Tag: walter white

“Better Call Saul” Writer Gennifer Hutchison Discusses Her Craft and Career

As of writing this, we are over halfway done with the first season of the Breaking Bad spinoff, Better Call Saul, and I think by this point, we can all breathe a sigh of relief.

Not only does Better Call Saul avoid the pitfalls of most failed spinoffs, it rockets past them to become a truly great piece of fiction. In hindsight, we probably didn’t have anything to worry about anyway.

Why? Well, because so many of the people that made Breaking Bad a masterpiece returned, and it’s not like they weren’t going to give the show their all.

One of those Breaking Bad alums is writer/producer Gennifer Hutchison, who wrote some of that show’s finest episodes, including “Confessions” and “Cornered”, which gave us the now-famous “I am the one who knocks” line.

So needless to say, when Adam and I sat down on spooky Friday the 13th to have a phone call with Gennifer Hutchison, we were both pretty jazzed.

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VIKTOR HERRMANN: What were the early days of your career like? How difficult was it to get where you are now, and what kept you going through the years?

GENNIFER HUTCHISON: That’s a good question. My first job in LA was as a PA in the writers’ office at the X-Files, which was a pretty awesome opportunity. I ended up becoming Vince Gilligan’s assistant in, I think, Season 8.

That was sort of my start. And then from there I kept moving up and I eventually kept consistently getting jobs as either a writers’ assistant or a producers’ assistant. But every show I got on would either get cancelled, or my boss would leave, or I would have to leave, and so after X-Files, every show I was on I was only on for a season.

This went on for quite a while. It was pretty difficult because I was never able to really get any traction, as far as an assistant who could then pitch possibly writing a freelance [episode]. I was writing my own stuff, but I definitely had some days where I was like, “what could I do instead?” [laughs]
But I kept doing it, mostly because I just didn’t know what else I would do. It was the only thing I could think of that I wanted to do.

Then I was working on Mad Men in Season 1, for Matthew Weiner. Season 1 was wrapping up, and one of the AMC producers said, “Oh, we’re working with your old boss, Vince Gilligan,” and I was like, “What is the show?” and they said, “It’s this thing called Breaking Bad.” And so I immediately contacted him and said, “Please hire me in any capacity.”

So he brought me on as his assistant, and then it just kind of hit, where I managed to get on a show that was great and sustained. And since I had this prior relationship with Vince, he knew what my goals were, and he had always been really supportive. When I came back for Season 2, I had a conversation with him and said, “I want to write for the show. What do I need to do to show you that I’m ready?”

And he said, “I need to read your stuff, any extra work there is on the show, webisodes, blogs, do those, and just show me.” So basically Season 2 was kind of my audition. [laughs]
And by the end of that, I said, “So, what do you think?” And he was like, “Well, why don’t we give you a freelance in Season 3 and see how that goes?” And it went really well, and that’s when he ended up staffing me.

VH: What was it like in those days, both as an assistant and when you first came on to the writing staff? How comfortable were you pitching ideas, versus how often you bit your tongue?

GH: When you’re a writers’ assistant you tend to not pitch as much. It varies by room. Some rooms don’t really like writers’ assistants to pitch, some do. You basically wait until everybody else has talked. [laughs] And then, if you have a pitch, you’ll volunteer it.

The difference of pitching as an assistant as opposed to pitching as a writer is you only want to pitch your best ideas. You want to make sure that it’s a great idea that you’re really confident in. When you’re on staff, your job is to keep the flow going, so a lot of times you pitch, “Oh, this is the bad version, but here’s what I’m trying to get to.”

As an assistant, you’re never really pitching the bad version. You want to pitch your absolute best. So transitioning from that? My first season as a full writer, that was interesting. It’s like, “Oh, I don’t have to be 100% sure of every detail of my pitch. I can take a flier, and it’s going to be okay. I’m not disappointing them.”

As a staff writer, you want to make sure that your pitches are great, but there’s definitely a little more freedom. You’re on staff. That’s your job. They believe in you, at least to a certain extent. [laughs] There’s more comfort.

ADAM GREENE: As we know, in Hollywood and pro-filmmaking, it’s pretty male dominated. What advice would you give to female writers for how to get to where they want to go?

GH: It’s tricky, and I think that there’s more attention being paid to it now. There’s definitely a huge disparity. I think it really comes down to, honestly, just being your best. There’s the idea that with women you have to be twice as good to be considered half as good. But it’s generally advice I would give to anybody who’s trying.

Do your best job, no matter what job you’re in. So if you’ve got that writers’ assistant job, be the best writers’ assistant. But make sure, especially for women, that people understand that you have goals beyond that.

Don’t be afraid to speak up; don’t be pushy, there’s a difference between being persistent and harassing people. But I think a lot of times, women tend to be quieter. They tend to not self-promote, just because of the culture we’re raised in.

It took me a long time to speak up, and say, “Vince, this is what I want.” And I think if I had spoken up earlier he would have been just as open to it. So I think it’s mostly about having that confidence in yourself, and being able to self-promote.

Whereas I think guys are told, “Go in there! Go in there! Do it!” And I think women need to start being told that as well, and people need to listen.

