There are spoilers for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul in this interview.
“In the beginning, the two shows were very different, at least for me,” says Peter Gould, in regards to writing for Breaking Bad and then being the co-creator of Better Call Saul. “When we started Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan had already shot and edited the pilot.”
He continues, “We knew where the story began, but in a lot of ways, we were still discovering who Walter White was. There were some big surprises for us. Better Call Saul was a very unusual circumstance because we opened the writers’ room from what Vince and I had written, which was a two-page pitch of what the show would be, and it was a completely different show from the one you saw.”
Better Call Saul, somewhat of a sequel, somewhat of a prequel, with flashes of never-before-seen Breaking Bad moments worked tremendously well thanks to a single question posed by Gould and Gilligan, “What problem does becoming Saul Goodman solve?”
In the beginning, of course, they didn’t really have an answer to this. In 2009, when audiences first met Bob Odenkirk’s Saul Goodman, he arrived to represent Badger, one of Jesse Pinkman’s friends in Breaking Bad. He’s anti-authority. He’s over-the-top. But, even in a 3:55 long scene, he’s also smarter than he looks.
“We started asking ourselves… what was this guy’s background, where’s he from, how do you become Saul Goodman?,” says Gould. “We had a lot of images, but also talked very linearly in a way that we hadn’t done with Walter White at all. We didn’t know where we were going to begin, but one of the big moments for us was the years when he was working in the back of a nail salon.”
“The glorious thing about this kind of work is that you get to discover the story as you go along. You can have all kinds of big ideas and you need to have big ideas about where it’s going and what it’s going to be, but you find it changes completely as you go.” One obvious journey was Jimmy McGill becoming Saul Goodman, but a major change for the writers came in the form of Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn).
Writing To Predetermined Character Timelines
“We had no idea how important Kim Wexler was going to be when we started the first episode,” says Gould. “We didn’t know what her story was. We thought we knew the relationship with Chuck (Michael McKean), Jimmy’s older brother, but we were bound by the rules we had already set in Breaking Bad.”
Other major characters included Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) and Mike Ehramtraut (Jonathan Banks). The writers had to create timelines around these characters and their interactions. “Has Hank already met Saul? Can we have them meet for the first time? Where was Gus when Breaking Bad started? What was the deal with him and the cartel? What was the relationship between him and Mike?”
The writers spent a great deal of time talking about these ideas. As such, many good ideas had to be scrapped when they realized the “Breaking Bad Timeline” wouldn’t allow for a new idea to work. “We had to be bound by the rules of the reality created by Breaking Bad,” he clarifies.
Another problem came from restrictions of the cast. “They’re a brilliant bunch and they all had a lot of other things they were doing. Bob, first of all, was not sure about doing the show from the beginning. Vince and I sat down with him at a very nice restaurant, told him what we had in mind, but he wanted to be there for his kids, Nate and Erin. I feel they are responsible we have a show because they said, ‘Dad you should do this.’”
Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), Peter Gould & Vince Gilligan. Photo courtesy of AMC Networks
The other problem an actor might bring up is that they’ve already done the character, so what’s new about this role?
“Giancarlo has done this character very well, so does he want to return to it? We have to talk a bit about it. The same with Jonathan. We knew if we were going to do a prequel or spinoff, we had to have Jonathan Banks. Nobody threw a drink in our face when we asked, but we didn’t take it for granted.”
Extending Storylines
“In a lot of writing, you set a problem for yourself that seems unsolvable, then you have to figure out what you’re going to do with it. Saul is now Jimmy and he’s not Saul-ish, maybe he’s a little Saul, but what’s his journey going to be? But, not Mike. We had Mike working in a parking lot booth, but how does he end up being the right-hand-man for the biggest drug kingpin in Albuquerque? That was an interesting, dramatic problem,” adds Gould.
