Better Call Saul’s Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould on constructing the Breaking Bad spinoff

Vince Gilligan: We started the way you're probably not supposed to start. We started with pure affection for this character, to the point that all we really knew, being brutally honest about our process, was that we loved putting words in this character's mouth. We knew we loved writing for him. I think that got us excited and engaged in the idea of creating a TV show around Saul Goodman.

We jumped in with both feet, based on that love of the character and certainly the actor who plays him. And then once the snowball was rolling down the hill, gaining speed and mass, and the two companies, Sony and AMC, were on board, we started taking long walks around Burbank, around where the Breaking Bad offices, and saying, "Okay, what does Better Call Saul actually look like?"

And we went through every permutation in the book. There was serious discussion of it being a half-hour show, and being, if not a sitcom, a straight comedy. There was a lot of talk about, is it a sequel? Is it a prequel? Do the events take place concurrently with the events of Breaking Bad? Could it be a little of all three? We talked about every possibility under the sun.

Peter Gould: We talked structurally like that. And then we also talked about who this guy was. That was the most productive side. We started talking about how he got to be who he is and who's in his life. Who's his family?

It was not like any other process I'd been through, because we went back through the timeline of his life and went back and filled in a lot of the questions. And then we got to a certain point where we asked, "Where do we pick him up? What is the first episode?" We had a feeling for what some of the steps in his evolution may be. But then, where do we start?

For me, anyway, the reason we started where we did is that this is a crisis moment where Jimmy backslid, as he says in episode two. We were interested in seeing him trying to be on the straight and narrow and then giving in to temptation and being a little bit of Slippin' Jimmy [a name the character adopted in an earlier life as a minor con artist] in episode one, and having that backfire spectacularly. That was very interesting to us to have us begin the series with him outsmarting himself, which is something this character does every once in a while.

Vince Gilligan: I am interested in why we are good. This sounds very heavy and lofty, and I don't mean it to! I like to think there's more to it than just some evolutionary reason. It's good for the clan of hunter-gatherers that they are basically kind to each other. Otherwise, the saber-toothed tigers will eat them. I like to believe there's a greater point to our existence here, and therefore, I'm interested in why people are good. The flip side of that coin is I'm interested in why people are bad.

And [Saul's] an interesting character to me because of that struggle. When you meet Saul Goodman in that first episode of Breaking Bad, he's pretty comfortable in his own skin. He's pretty comfortable suggesting that Walt and Jesse shank Saul's own client, Badger. He says all that without blinking an eye. We figured if he was that guy right at the beginning of Better Call Saul, a) he doesn't have anywhere to go, and b) a guy who's comfortable in his own skin is not necessarily going to allow you as a writer to concoct reams and reams of drama. It's the characters who have self-doubts and frustration and dark nights of the soul who are the most interesting to write about.

So now the question is how is he gonna get from Jimmy McGill, the guy you met in these first two episodes, to Saul Goodman. And frankly, we're not even completely sure how it's all going to happen. But I like this character who struggles to be good, but why does he want to be good? Is it because it's what his brother wants? Is it because it's what other people who are close to him in his life want from him? Is it really what he wants? It's that tennis match that's going on of morality inside his soul or inside his head. That interests me.

Bob Odenkirk plays Jimmy McGill, the man who will become Saul Goodman. (AMC)

Peter Gould: We worry about that every day. But having said that, what I've always felt — and I don't know if this is right or wrong — is that how things happen is more interesting than what happens. You can summarize a great story in a sentence. You can summarize The Godfather in three sentences.

Vince Gilligan: Guy destroys his family.

Peter Gould: Yeah. But it's not a substitute for watching the movie and feeling your way through it. To some extent, that's true of any television show or even a movie. You're pretty sure, unless you're watching Psycho, that the person you're following isn't going to die until the end of the movie, most of the time, unless it's a certain genre.

In some ways, it's a handicap, but I think we tried to make use of it. The way you can use it is it creates resonances and ironies and depths, hopefully. Having said that, we also really tried to make a show that stands on its own, that is not just the bookend to Breaking Bad, although I think inevitably, that's going to be part of how it's perceived. And maybe that's what it is. But we tried just as hard with this to tell a story that compelled us and made us laugh and worried us and had suspense to it.

Vince Gilligan: You know Jimmy McGill — when you're watching episode two, and he's out there in the desert — you know he's not going to get killed. And that's a good point. On the other hand, you kind of know in your heart Captain Kirk's not gonna get killed in any given episode of Star Trek.

Peter Gould: Tony Soprano's probably not going to get it until the end.

Peter Gould: We went into this, and one of our concerns was the idea that doing a legal show seemed very unappetizing to us. We're not lawyers, and it's territory that's been plowed so endlessly with courtroom scenes.

Vince Gilligan: It's like buying an abandoned silver mine. It's been mined for the last 136 years. There's no nuggets left in this thing.