VH: What are your writing habits like, and do you find that those habits change based on different projects you’re working on, or do you tend to stay consistent?

GH: With this show, we break all the stories together. We do all of them on 3×5 cards and then you take those to write your outline, and from there you write your script.

When I write on my own projects, I tend to do something similar. I like to break on cards, or I might skip the cards and go straight to outlining, but I definitely do the outlining.

As far as my personal writing habits, I tend to write in bursts. I’ll write for 45 minutes, and then I’ll take a 20 minute break, and then I’ll write for 30 minutes, and take a 10 minute break. I’m very bad about procrastinating, so deadlines are very good for me.

On my own projects, I tend to have to impose deadlines, or I tend to languish a bit more. That’s why TV is a really good place for me. It’s a world of deadlines. [laughs]
VH: I don’t think you’re the only writer who struggles with procrastination.

GH: [laughs] No, no, it’s something I always beat myself up about. And then once I started working, I was like, “Oh, everybody does this.”

AG: When you are faced with no idea how to continue or resolve or even start a scene, what gets you in the zone, as a writer?

GH: Other than fear?

AG: Other than fear and coffee.

GH: [laughs] You know, I actually don’t drink coffee. Mostly what I tend to do is I try to step away for a minute. I might sit and play a video game for half an hour, or go outside and take a walk. And then it just comes to a point where you have to force yourself to sit down.

It also helps me to talk to other people. The TV shows I’ve worked on, and TV in general, is very collaborative. Talking out ideas helps get you past writers block in a lot of ways. Sometimes I’ll just go and talk to my husband and say, “I’m having a real problem.”

He’s not a writer, and usually he won’t give me an answer. As I’m talking, I’ll figure out the answer. But just being able to say it out loud to someone helps get past the issue.

VH: Your first episode, 308, “I See You,” I imagine was a tough episode to write. It’s very different than most Breaking Bad episodes. It’s much quieter. What was your process writing that, and what were the challenges? I’m sure there was a lot of pressure to get it right.

GH: Yeah, there was. You don’t want to let your boss down, especially when they’ve taken a chance on you. Breaking that episode was tricky, and the big sequence with the Cousin crawling across the floor on his severed legs was a late addition.

I remember when it got pitched in the room and Vince was really excited about it. I had this moment of panic, where I was like, “I have to do what?” Our most iconic scenes actually came from a pitch where we thought, “That’s completely insane, we can never do that.” And the more we talk about it, and refine it, we realize that it will totally work. That was sort of my first panic moment, and then, ultimately it ended up being great.

The other thing that was interesting about that episode is that it was the first of my Walter White monologues; I tend to get monologues of his in my episodes. That was really fun for me write, but getting it right was a lot of pressure.

I remember when Vince gave me notes. “This direction is good, but I think you need to do a little bit more of this. Why don’t you take another stab at it?” And I was able to refine it from there.

Vince was really great through the whole process, and really allowed me to address my own notes, and find my way through the script.

AG: What is your unwritten rule of screenwriting? What’s something that’s maybe overlooked by aspiring writers or teachers, but you consider crucial?

GH: Honestly, I’m a character driven person, and I don’t think that’s necessarily overlooked, but I think there can be this idea that the idea should come from a concept instead of a character. I think you can have amazing concepts, but if you don’t have this great character driving your story, then it’s just not going to get where you want it to go. I think getting trapped in the plot as opposed to letting the character guide the plot can be a real problem.

A lot of times when I’m working on my own stuff, I’ll find myself thinking, “Okay, and then I need a run-and-jump here,” and it’s like, “No, no, no. What would the character actually do here?” That’s where you’re going to get the best drama. How would a real person, your real person that you’ve created, react in this situation?

AG: It might not even be something that you want to happen to the character.

GH: Exactly. We found ourselves in that situation a lot on Breaking Bad, and we would always go, “Why isn’t this working? We need this, we need that,” and it’s like, “Okay, no, no, no. Where’s Walt’s head at? What would he do?” And that usually got us through.

VH: Moving onto Saul. So far this first season feels to me very, very deliberate. Even more than Breaking Bad did. Sometimes things are set up very subtly, and they take several episodes to pay off. Can you talk about the process in the Better Call Saul writers’ room compared to Breaking Bad, and how broadly you might have planned things out this time around?

GH: Sure. It’s funny, because I think Better Call Saul benefits from the fact that we did five seasons of Breaking Bad, and so many of us came from there. We really had that basis, and we really refined our process. Coming in [to Better Call Saul], it was more about figuring out what the show was, and not how do we get there. We know the best way to break stories for us as a group.

And yeah, it is really serialized in a lot of ways. Which is funny because I think a lot of people expected it to be, you know, Saul deals with a whacky client every week. And that’s not at all what it ended up being.

It was really a learning process for us when we started. It’s interesting that you say we placed so many things that don’t pay off until later. As we were going through, we really took it step-by-step. And there were definitely points where we had discoveries. So sometimes we went back to make sure we had laid the groundwork.