For Mike, in particular, he has a moral compass even though he’s doing unlawful acts. “Trying to figure out how that guy ended up where he was going to be was not straightforward. Mike is a really complicated character. I think he’s one of the few characters who is honest with himself about what he does. That was a challenge, so we had to go step-by-step, and we didn’t know if we were going to get Giancarlo back or that he would be such a huge part of the show.”
In one particular scene, we see Mike talking to Nacho Varga’s (Michael Mando) father. At that moment, even though he has a code and wants to be a proper man, he knows his decisions are terrible. “I think he’s capable of much better. I think he knows that and I think that torments him. In that scene, he wants to find an area where they can agree or share as fathers who have lost sons, so he identifies with him, but Nacho’s dad just says, ‘No, I reject you, you’re a criminal,’ and that’s painful. But I think Mike knows that’s what he deserves.”
Nacho Vargo (Michael Mando) Photo courtesy of AMC Networks
In the beginning, the writers felt like they would be lucky to get two seasons, but in the end they got six. Better Call Saul ran from 2015 until 2022, across sixty-three episodes. “I thought it was going to be an addendum to Breaking Bad. I didn’t think it was going to be a frame around Breaking Bad that contains Breaking Bad in a weird way. We didn’t know that and we were fortunate the show was popular enough to keep coming back.”
Gould jokes that he got the call every showrunner would like to get: “The head of AMC said they wanted to keep the show on the air until we were done with it. ‘Think about how many more seasons you want and how many episodes.’ That’s exactly what you want to hear. It’s the greatest compliment you can get. ‘People are watching, we have faith in you, and you tell us.’”
At this point, Gould recalled that Breaking Bad wrapped with sixty-three episodes, so he decided they should aim for sixty-two episodes. “Let’s top Breaking Bad by one,” he jokes. “The main thing was that we didn’t want to overstay our welcome or run in place to fill the number of episodes.”
Ending Better Call Saul
According to Vince Gilligan, after they finished writing Breaking Bad, he noticed an array of influence from John Wayne’s 1956 Western, The Searchers. For Better Call Saul, Gould says they didn’t bring up comparisons in the room, but in hindsight, he was thinking about The Third Man, a mystery from 1949.
“I was thinking about all of the endings in movies where there’s a romance, a little touch of ambiguity of where it’s going to go. Some of my favorite endings of movies from the 1970s. The Graduate. The Candidate. Where it’s satisfying, but there’s a little of an open-endedness to it. That’s special to me and we were reaching for that.”
In some ways, the ending to Better Call Saul is somewhat like the movie Flight, where Denzel Washington’s character can’t tell one more lie. But with Jimmy McGill, it’s more about his relationship with Kim Wexler than his own moral code. “If he and Kim hadn’t broken up, I don’t know if he would have ever been hurt enough to become Saul Goodman. It’s a double or triple-sided conundrum, hopefully in the best possible way.”
Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) & Kim Wexler (Rhea Seahhorn). Image courtesy of AMC Networks
“Jimmy wouldn’t have been his best self without her, but he also wouldn’t have been his worst self,” clarifies the screenwriter. “It’s not her fault, but when the relationship ended, she went and lived a blameless life, maybe too blameless because she wasn’t doing any harm, but she sure wasn’t doing much good either. He went off and became his worst self. I think that’s on him.”
As for writers trying to break in today, Gould encourages, “I’m not great with advice, but I would say try to find people who love the same thing that you love. Watch movies with them. Share your writing with them. We’re in a special time, in a lot of ways, because you can make something on your own that other people can watch.”
“Do a lot of work, make a lot of mistakes, and learn from them. That’s maybe the most difficult thing, to learn from the pain, be tenacious to make a living, but also be tenacious to get good at this stuff, to have your work come anywhere near what your hopes for the work are. And, finally, take pleasure in doing it because that’s ultimately — the doing of it — what has to be the biggest pleasure, not the stuff that you might imagine comes with doing it.”
You can also read our interview with Thomas Schnauz who was a producer on all six seasons of Better Call Saul and three seasons of Breaking Bad. He also wrote on both shows.
This interview has been condensed. Listen to the full audio interview here.
