Breaking Bad Creator Vince Gilligan on AMC's 'Big Balls' and a Potential Fifth Season

I wanted to ask you about that. That was the second season finale when Walt watched Jane choke to death, right?

Right. That was the only time AMC has ever called me up and said, "Are you sure you want to do this?" To their credit, they didn't tell me that I couldn't do it. They just asked to talk about it with me, which was the right thing to do. Truthfully, my original idea was even nuttier.

What was the original idea?

The original concept was that Walt goes over there and shoots Jane up with heroin, actively murdering her. That would have been wrong though -- it would have been too much. Viewers would have hated him and there are plenty of people that hate him as he is now. It was much more powerful watching this guy stand there impassively as this poor young girl dies than, oddly, if he had been more active.

I don't think there is another television network out there who would have been as fearless. Any business, whether it produces television or produces jet planes, becomes conservative because the more you have the more you can lose, but AMC was this young upstart and continues to be in the best possible sense. They've got big balls as far as storytelling goes.

Has Bryan Cranston ever told you that Walt was going too far?

No, Bryan is just as fearless. He is even fearless with his physicality -- I mean, you see him in underpants, you see him naked in the supermarket and that is really him. He has no fear of looking foolish or schlubby. And by the way, in real life, he is not schlubby. He is very athletic and handsome and charismatic but he is not afraid to bottle that all up to play Walt. And he has never asked me to rewrite anything. I am forever grateful for him.

My favorite episode of the season was "Fly" -- where Walt spends an entire episode trying to kill this single insect. Where did that idea come from? It seems like it could have been inspired by The Twilight Zone -- it was like a micro-sized Moby Dick.

I am glad you liked that one. I will tell you that necessity is the mother of invention and that whole concept started with the simple fact that we were very much over budget for our season. So that is what you call a bottle episode -- all of the scenes took place in one location. We did not have to move our crew, which is a huge expense.

So we knew that the entire episode would take place in the super lab -- which is on our sound stage in Albuquerque -- and then we had to figure out how to occupy Walt. At first we had these big ideas about bringing the cops in or putting a character into a hostage situation but we discarded those one by one because we thought they were too obvious. "What is the least obvious thing that we could do that will hold the audience's interest for 47 minutes?" Moira Walley-Beckett and Sam Catlin did a great job writing that episode.

You have a few chemists and DEA agents working as consultants on the show. Are any of the plots actual events that those DEA agents have encountered?

We don't really do that too much because the plots we make up are so crazy and specific to Walt. But we do get wonderful help from DEA agents in Los Angeles, Dallas and Albuquerque -- we just call them up if we have a question.

We had a DEA chemist visit our set back when we were shooting the pilot and tell us every step of making meth -- what the process entails, what the chemicals look like. We had to come up with "movie" ways to make meth, so they told us that, you know, at one point the chemicals would reduce to look similar to Strawberry Quik. So one of the prop guys went out and got Strawberry Quik and mixed it and he said, "Maybe a little darker than that." So we shaded it just right and every step of the way, he made it look absolutely real. The DEA has been wonderfully supportive. And God bless them, because they are fighting the good fight when it comes to terrible drugs. There is no upside to meth.

On the flip side, do you get feedback from the meth community?

I don't really like to go online and look at message boards really because too much feedback, good or bad, either makes me feel unnecessarily proud of myself or really depressed. So I kind of steer away from it in general. Some of the people that I work with go online and I'll occasionally hear that there are folks recovering from meth addiction who watch the show, or folks who used to cook meth. We do seem to have a certain percentage of fans who live that lifestyle and hey, the more viewers the better -- just so long as we aren't ever making anybody say, "Gee, I ought to try this" because that is definitely not the outcome I would want, ever.

You've spoken about wanting to end the series after four seasons. Is there any way you would go on longer?

I don't really know. Plotwise, that is the toughest question to answer. Four still sounds good to me but if we had a fifth, maybe we could do something very exciting, so it just remains to be seen. I am very much an employee -- as long as the company wants to do it within reason, I would like to keep it going. I love keeping this family of cast and crew together. I am coming to grips with the idea of another season, though, and realizing that five seasons might not be so bad.

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