It really was a brick-by-brick process with Season 1 on this show. Because [Jimmy] doesn’t have this thing of, “I’m learning how to be a drug dealer,” it really is about, “How does this Jimmy guy become Saul?”

AG: Knowing that you have to be true to the Breaking Bad world, has that been a challenge or something that’s been good?

GH: Both. [laughs] It’s good to have parameters when you’re writing, because if you can do anything, you often can’t decide on what’s best. We know that there are certain characters that just don’t exist in Albuquerque at this point, so that’s good.

But there are other times where we’re like, “Oh, what if we did this?” But we can’t because we know that in Breaking Bad era, this character is not in jail, or isn’t here. So it really was a mix of feeling constrained, but then seeing opportunities, and wanting to pull as much of the Breaking Bad mythology as we could.

VH: Do you have any nightmare stories? A scene that was particularly tough and memorable to write?

GH: You know, it’s mostly in the breaks. When we’re putting an episode together on the board, that’s the hardest part. On both these shows, we tend to break in such detail that once you get to script, usually you have a really good idea of where you’re going.

As far as being in the room, all the Tuco stuff was very tricky. We wanted Tuco to be not exactly where he was in Breaking Bad, and we needed to introduce this new character, Nacho, in an interesting way.

As far as writing, the salon scene in “Hero,” when Kim and Jimmy are talking and she brings the cease and desist, was really interesting for me, because there’s a couple different things going on in that scene.

It was a challenging scene, not in a bad way, but just making sure that you establish their rapport, you show that she doesn’t like that she has to give this thing to him, but she also thinks that he needs to stop what he’s doing. He’s kind of trying to let her know his feelings for her. There’s a lot of little things going on in that scene. That was definitely something I spent a lot of time on, but it ultimately ended up being a great scene.

I just think Rhea and Bob did such an amazing job with it, and it was probably my favorite scene in the episode.

VH: In the performances, but in the writing too, there’s such a humanity between those two characters and how they interact. It’s wonderful.

GH: Yeah, those two have such great chemistry.

AG: Who came up with the allergic to electricity psychosis condition that Chuck faces? And has that world been fun to play in?

GH: That was pretty early. We knew that we wanted Chuck to have some sort of condition that kept him housebound. We liked the idea of it being something that was like, “Is this a real thing? Or is this a psychosomatic condition for him?”

As far as the electricity thing, I don’t know who specifically came up with it; it may have been Vince. I remember it coming up pretty early. Refined from, “This guy is stuck in his house, what is it that’s keeping him there?”

That’s been fun. Although, it causes problems, because a lot of stuff is like, “Okay, and then Chuck calls Jimmy,” and we’re like, “Chuck cannot call Jimmy.” [laughs] It’s fun, but it is very challenging.

Chuck also maintains such a sense of dignity, so you want to keep that balance. You don’t want him to come off like this stereotypical crazy guy in his house. You want him to feel like a real person. That’s definitely a fine line to walk.

VH: One last question: We already know that you’re a fantastic writer, but do you have any plans or aspirations to direct in the coming seasons?

GH: It’s funny, when I was in college, I wanted to be a director. I think that’s what everybody knows. But I had always written, and so I was like, “Oh, you can do that too. Great!” And so I started heading down the writing path, and I didn’t really think about directing for a while, but it is something that I still have interest in.

I would love to direct down the line, for sure. It’s something that I would hope to be able to do. It’s also a really tough job, and a specific skill set. So there’s definitely a lot of learning to be done. [laughs]
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You hear that, kids? You can be one of the best writers working in television, and there will always still be learning to be done.

I hope fans of the shows and of Gennifer’s work found this entertaining, but more than anything, I hope aspiring writers found it useful. Mrs. Hutchison gives out the kind of sage advice people usually charge multiple digits for, so study up, writers!

PS: If you enjoyed this interview, check out our earlier conversation with another Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul writer, Tom Schnauz. Some of the hints he gave us as to what Saul would contain are only now becoming evident.

March 17, 2015
Breaking Bad’s Tom Schnauz Talks Writing, Directing, and “Better Call Saul” – PART 2

Alright, friends, let’s not waste any time here. Diving right back into the second half of my and Adam’s interview with Breaking Bad writer/director/producer Tom Schnauz!

VIKTOR HERRMANN: About the end [of the series], this is just a little aside, but do you know whose idea it was to use “Baby Blue” as the outro song?

TOM SCHNAUZ: I’ll say with 96% certainty that it was Vince. He used to come in a lot of times and say “Here, I heard this on the radio.” Certainly the… holy moly, I’m drawing a complete blank. The song we used in 508.

VH: “Crystal Blue Persuasion”?

TS: Yeah, that was definitely a song Vince had been wanting to use for a long time. So I’m pretty sure “Baby Blue” was the same, too.

VH: What did it feel like when you finished the “Buried” script and you realized this was the last Breaking Bad script you would ever write?

TS: It was pretty depressing. [laughs] I gotta say, it was really, really tough. It was a very strange time for me. My own father passed away from cancer right in the middle of filming, and that episode is dedicated to him. There was a sadness to the Breaking Bad family breaking up, but I was going through my own thing with my own family, so maybe I would have been more emotionally torn by Breaking Bad ending if I didn’t have this other stuff going on in my life that was devastating.

