WORD VIRUS: Vince Gilligan of 'Breaking Bad' Talks About Ending the Season, and the Series

Gregory Peters/AMC Bryan Cranston as Walter White in a scene from “Face Off,” the fourth-season finale of “Breaking Bad.”
Warning: this post contains spoilers, starting with the next sentence.
Two-faced to the very end, Gustavo Fring, the seemingly mild-mannered proprietor of a fast-food chicken franchise but secretly ice-cold drug kingpin (played by Giancarlo Esposito), got what was coming to him via a revenge scheme that was hatched, if not always smoothly executed, by his meth-cooking underlings Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), in the Season 4 finale of “Breaking Bad.” This very permanent checkmate – or is it? – was the culmination of a lengthy chess game plotted out by Vince Gilligan, the creator and show runner of “Breaking Bad,” and his writing team, who had been planning all along for a season-ending showdown between Walt and Gus.
Craig Barritt/Wireimage Vince Gilligan, the creator and show runner of “Breaking Bad.”
What Mr. Gilligan and his producers might not have anticipated, however, is that they would find themselves in a standoff of their own over the summer, as the AMC network, which shows “Breaking Bad,” waged a hard-fought negotiation with Sony Pictures Television, the studio that produces it, over the continuation of the series. When the smoke finally cleared, Mr. Gilligan emerged to say that “Breaking Bad” would continue, but only for a final, 16-episode season. (AMC hasn’t said yet when or how it plans to show those episodes.)
Mr. Gilligan spoke recently to ArtsBeat about Season 4 of “Breaking Bad” and its explosive finale, the negotiations that went on behind the scenes, and what plans he has – if any – to wrap up the series. These are excerpts from that conversation.
Q.
I think I speak for everyone in America when I ask: What were the Aerosmith and Def Leppard songs we were about to hear before Walt turned off the radio?
A.
You know, that’s a woman named Erica Viking, and she’s one of the actual on-air folks on Coyote 102.5 in Albuquerque. We gave them the parameters of the news story and then let them put it in their own words. I think they threw in the Aerosmith and Def Leppard. But it was a nice touch. She’s an interesting lady. You know the expression, a face made for radio? She’s, like, smoking hot. I’m not sure why she’s on the radio.
Q.
The question came up at the end of last season, whether or not you’d really killed off a character in its closing moments. So let me ask this time: Is there meant to be any ambiguity about whether or not Gus is dead?
A.
[laughs] There will hopefully be no ambiguity. I suspect that some people might think that he may show up with steel rivets in the side of his head, looking like the Terminator next season. But I very much doubt that will happen.
Q.
As you mapped out Season 4, was this always the ending you were building toward: a conclusive showdown between Walt and Gus?
A.
Yes, it was, and it was something my writers and I worked on pretty much the whole season, knowing that at the end of the year, one of them would have to go. The town wasn’t big enough for the both of them, as it were. In the best sense of the movie “Highlander,” there could be only one.
Q.
And yet the show this season started to flesh out Gus’s back story, though it didn’t do so completely. Are there threads you might come back to later, or was that a deliberate choice to leave some things about him ambiguous?
A.
Right on both counts. We may come back to it in the future. As I told Giancarlo Esposito, and I told him a few months ahead of time what we were planning for the end of the season, I was very apologetic that we were going to lose his character. But I also hastened to point out that even though characters may die on “Breaking Bad,” they don’t necessarily rest in peace. In other words, we flash back in time quite often on this show, and we revisit old characters who have already met their demise. And because of that, who knows? We may well see Gustavo Fring again in the future.
But as to the second point, we talked a long time, my writers and I, about what exactly was Gus’s back story? How bad a dude did he have to have been, back in Chile, for the cartel to spare him, even though they were very insulted by his actions? And we went back and forth, we talked about Pinochet and his government, what did he do back there, precisely? And we borrowed a bit from “Pulp Fiction,” I suppose. Because in “Pulp Fiction,” Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta are carrying around a briefcase, for the entire movie, that the contents of which are only hinted at. At one point, you see a glow emanating from inside the briefcase, but you never do find out for sure what it’s in it. And I always liked that, as a viewer. To me, the audience’s imagination as to who Gus was in his past life is potentially more interesting than any concrete answer we could give them.
Q.