Peter Gould: So we looked in the tailings! We had a couple of insights right at the beginning. One was, this isn't a law show; it's a crime show. I hate to say it, but as a writer, I'm probably more interested in crime than I am in straight-ahead legal drama.

Vince Gilligan: We can't do legal as well. There's so many great law shows and law movies, and we can't touch those. But we can show the stuff you never see in the law show. The law shows are about the talking. Every great law show, from Perry Mason to Matlock to L.A. Law to Law & Order to The Practice to A Few Good Men to The Caine Mutiny to To Kill A Mockingbird, it's all about the great discourse, the great arguments, the great forensics of it all in the courtroom.

But what we'd never seen was people sitting around, bored out of their fucking skulls in the courtroom, not saying anything. So that's what we wanted to do.

Peter Gould: We did go to court and sat around a lot and talked to lawyers. One of the things that we found out is that most cases don't go to trial. Most things are settled in the hallways. There's dickering. If every case went to trial, we'd have no system at all. I felt like, even in the legal side, there was room for us to open up a little bit of our own area. But having said that, ultimately, you're not going to see a lot of courtroom scenes in the show.

Vince Gilligan: It's not about making fun of the legal system. It's not about portraying it as particularly broken. It's just about showing a different side of it that you don't see in other TV shows and other movies.

We had a really interesting day down at the LA Superior Court with all of our writers. The wheels of justice grind slowly, but exceedingly fine, just like they say. Stuff happens. Stuff gets accomplished. But in real life, unlike in the movies, there is a lot of sitting around, shuffling papers, and coughing. And not too much is happening. They're waiting for some guy to come out of the hallway, get off his cell phone, come into the room, and give his testimony. That's the stuff you never see in the movies that we wanted to show.

Vince Gilligan: We just had wonderful actors on that show. The easier question to answer is what didn't that show teach me. I wouldn't be here talking to you now. I wouldn't know how to do this job, if it weren't for The X-Files. It taught me literally everything I know about writing and producing and directing television. It's the iron-reinforced, concrete foundation of everything I know and do.

And it taught me, among many other things, that you hire the best actors that are out there. If you don't, no matter how well it's written and no matter how well it's directed, your show isn't going to be that good. We had an excellent casting person on X-Files, Rick Millikan. We have excellent casting people on Better Call Saul, the same folks we had on Breaking Bad, Sharon Bialy and Sherry Thomas. They find people constantly we've never heard of. Certain people, like Bryan Cranston, I had him in mind for Breaking Bad. But most of the great actors, aside from a few notable exceptions, on both shows were discoveries of Sharon and Sherry.

Peter Gould: When we were casting for Saul, a few people made lists, including Nora, my wife, and Nora was the first person I heard say Bob Odenkirk. It may have been one of those ideas that occurred to a number of people at the same time.

Vince Gilligan: We were all big fans of Mr. Show.

Peter Gould: When we originally talked about him in the writers' room, he was a little bit of a lawyer cartoon. He was a comic relief character. He was a two-and-a-half-dimensional, because on Breaking Bad, I don't think we did completely flat characters. He was a little bit larger than life. I was very worried about him fitting into the show.

The fact that he became an honest to God human being, not so much to his behavior. We never really learned anything about him on Breaking Bad, not personally. But you did learn where he drew the line, especially in that wonderful moment where Walt says, "I say when we're done," and you started seeing there were all sorts of levels to Saul that transcended simply being comic relief.

I was so proud of that, to the point where we got to season five, and he really was a human being, and I felt so gratified by especially that last scene he has in Breaking Bad, where he's been stripped of the suit of lights, as we call it. He's there, and he's all in white and beige, and you can just see that to him, the fun is over. I thought that was sort of touching, and the idea that you could be touched by this character, who started out as such a cartoon, really made me feel great.

Of course, I was also so glad that he became so useful to Breaking Bad. We really needed him.

Vince Gilligan: We did. Walt needed a consigliere. He needed a river guide. He needed that further entree to the criminal underbelly.

Everything Peter just said, it bears stressing that this character couldn't have become so multi-dimensional and solid and human if not for the guy playing him. If Bob Odenkirk weren't the actor that he is, a couple things wouldn't have happened. We would have gotten tired of the character, because the actor wouldn't have risen to the occasion so admirably.

And, as happened with the character of Hank, played by Dean Norris, the character of Jesse, played by Aaron Paul, happened with Bob Odenkirk in the role of Saul. Those were three characters who became integral to the show in ways that I never conceived of them becoming, strictly because the actors were so good and so much fun to write for and so capable of nuance that the characters followed suit.

Peter Gould: That's what's so much fun about television. The show talks back to you, and you get to see what the actors do.

For a silly example, Moira [Walley-Beckett] came into the writers' room one day and said, "Did you know that Charles [Baker]," who plays Skinny Pete, "can play the piano really well?" He was on the set, and there was a piano, and he was playing. Now, you can write a scene where he plays the piano. That's a small version of learning, "You know, Bob, he's really good. We can give him more." That's a wonderful feeling.