Bob Odenkirk stars as Jimmy McGill in Better Call Saul, returning to Lightbox
Bob Odenkirk stars as Jimmy McGill in Better Call Saul, returning to Lightbox
You no doubt consider yourself a good person so why do you do bad things? Admittedly, "bad" is a sliding scale - maybe you lied to your boss and pulled a sickie, maybe you ran that orange light when you were in a rush, heck, maybe you killed a man.
But whatever you did, and everyone has done something, the question is; why? Was this action the momentary slip of a good person or the revealing slip of a bad one?
This simple question and the complexity inherent in its answer are at the heart of Vince Gilligan's storytelling. As the creator of Breaking Bad [BB] and the co-creator of its spin-off Better Call Saul [BCS] Gilligan paints in dark, dark greys that slowly and certainly smudge into black.
"I was fascinated by the character of [BB's] Walter White from the first moment I conceived of him. I realised only in hindsight that he reminded me, at least at the beginning, of me," Gilligan says when asked what compels him to tell these sorts of stories. "I was about to turn 40 years old and I had a feeling I was heading for a midlife crisis. The idea of a character who is having the world's worst midlife crises is something I found fascinating."
"I was further fascinated by a very law-abiding, somewhat boring citizen, suddenly deciding to break bad, to raise hell and become a different sort of person from who he was. He remains fascinating to me as a character even though I personally lost sympathy for him. I found him less and less likeable as the show progressed. But I always did find him fascinating."
He says that simple question of whether Walter White was a good guy who became a bad guy or if he was just a bad guy all along, drove the show and kept his interest. While BB offered plenty of clues, it withheld a concrete answer. Maybe he can shed some light?
"I'm not sure how I come down on that," he says, laughing. "But it's always an interesting thing to discuss among folks who watch the series."
He's quick to note that BCS, which begins its new season on Lightbox on Tuesday, is exploring similar concepts of character and morality.
"We again have a character who's in the process of devolving," he says of BCS' main character, Jimmy McGill, the lawyer with a heart of a gold but a flexible approach to the law. "Speaking in terms of moralities he's devolving to become something less than an upstanding citizen.
"The interesting thing for us with Jimmy McGill is that his older brother, Chuck, whom he loves dearly and respects, seemed to be chipping away at his self-esteem. It's an interesting question: 'Did Chuck actually steer Jimmy into a direction of becoming a bad lawyer or a criminal lawyer?'. It's something we enjoy learning the answer to along with the viewers."
Scene from the fourth season of Better Call Saul
Both of Gilligan's show have been meticulous in their storytelling, obsessive in their detail and filled with Easter eggs for dedicated viewers. Some subtle, such as a montage sequence showing all the blocks of Jimmy's scheme falling into place while a mariachi version of the Tetris theme tune plays, others more audacious like having the first letter of each episode's title combine to spell out a season spoiler.
So it's surprising when he says he doesn't know what's going to happen.
"That's the great fun of creating a TV show," he says. "You find the answers. You discover them as you progress."
That sounds a bit scary.
He laughs and says, "Very scary. But very exhilarating at the same time. It's scary and exhilarating to not know where you're going. It makes every day in the writers room an adventure."
It may be an adventure but it's also a painstaking one, as Gilligan describes a disciplined writing process prizing originality above all else.
"We sit around a long table in a writer's room for hours and days and weeks on end and wrack our brains until we come up with something interesting. The amount of lead time that we're given is crucial to the process, if you don't have enough time to do this sort of heavy mental lifting there's no way you can come up with these original ideas. But once you have the time to do it then you have to have the self-discipline to say to yourselves: 'Is this good enough? This idea that we have at the moment. Is it interesting enough? Is it original enough?'.
"Very often we'll say, 'this idea that we've got I think I've seen it before.' So we work at it a little longer, hone it a little more and maybe we can find a different take on it. A more unique and original version of the idea. You have to be tough on yourself and continually ask, 'is this as good as it can be or is it simply good enough?' Because if the answer is the latter then you need to keep working on it."
I say that's a hard thing for a writer to admit and he laughs and says, "It helps to have a certain amount of self-loathing."
"It helps to be able to say, 'you know what … I'm really not that good. Therefore if my first instinct is, 'it's pretty good,' I probably need to be tougher on myself and say, 'I bet I can do better'."
In exploring why good people do bad things both Breaking Bad and now Better Call Saul strived to show the humanity behind their eventual villains; before becoming meth kingpin Heisenberg in BB, Walter White was merely trying to provide for his family, whereas Jimmy McGill battled to turn his life around and become a lawyer only to then have all the sunshine kicked out of him.
NEW YORK, NY - JANUARY 19: Director Vince Gilligan attends "Becoming Warren Buffett" World premiere at The Museum of Modern Art on January 19, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Bennett Ragl
So I ask Gilligan if he could write a show that took one of his notorious villains, the clinical mob boss Gustav Fring say, or the horribly ruthless gang enforcer Hector Salamanca, and write a show that puts a new human spin on them and completely changes our perspective of these evil characters.
"That is interesting ..." he muses. "I guess the answer probably is there's limits to who we can humanise. It would be tricky for us to tell Hector Salamanca's story because that character is so loathsome in so many ways, so dark and nasty, that I would have a hard time finding the humanity in him. He would be therefore less engaging to write about. I hadn't really thought about it that way until you asked me that question but I see now that there are limits to this.
Then, smiling, he says, "Some people are so bad you don't really want to follow them in your TV series."
LOWDOWN Who: Vince Gilligan What: Co-creator of Better Call Saul and creator of Breaking Bad When: Lightbox has the new season of Better Call Saul express starting on Tuesday.