VH: I don’t think anyone could blame you for that. So, now, you are in a way, still writing the characters. Now that you’ve been in the Better Call Saul writers’ room for a while, how has the idea of what the show would be like changed from what you thought it would be like before you got into the room?

TS: I don’t know if I had a clear idea. I think some part of me knew it was going to be, kind of carrying on the tradition of Breaking Bad, that same feeling. I think if you had asked me before we started, I may have said that this is going to be a more comedic version of the show. But part of me probably knew, inside, that it was going to have that same mix of drama.

We are attacking this just like our Breaking Bad episodes. We wonder where the character’s head is at and go from there. We don’t try to think “What’s the big comedic set piece?” or “What’s the funny thing we’re going to do?”, we do it from an emotional “What does our character need” type of thing and go from there. If it’s funny, great. Bob Odenkirk is incredibly funny and I think even the serious scenes, he’s going to find, you know, the little flash of humor here and there.

VH: So far, is Better Call Saul as serialized as Breaking Bad or is each episode more of its own thing?

TS: I’ll say it’s just as serialized at this point. We’re only five episodes in, but I mean, we’re just doing the kind of writing we know how to do. Which is serialized, following the character and his development.

The interesting thing is, you know, this is a prequel to Breaking Bad, of course, Mike Ehrmantraut’s coming back… so we’re in this really interesting situation where we know where the characters are going so instead of having this freedom of letting a character, you know, go off wherever it needs to go, we sort of know where we have to end up. So it’s like we’re fitting these puzzle pieces into this space.

We’ve created the start point, and we know the end point. We’re really trying to maneuver within the reality and history that we already have.

VH: Has that been challenging? Have you found something maybe you’d like to do but it would conflict with the Breaking Bad continuity?

TS: I think so, I think there’s been a couple of times where we’ve been like, “Oh, this is good!” and then someone will say, “Well, you know what, in episode 208, when Saul’s introduced, he says this and that”, and we’re like, “Oh, shit.” [laughs]

You know, we have what we’ve established with Mike and his granddaughter, Kaylee, and Kaylee’s mom, and what that situation is. We’re trying to explore why is mom there but not dad? We’re exploring that a little bit. I don’t want to say too much without spoiling things.

VH: Of course. When we e-mailed, you mentioned you were working on your first Saul outline. I’m assuming I can answer this question myself based on what you said, but are the Saul outlines so far just as detailed as those legendary Breaking Bad outlines that none of the fans have ever gotten to see?

TS: Yeah, they’re the same. I think the first outline we did, for the first episode, was 17 pages, [laughs] which is a good sized outline for us. My outline I tried to keep a little more conservative. Right now it’s a 12 page outline. We carded them exactly the same – actually that reminds me I should take pictures of these boards before they disappear – so eventually on Twitter, after they air, I can post them. We’re pretty detailed.

ADAM GREENE: Tom, do you find it more preferable to write or to direct?

TS: Oh, I love directing. I’ve only gotten to do it the one time, except for when I was back at college. Preferable? You know, I need to do it some more before I can give you a straight answer. I mean, I love writing and I think the hardest part is the writing, getting that right.

I feel like when you’re directing you have a lot of people supporting you. A lot of departments and a lot of very skilled people doing things, contributing ideas. The writing is a little more solitary, even though we have our core group who we break the story with, it just feels harder to break a story and get it right. Certainly all the heavy lifting’s been done, so when it comes time to direct, I’m not going to say it’s easy… but I had fun directing, for sure.

AG: A question about Walt’s character: he has two sides, the everyday normal Walt, and the conniving, evil Walt. How do you effectively ride that line between his Jekyll and Hyde?

TS: So much of that is credited to Bryan. We were lucky to have an actor who, you could write down the subtext of what we want to say as writers without having dialogue there, and he, through a squint of his eyes, we get what’s going on in his head. So when he’s saying one thing you know he means another.

AG: Was there anything in particular that comes to mind that you learned working with the cast and crew? Whenever I get onto a new set, or start a new project, I always seem to gain from someone something that I didn’t have before, and I just wondered if something rubbed off on you that might influence your future projects?

TS: Yeah, it’s just being open to everybody’s ideas. Like I said, I drew storyboards for everything, but I didn’t stick to them rigidly. They were more of a guide into going in and having a feeling of what I wanted to do, but a lot of times Michael Slovis would come in and say “Hey, look at this” and it would be much better than what I originally drew. And Bryan would have a thought about the way a line should be read.

It’s just… always being open to everybody else’s ideas. I learned that in the writers’ room too. The most effective writers’ rooms are the ones where you feel completely safe. You get into a writers’ room where there’s one person who’s judgmental, it is completely damaging. It just shuts down creativity and people don’t want to say things because they think they’re going to get made fun of. That is something I luckily learned very early on, that you cannot, you cannot have that personality or be that personality in a writers’ room.

You want to be free to say the worst idea ever and not be laughed out of the room, because you never know what good thing is going to come out of it.