Given that Walt and Jesse know even less about Gus, and don’t know why he was so important that the cartel could not kill him, could their assassination of him come back to haunt them?
A.
That’s a good question. We will be getting into that when the writers’ room reopens in November. But I can think of one gentleman who may have a problem with it, who’s a bit closer to home, who is Mike, played by Jonathan Banks. [laughs heartily] Mike may have a problem with what transpired, and I wouldn’t want Mike mad at me, I can tell you that.
Q.
I don’t think I’d want Jonathan Banks mad at me, either.
A.
No. And I’ve had Jonathan mad at me, and it’s not pleasant.
Q.
Was it particularly difficult to say goodbye to a character as compelling as Gus, and to Giancarlo Esposito, who’s been so dominant in his portrayal of him?
A.
It was very hard. We talked for not just hours. We talked for days on end, questioning ourselves and re-questioning ourselves as to, were we doing the right thing? But it just felt like it was time. I was being facetious before when I spoke of “Highlander,” but it really is true. If Gustavo Fring is in Walt’s world, they can never be partners. They are similar personalities in the sense that one of them has to be on top, and at the end of the day, the show is about Walter White and his journey from Mr. Chips to Scarface. In that regard, he has to, with every season, get a little further down that path. He really was under the thumb of this character for the entire season – more than a season now. And while I think the audience will miss Gus greatly, I think also there is a satisfaction to be gleaned from Walt persevering and succeeding.
Q.
Did the effects crew from “The Walking Dead” help out with the scene where Gus meets his demise?
A.
Indeed we did have great help from the prosthetic effects folks at “The Walking Dead,” and I want to give a shout-out to Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger, and KNB EFX, those two gentlemen and their company, because their shop did that effect. And then that was augmented by the visual effects work of a guy named Bill Pulaski and his crew, who digitally married a three-dimensional sculpture that KNB EFX created with the reality of the film scene. So you can actually see into and through Gus’s head in that final reveal. It’s a combination of great makeup and great visual effects. And it took months to do.
Q.
Months?
A.
Really, months. That one shot where the explosion happens, and then you dolly in on Gus, is actually two shots: the explosion happened in one take, and then the shot revealing Gus – it took me 19 takes to get it right. But we did use Take 19. That was no fault of the actors. That was me being a little persnickety as a director. The big, bravura part of the effect is obviously Gus’s face, what’s left of it, but to me it’s just as amazing how the visual effects guys married the two shots together so that there’s literally no seam between. There’s smoke, but you don’t see the cut in between. It’s just amazing what they’re capable of doing these days.
Q.
What about the closing shot of the episode, the poisonous plant growing ominously in Walt’s backyard. Is it meant to suggest the possibility that he might have poisoned Brock, or is it meant to say he definitely did it?
A.
To me it is fairly definitive. But there’s the old Billy Wilder quote, which I am going to misquote, that if you give the audience 2 plus 2 and let them add it up to 4 themselves, they’ll love you forever. I abide by that. The audience is plenty smart, and I like giving them as little as possible, and letting them do the math themselves. It’s such a shocking moment, that you find out the full badness, if you will, of Walter White, and you learn, truly, what he’s capable of: these monstrous acts, up to and including poisoning a child to further his and his family’s survival. To me, a moment like that is best told delicately. It’s best to not hit the audience over the head with it but to let them do the math themselves.
Q.
I have to say that this season finale almost felt like a series finale, with all of the story lines that it appears to wrap up. Was that by design?
A.
That is on purpose. We weren’t sure that we would have a fifth season when we were plotting out the end of Season 4. So we wanted to make the end of Season 4 as satisfying and as complete as possible, not knowing what the future would hold. Having said that, there are a couple of big, outstanding questions still in play. But I agree with you, if the show had not gone on past the end of Season 4 – although I’m very happy to say that it indeed will – but if it weren’t to go forward, I think I could be satisfied on some level, by that episode.
Q.
Does that suggest that in at least one reality, there could have been a happy ending for Walt?
A.
Yes. Well, now that you’ve put that way – happy for Walt, unhappy for pretty much everyone else around him. [laughs] That’s what he does, that’s the effect he has on people, come to think of it.
Q.
