Breaking Bad: Vince Gilligan interview

Vince Gilligan's Breaking Bad is a deserved critical triumph and has been showered with awards. But when Gilligan first pitched the show he was told by the CEO of Sony America that it was "the single worst idea for a television show that I have heard in my whole life".

The writer Stephen King, who calls Breaking Bad "an American classic", said he would loved to have been a fly-on-the-wall at the 'pilot pitch' meeting where Gilligan first proposed the concept . . . a middle-aged suburban chemistry teacher with terminal cancer who goes completely off the rails and starts a new career cooking and selling crystal meth.

Gilligan said: "I first had to sell the project to the studio and I got so lucky. The Sony part was surprisingly easy and looking back it's a bit shocking. I had a prior relationship with Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, the co-heads of Sony Television, because I'd worked on an ill-fated pilot for CBS with them. Even though it didn't work out, they had liked the script and said there was an open door to bring back any new ideas.

"So around 2005, I took them the idea for what became Breaking Bad. When I was pitching it - describing a middle-aged family man who has cancer and starts to cook crystal meth, they looked like deer in the headlights, as if to say 'what are we hearing?' At that point I did think I may have a programme that may not be for everyone. I wouldn't have blamed them for being careful and I expected it to be forgotten but they rang back a few days later and said 'guess what? We're going to buy it!'

"They had talked to the big boss, Sony CEO Michael Lynton, who was born in England by the way, and he went for it, even though, as he told me later, he had said to them that Breaking Bad 'is the single worst idea for a television show that I have heard in my whole life.' But more power to him. He said he had picked these guys to bring in ideas and he would back them."

The bold decision paid off. Breaking Bad, set in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is now into its fifth series (series four can be seen at the moment on NetFlix) and has won 26 television industry awards, including six Emmys.

The star of the show, superbly played by Bryan Cranston, is Walter 'Walt' White - the character name he had from inception. Gilligan says names are important to him, adding: "It sounded bland enough and I liked the matching symbols and the alliterative nature of it."

Walt does indeed break bad, becoming progressively more dangerous and self-serving, under the guise of doing bad things to protect and support his family (he has a wife, a grown up son 'Walt Junior' with cerebral palsy and, by now, a baby).

I wondered, after six years of having to inhabit the mind of such a devious and scheming man, whether Walter's psyche had bled into Gilligan's own? "That's an excellent question . . . I have been carrying him around in earnest since 2005 and I do feel like I have been keeping him too close at hand. I started to realise that he was colouring my perception of life. Not in a straightforward criminal way - like making me want to make drugs or rob a bank. The way he has affected me has been even darker. I now see the world as a more scary place. The world seems a little more dangerous and a more frightening place. I'm hoping that feeling goes when the show is finally ended."

It's interesting to note that Cranston's wife says she can only watch the series during daylight hours, because it's too disturbing to watch at night.

What intrigues me about Walter White is that he is so pathologically self-deluded about his motives. Would Gilligan agree?

"You've nailed it," he said. "The script writers and I have a joke that if Walter had a superpower it would be to lie effortlessly, and the person he lies to the most is himself. He is fantastic at deluding himself. Lots of the fans of the show in America take him at his word, that he is doing everything to help his family, and up to a certain point you can believe that. But there's going to be a point, maybe, where the viewer says, 'Walt's actually full of crap'. He is really doing it for himself because he likes feeling like the boss.

"Early in season one, he turns down the offer of financial help for his cancer treatment from a friend. Up to that point, you feel sympathy. But he's handed a way out from his old lab partner - a life preserver like some deus ex machina and he still opts to cook crystal meth. That's the moment when his protestations ring false."

Breaking Bad has many shocking scenes of violence. Of the moment when the acid Walt is using to dissolve a tattooed corpse ends up eating through a bath-tub, and leaking a gooey slush of human remains through the ceiling, Gilligan says: "The bloodiness of it is a dramatic moment and it's not a pleasant thing. But I knew I might be a bit of a strange, warped thing because I never saw it as that big a deal."

But entwined with the violence and darkness are fine moments of comedy. Did the show need that?

Gilligan said: "You need a much humour as possible in a show like this. That was something I leaned from working on the X-Files. I learned so much from Chris Carter, who was the creator of Millennium about serial killers. It was hard to watch, and depressingly dark and I knew for Breaking Bad - a bleak show with cancer and criminality - that it would need to be leavened with humour. So we go for moments of absurdest humour but the moments have to feel real and derive from behaviour that the characters would perform."

One such moment is hilarious. Walter is turned away from his house by his wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) and as he strops off he throws up into the air behind him a giant takeaway pizza. It arcs out of its box and lands perfectly on the garage roof, staring out like a giant meat and cheese eye.

Gilligan is proud of the scene. He explained: "There was a lot of debate among the crew about how Bryan would throw it. We even thought we would have to digitally recreate it. But Bryan got it on the first take. He threw it up and this huge pizza came out of the box perfectly and landed in the right spot. When the director shouted 'cut', everyone clapped and even though we did a few more takes we never got it to happen again. That scene is the first take and it still makes me laugh."

The humour is also evident in some of the supporting characters. Mark Margolis, who was in Scarface, plays an aged wheelchair-bound Mexican drug lord called Héctor who, after a stroke, can communicate only by pressing repeatedly a bicycle bell. "Mark is one of the funniest guys in New York," says Gilligan.

He also praises Bob Odenkirk for his portrayal of corrupt lawyer Saul Goodman. Gilligan says: "Bob was very familiar because he was 10 years on Mr Show, a sketch comedy. Bob wasn't an actor, he was a sketch character comic. The Breaking Bad writers and I were thinking of The Godfather and how Michael Corelone and Vito have their Consigliere, who advised them on how to keep everything as legal as possible. We thought: 'What kind of lawyer would Walter White have?' So Saul, who dresses like a circus clown and is a bit oafish, is just right because although he is silly and bombastic he is a good lawyer in terms of knowing how to work the system. He's canny and astute and not an opponent to underestimate."

And has Gilligan ever been tempted to sneak in with a walk-on part? "Ah, to do an Alfred Hitchcock? God bless him but I'm not tempted. If a director or producer does it now there is such a risk of a less than flattering comparison with Hitchcock."

Perhaps he's right. Dealing with the dark mind of Walter White is enough to keep anyone occupied.

^{Breaking Bad Season 4 is on Netflix, the world's leading internet subscription service for enjoying movies and TV shows.}