AG: My final question, and then I want to wrap up, because you’ve been so generous with your time. Do you have any advice for writers that are trying to get into the business while also trying to maintain their voice?

TS: Yeah, I always hate giving this answer cause it sounds like… bullshit, a lot of the time. [laughs] So much of this business depends on luck and timing, and so what you have to do as a writer is to keep writing and keep generating products, keep churning out ideas, and creating scripts that make you happy. Make yourself happy, that is.

I think early on, one of my first screenplays was, “Oh, what is the public going to love? What am I going to sell?” And it was just a disaster, it went nowhere. Finally, the script that I had optioned was one that I was just like, “Screw it, I’m gonna write a script for myself, I’m somehow going to get the money together, and I’m going to make this film myself.” And once I started writing to make myself happy, I think that’s when things gelled for me as a writer, and then, fortunately, it just fell into the right hands at the right time.

This was back in 1995, I wrote, again, my first feature screenplay that was really for myself. The screenplay never got made, but it got me in the door with an agent and a producer, and it got the ball rolling for me when I started thinking “Yes, I can do this for a living” so I think what you have to do is keep trying to write things that make you happy, things that you are proud of. And then, the unfortunate thing is that you need to keep shooting those bullets out there until one lands in the right hands.

Again, if it’s something you really want to do, and you keep trying and going for it, you gotta hope that your script lands in the person that is looking for that particular kind of thing at that moment. A lot of times you can have a really well written script, and it’s just gonna, you know, cross the desk of people who either A.) don’t have good taste, or B.) they’re just not looking for that thing at that moment. You know, you wrote a quiet little dramatic independent film, and they’re looking for an action comedy. But there is somebody out there looking for the thing you have written, so you gotta keep, you know, putting that arrow in the bow and keep shooting until it lands in the right spot. I think persistence is what it takes.

If I can give any bit of advice, keep trying, if it’s something you really want to do, keep going for it until you get your script in the eyes of the person who is looking for it.

VH: That’s great, I don’t think that was a bullshit answer at all.

TS: [laughs] I hate using the word “luck”. It sounds like bullshit, but luck is… as a concept for right moment, right time, or needing the planets to align, or whatever that other bullshit stuff is. [laughs] I don’t believe in the mystical things but you just gotta wait for the right things to align.

June 25, 2014
Breaking Bad’s Tom Schnauz Talks Writing, Directing, and “Better Call Saul”

Anybody who knows me knows that I love “Breaking Bad”. Hell, to say I love “Breaking Bad” is to say World War II was a minor international conflict. I adore the show. Every aspect. The performances, the production design, the editing, the cinematography, the music (both needle drops and score)—all of it is absolutely masterful.

But in themselves, great production, performances, etc, a compelling show do not make. What is absolutely mandatory for a terrific final product is a terrific script. A script worthy of the work put in by all those people on the production staff. Over the course of its 62 episode run, “Breaking Bad” has had 62 terrific scripts.

And some of the best (and certainly most kick-ass) of the bunch have been written by Tom Schnauz. Remember the one where Hank is attacked by the Cousins in a mall parking lot? That was him. Or how about when Walt buries all of his money in the desert and Marie confronts Skyler about the secrets she’s been keeping? Also him. Or the one in which (SPOILERS, YO) Walt murders Mike? Yeah, he wrote and directed that one.

All of this to say: when I reached out to Tom Schnauz for an interview, and he said yes—I was pretty freaking excited. A Breaking Bad fan himself, Adam Greene was also able to join the discussion. With that set-up out of the way, let’s not waste any more time, and get to the goods.

VIKTOR HERRMANN: So, I want to let you know that the moment in “Say My Name”, in 507, when it’s a medium shot of Walt, and he’s fuming, he’s just had the fight with Mike, and he walks out of frame and then he walks back into frame – that made my heart stop.

TOM SCHNAUZ: Thank you so much. We had a substitute camera man that day, and I remember he kept wanting to pan with Walt as he walked off, and I said “No, no, lock it off. Let him exit and then come back in.”

Vince had no idea. We usually write a lot of our shots in the script, even when we’re not directing, we’ll kind of direct it on the page, and that was not something that was written on the page. I remember I was very happy when Vince liked it when he saw it, because Vince has final say over everything and that was something I was glad made it into the show.

VH: I’m glad it did too, because that’s one of my favorite moments of the whole series. On that episode, on 507. The teaser is basically five or six minutes of dialogue, so when you went to shoot that, how did you prioritize what coverage you were going to get?

TS: That was almost a full day, that teaser. We also shot the stuff right after, the beginning of Act One, when Mike’s in the truck with the money and Jesse’s saying “what about me?” You can sort of tell that’s done right after. The sun is setting, it’s almost done in a oner, but we cut with a little bit of coverage.

We started the day, I remember I asked Bryan if he wanted to go first or wait. And I pretty much knew I was going to film Bryan’s side all up through lunch. So we got the opening, the face meeting, and then I went in for the close coverage on Walt, and just got a bunch of different sizes. I got as much as I could leading up to lunchtime. And I think I ended on his closer stuff, I think I worked wider and worked my way in.