Back in March, we learned that AMC’s negotiations to renew “Mad Men” had grown contentious, and when they were resolved, its show runner, Matthew Weiner, said he would be ending the series. Then a few months later, we find out there’s a difficult negotiation to extend “Breaking Bad,” after which you said you’re ending your series. Is there a pattern emerging here? Are these negotiations so frustrating that you’d rather wrap up your shows than have to keep going back to the table?
A.
Not really. I can’t speak to the “Mad Men” situation, although their timeline is a lot longer than ours – they’re going to end the show in three more seasons. I can only speak for myself, and AMC and Sony have been great to work with. Nobody else in town would have done this show, and I will be forever grateful to both companies for letting me put it on the air. But really, “Breaking Bad” was intended to be a finite story from the get-go. It was designed to be closed-ended and not have even the possibility of going on indefinitely. It’s really incumbent upon us to bring it to as satisfying a conclusion as possible. And the only way we’ll have a chance at doing that is to know exactly when it is we’re going to end, and also have that ending not be too far off in the future. Our studio, I think, in their heart of hearts, would have liked the show to go on longer than it will go on. Because this is a business, first and foremost, and the television business is intended to make money. And you only really start to make money with more episodes under your belt. But at the end of the day, this was nothing other than me wanting to end the show with as much quality as we began with. And that’s truly why we have 16 more, and out.
Q.
Does that imply you didn’t get as many episodes as you wanted to wrap up the series?
A.
No, honestly, no. I would have been happy, for instance, with 13, one more full season. I think 16’s great – 16’s probably even better than 13. We get one more full season and three extra, which is cherries on top. There are certain things that need to be wrapped up, so that we can conclude the show the right way. I was one of loudest voices saying, “I don’t have that much more story left in me here.” I should add to that by saying I don’t want this show to end. For me, this is the most creatively satisfying job that I have ever had, or that I will likely ever have, and I will probably be in a fetal position on the day that it all ends. I will miss it intensely. I also don’t want to tread water for seasons on end and have people begin to say, “God, ‘Breaking Bad,’ that used to be a really good show – is that thing still on the air?” That would kill me. I would much rather go out a little bit early and miss it fondly for the rest of my life.
Q.
Were you really being squeezed by AMC on the number of new episodes it was willing to order? I think that’s what left so many people dumbfounded, that here’s this critically acclaimed, brand-defining show, and it sounds like the network wants to rush it off the air.
A.
Listen, the thing I’ve learned since I’ve started working in this business. You don’t really want to see how the sausage is made. That’s just in every negotiation, not just the ones I’ve been dealing with but every one I’ve been a party to. In the movie business or the TV business, there’s a certain amount of gamesmanship and horse trading, and it’s part of the way the job is done. I’d prefer to not even know about it most of the time. I was basically cutting the last few episodes of Season 4 of “Breaking Bad,” and I would hear occasionally from my agents, telling me where things stood, and half the time when the call came through, I’d be like: Oh, God, do I have to hear about this now? [laughs] You guys know I want to wrap it up within about another season, you know the parameters that I’m hoping for. Just wake me when it’s over.
Q.
I know it’s foolish to ask how you’re going to end the series, but do you have a game plan yet for how it’s going to end?
A.
I’d love to say I did. I depend so much on my six writers, and we’re going to get together again in mid-November and open up a writers’ room, and I’m looking forward to that. I should be thinking about it right now. I should be daydreaming about it or playing with a few puzzle pieces, trying to lock ‘em into place here. But I really find my brain works best when I have the six of my writers with me and we can hash it out together as a group. I guess the best way to put it is, I have hopes and dreams for these characters. But I don’t have anything plot-wise. I don’t have anything hard and fast figured out. I know there are certain big, outstanding questions or issues to deal with before we put on our last episode. But other than that, where it all is going to head, I look forward to seeing it, same as the audience does.
Q.
Does that mean you could have a flash of inspiration between now and November that could completely alter how “Breaking Bad” will wrap up?
A.
Absolutely. I don’t want to sound too loosey-goosey about it, because I think the more time you have to plot out your story, the better off you’ll be. But we try to combine the best of both possibilities, which is to say we have enough lead time to question every possible permutation of story and reason out all the different ways we could tell the story and go with the best one. But also, with that kind of scenario, we have the possibility to suddenly get some 11th-hour inspiration and take things in a different direction. Television is not usually an arena in which you get the time to really ponder things. And that’s a big reason why this show has been such a blessing and such a source of enjoyment for me, it’s because I get to do just that.