a little bit of comedy in it.
Guest:When we started this, Peter Gould and I thought Better Call Saul would be the flip of it.
Guest:We thought it'd be a comedy with a little bit of drama.
Guest:There's actually much more drama
Guest: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.
Guest:But the genesis of it stemmed from loving working with—and I should say, as I was about to say, loving working with Bob Odenkirk, and that is true, but—
Guest:That in and of itself doesn't answer the question because I love working with Aaron Paul.
Guest:I love working with Betsy Brand and Dean Norris and Anna Gunn and R.J.
Guest:Mitty.
Guest:Any of them I want to work with in the future.
Guest:But...
Guest:Also, with the character of Saul Goodman, he is fun to generate dialogue for.
Guest:He has such a gift of gab that most of us don't possess.
Guest:And it's fun putting those words in his mouth.
Guest:That was part of the fun of it and part of the interest in it initially.
Marc:And also, there's someone who becomes morally challenged and somehow compromises himself and has to justify that.
Guest: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 a spinoff series.
Guest:We didn't realize that he was a nice guy and somewhat heroic, in fact, in his past.
Guest:We didn't know any of that about him.
Guest:You discovered that.
Guest:We discovered it as we went, you know, as a group, as a group of writers.
Guest:But with Bob's help as an actor portraying the character.
Marc:Well, it's great, man.
Marc:You're off to a good start.
Marc:I'm excited about the second season.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:Thank you, Mark.
Marc:So you're writing that now?
Guest:We are halfway through episode five out of ten episodes, breaking the story.
Guest:And the writers of those episodes are plugging away.
Guest:And, yeah, we'll be shooting through the summer and end of the fall.
Marc:Okay, well, if you need me in Albuquerque for a bit part, you let me know.
Guest:Anytime you're in town, please let us know.
Guest:We would love to have you come visit.
Guest:We'd love to put you on the show.
Marc:Okay, I'll do it.
Guest:Do you get back?
Guest:Do you get back to Albuquerque?
Marc:Yeah, my dad's there.
Marc:When we're getting along, I go back.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Yeah, I'll come out.
Marc:I'll plan my trip around when you're shooting and be like, hey, Vince, I'm in town for as long as you need me.
Marc: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
Marc:Great guy, right?
Marc:Right?
Marc:Was I lying?
Marc:Love it.
Marc:What a great conversation.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:WTFPod.com for that merch and the dates and everything else.
Marc:Some of you missed my guitar playing.
Marc:I found that very touching.
Marc:So, let's do it.
Marc:Boomer lives!