I had everything storyboarded, I drew little sketches. And I think as time was going by, as lunchtime was approaching and I knew I had to switch sides based off that, I started dropping shots. But I knew I wanted the really wide wides, the great backgrounds and then, couple of mediums, and then went in for the tight stuff. His speech was covered almost all the way through, except for the really tight shots at the end when he says “You’re goddamn right”.

It was a learning experience. It was my first time directing, so there was a bit of a, you know, learning curve. But I had a great AD, Nina Jack, an amazing DP, Michael Slovis, so they held my hand through the process. [laughs]
VH: Did you storyboard everything? The meth-cooking montage?

TS: Of all the things you’d think would be the more storyboarded one, but it was actually kind of the loosest. I didn’t exactly know what the set was going to be. I had a rough idea and I went in there knowing I wanted this movement from left to right, as if we’re circling the cook area. So I knew the majority of the shots would be “Okay, they’re at this station, the camera is moving left or right in a straight line.” And then we had B-Camera just picking up all these little bits and pieces. I ended up using those little B-Camera bits and pieces a lot more than I thought I would, thanks to our, at the time Assistant Editor, Sharidan [Sotello], who later went on to become a full Editor on my episode, “Buried”; she co-edited it. She was really responsible for a lot of that montage looking the way it did.

VH: Switching over to writing. What are your writing habits like? Are you someone who writes for a certain amount of time, or do you work towards a specific page count?

TS: I am a night writer. For some reason, my brain doesn’t start functioning until later in the evening. [laughs] When I have to, I’ll write in the daytime. I just came off this show “Resurrection” where we did a lot of writing in the offices, so I would write in the daytime there, but I get a majority of the work done at night. I tend to put some music on, and usually around nine o’ clock at night, I feel this sort of momentum happening, and at some point I sort of get on a tare. If there’s a deadline, I’ll stay up until four in the morning, or more if I have to. Whatever the deadline is.

I never say to myself “I’m gonna finish five pages tonight” or whatever. I’ll just keep going. And there are days where you get a page done. [laughs]
I just wrote my outline for my first episode of “Better Call Saul”, and I’m not a big fan of writing outlines, so it took me a really long time to write this thing. Just because I’m in the room and we’re breaking and I wasn’t getting a lot done at night. So I mostly did my writing on the weekends. I need a long stretch of time that’s allotted to writing. It’s a momentum thing. Once I get rolling, I feel like I can do a bunch, but if I do it in starts and stops, it’s not very productive.

VH: That’s kind of how I am, so I sympathize. Correct me if I’m wrong, but from Season 3 and onwards, all of the writers, except for Genny Huttchison, were producers, right?

TS: That sounds correct, yeah.

VH: How important do you think that was in delivering the uncompromised vision of every writer to the screen?

TS: You know, Genny was as a producer as much as the rest of us. The producer title is a writers’ guild bump, pretty much. Once you’re around a certain amount of time, you get a producer’s title. From my first show on, when I was on “X-Files”, I didn’t have a producer’s title, but I don’t do very much different now than I did then.

That was just the nature of Chris Carter’s and Vince and Frank Spotniz and John Shiban, their way of letting the writers be involved all through the process. It’s different on different shows, but I’ve always been lucky to work under their umbrella, where the writer comes in and they’re involved in casting and editing and every step of the way. For me, having that title is just an indication that you’ve been around a little longer.

VH: Hopefully a little bit of a paycheck bump too.

TS: Yeah. [laughs] But every writer, including Genny, produced their own shows. Genny was on set for her episodes, it was just because she was new, she didn’t have the title.

VH: Being on set, was that a major influence on how you directed your episode? Obviously you worked with Michelle MacLaren a bunch of times.

TS: Oh, yeah! I got to be in the shadow of a lot of really great directors, Michelle MacLaren being probably the most important person in my life as far as that’s concerned. And I got to be around Kim Manners on the “X-Files”, and Rob Bowman, he directed an episode of “Night Stalker” that I did. Yeah, I can’t say how important it was, watching them work. Especially Michelle MacLaren, on 307, 311, and 405. I met with her privately to get directing tips, so she was really important to me. If 507 is considered a success, I owe a lot to her.

VH: About 307. Jesse has the whole “What happens now” speech. How much of that was broken in the room, and how much was you just writing the dialogue?

TS: I remember specifically the stuff about wanting him [Hank] to put a gun up his mouth, that I can say for sure was me. And burn his house to the ground, because I remember I was kind of riffing on Clint Eastwood in “Unforgiven” when he says, you know, “I’ll kill your family, I’ll burn your house down.” I always had that in my head as a great threat to say to somebody. So, a lot of that stuff, I remember I specifically wrote.

Having said that, the talk in 307, between Marie and Hank on the bed, when he’s talking about “I’m not the man I thought I was”, that particular line I wrote with the help of John Shiban. We talked and he kind of got me to that point. But a lot of the talk leading up to that final line, I remember Vince was pitching out what the scene was in his head, so a lot of that dialogue came from Vince. Dialogue wise, I can say is credited to me, but that section was a lot of me copying down what Vince was saying in the room.

VH: You mentioned John Shiban and that just got me thinking; you wrote an episode with him, and I believe two with Moira Walley-Beckett. What was that process like? Did you just split it up, “I’ll take Act One and Act Two”, or was it more collaborative than that?

TS: I think racing for time on a lot of those episodes, it was a lot of “Okay, you do Teaser, Act One, Act Two”. I think on 311 with John, I did Teaser, [Act] One and Two, and John did Three and Four. I know I got a little dialogue in Three and Four, Saul talking about convincing a woman he was Kevin Costner.

On 409 and 412, Moira and I just divided up Acts. We ended up trading Acts and giving each other little notes, but not a lot.

VH: I’m curious about the gunsalesman character in 307. How do you approach writing a character like that, a walk-on?

TS: That was the very first thing I wrote for a Breaking Bad script. I went to that scene first cause I thought, this will just be goofy. I came up with all that nonsense about the woman who likes to be urinated on, but I was sure, I could have bet money that Vince was going to laugh at this and want to cut it or tone it down. And right from the beginning he loved it. Then we shot it, and I was like, “Okay, we’re going to cut this down”, then Vince in the editing room would laugh at it every single time. So, it was one of those things where I thought “Let me shoot for crazy, outrageous dumb stuff and see what happens”, and it stuck.

Honestly, for me, it borders on being a little too unreal. It’s a little too cartoonish with the comedy, but it stuck.

VH: Considering how dark that episode gets by the end, it was good to have that humor there.

TS: We always try to get as much comedy into these scripts as possible. I just had lunch with a friend who told me that watching the show, he always got excited seeing Bob Odenkirk’s name in the beginning. Especially in the later seasons, everything was so dark, and he when he knew Bob Odenkirk was in it, he knew there would at least be a moment of lightness, some comedy, amidst all the horror.

VH: I still love that whole “Star Trek” talk between Badger and Skinny Pete.

TS: Boy, Vince was pitching that forever. As long as I can remember, he’s been talking about that as a “Star Trek” episode, and it finally made it into an episode.

VH: Skipping towards the end, I know in the [Breaking Bad Insider] Podcasts, you guys talked about considering the “everyone BUT Walt dies” ending. So, what was it ultimately that made you decide that wasn’t the right direction to go?

TS: That’s one of those things, I don’t know if we could ever define why we made the decision we made, except that it felt right. That’s as much as I can really say about it. You kind of get a feeling that this story has to come to an end with him and his death. It started with him getting cancer, his death sentence, and once you have a character who has a death sentence, there’s no turning back. He’s going to die, either from cancer or because of his activities. You sort of have to reach that conclusion.

I mean, could it have worked if we had killed everybody else off? Yeah, but it would have been a different feeling we’d leave the audience with. I think we were all pretty much in agreement in the room. I don’t remember anybody clamoring to go that other direction. We definitely talked about it, but I think we were just exploring every option.

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That’s it for now, folks. Come back next week for the second half of our interview with Tom Schnauz, where he gives a spectacular answer to the old “what advice would you give” question, and tells us what we can expect to see from “Better Call Saul”!

June 18, 2014
Why the Writing of Breaking Bad is So Good

Before we start, I have one word for you: SPOILERS.

There. Let’s begin.

Every screenwriter, aspiring or otherwise, knows the immense surge of inspiration that can come after watching a great film. It’s jet fuel. It propels us to keep working, to keep striving to make our own storytelling measure up. A great piece of filmmaking can be a better lesson than the most acclaimed college course on the planet. Which leads me to Breaking Bad.

Breaking Bad isn’t just television. It’s filmmaking of the highest possible caliber. For screenwriters, it’s a goldmine (or money-stuffed barrel) of lessons on great storytelling. Though, if you’re only paying attention to the finished product, you might get a whole set of lessons that are, well, frankly… wrong.

I’m not gonna lie, I’m a little worried that right now, somewhere, screenwriters and Hollywood execs are shouting “Make it darker!” Or perhaps, “Give it more ‘holy crap’ moments!”

Yes, Breaking Bad is a very successful series (though it’s important to remember that it wasn’t for the majority of its life on the air). Yes, Breaking Bad is dark. Yes, Breaking Bad is chalk full of “holy crap” moments. But that’s not why it’s good.

What makes it good, at least in this humble writer’s opinion, is the absolute honesty with which Vince Gilligan and his writing staff treat their characters and the world they inhabit.

The Breaking Bad writers don’t shove those “holy crap” moments into the middle of the story just to get a rise out of the audience. They carefully earn every one. A guy opening his door and getting shot is dramatic, absolutely. But when the character who opens his door is Gale — perhaps as innocent as a meth-cook can be — and the character who shoots him is Jesse — someone totally aversive to murder – the drama is a hundred fold.

Drama that good only lies at the end of a long road. One covered with too much coffee, tears and heads banged against keyboard. But there’s really good drama at the end!

The first step on said road is to ask: “Where is the character’s head at?” It’s something the Breaking Bad writers refer to constantly as the starting point for their discussions. What does each character want at that very moment? What do they fear? What are they willing to do to get what they want? Just as importantly, what are they NOT willing to do?

When these questions are answered, a character is formed. Then, telling the story becomes a matter of asking: “What would this character do in this situation?” If you’re honest, you get good drama. Breaking Bad writers often talk about having great ideas for scenes or story beats that would fall by the wayside, simply because that’s not where the characters wanted to go.

A favorite example of mine is Drew Sharp, the boy on the motorbike whom Todd shoots dead. About halfway through “breaking” (meaning, plotting out the story beat by beat) the first eight episodes of Season 5, the writers had a general idea for where the series was going. The plan was for Walt to retire and Jesse to take over as Albuquerque’s new kingpin. Then Todd shot Drew Sharp.

From that moment on, everything changed. The writers knew there was just no way Jesse would let that slide. There was just no way he would stay in the meth business. So he quit. The writers didn’t lock themselves into their original plan, they let the characters lead the way.

I was curious if Todd was a character created out of necessity – aka, someone to shoot Drew Sharp – so I asked Breaking Bad writer and producer Thomas Schnauz. The answer was no: Todd came first, and Drew Sharp was a pretty last minute addition. Who knows what the writers’ original plan for Todd was, but it just goes to show their willingness to throw away their plans and let the story come naturally.

Breaking Episodes – How Breaking Bad writers organize rock solid scenes.

Famous amongst fans of the Breaking Bad writers are the index card filled cork boards. When breaking each episode, the writers would work together to plan out every single beat of the story in extensive detail. They would write out beats on 3×5 index cards and pin them to a cork board. All together, an episode would average somewhere around 60-65 cards. That’s a lot of plot, and a lot of detail. But it ensures that every episode has a rock solid structure, then, when an individual writer goes off to work on an episode’s script, they get to “do a little jazz”, as writer Peter Gould puts it.

Each writer creates the dialogue, embellishes the scenes and puts their unique stamp on their individual episodes. They get to do this with confidence, because they know most of the heavy lifting has already been done by the group. But the work and time put into that heavy lifting cannot be ignored. Especially when the writers write themselves into a corner, something which, let’s be honest, they tend to do with frequency.

Midway through Season 3, Walt and Jesse are trapped in the RV with Hank looming outside like a hungry shark. It’s a moment that pins the audience to the edge of their couches and makes them wonder “Just how are Walt and Jesse going to get out of this?”

Well, believe it or not, the writers had to ask themselves the same thing.

They often reference this moment as an example of just how painful the writing process can be. It took hours upon hours of thinking, of talking and coming up with plenty of bad ideas until a Breaking Bad worthy solution was thought up: A fake phone call to Hank telling him something horrible had happened to Marie.

Made for some damn good drama, didn’t it?

I came upon a similar roadblock recently while working on a screenplay. Well into the climactic scene, my protagonist was ready to unleash her master plan and defeat the bad guy. Ta-da! The sun shines high and everyone cheers. Feel good film of the year. Then something dawned on me (I like to call it logic), and I realized that there was no way the bad guy wouldn’t anticipate the protagonist’s plan. So he did, and he turned it on its head.

And I had no idea what she was going to do.

At that point, I wanted to shut my laptop off, go get lunch and convince myself the solution would come easier after some heavy procrastination. Then I remembered Hank outside the RV, and I realized that if I didn’t have any clue how the protagonist was going to get out of her plight, chances are the audience wouldn’t either.

So I kept working. There was a lot of staring at the screen, a lot of start and stop writing, and so much thinking I ought to have paid tuition. The bad ideas came first. And man, oh, man, was there a lot of them. But finally, after what felt like three days in the desert, I came up with a solution. The scene – and as a result, the screenplay – is ten times better because of it.

What allowed me to make it better is the inspiration I’ve derived from the Breaking Bad writers. The lessons countless hours of watching the show and closely analyzing it have taught me. Chief amongst which is: HONESTY.

There’s an index card with “Where’s Walt’s head at?” taped on the wall next to my desk. It’s a constant reminder to always stay true to my characters. I must look at the thing a thousand times a day, and every time, it fills me with inspiration and an immediate self awareness if what I’m currently working on isn’t treating the characters with honesty.

So, next time you’re writing a script and you feel the biting urge to make it darker, just because Breaking Bad is dark AND good, stop. Take your hands off the keyboard, put the pencil down (yes, I know there’s at least one of you still left) and remind yourself that Breaking Bad isn’t good because it’s dark. It’s good because it’s honest.

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PS: For anyone interested in studying the craft behind Breaking Bad further, I cannot recommend the “Breaking Bad Insider Podcast” more highly. Hosted by Kelley Dixon, one of the show’s editors, and Vince Gilligan himself, the podcast discusses every episode from Season 2 till the finale in glorious, extensive detail. Guests such as other writers, directors, cast and crew members are always present, and the amount of insight one can get about the making of the show is simply unmatched. Do yourself a favor and start listening.

Also, most of the Breaking Bad writers are on Twitter. In particular, Thomas Schnauz and Moira Walley-Beckett are quite active and will often take the time to answer questions. As is the writers’ assistant, Gordon Smith, who provides a different view of the process.

November 27, 2013