In anticipation of this Sunday's season finale, the native Virginian -- who also wrote and produced over 30 episodes of The X Files and penned the Will Smith blockbuster Hancock -- phoned Movieline to cheerfully talk about the nuttiest scene he ever wrote for Walt (that never made it to air), the encouragement of AMC, and the possibility of renewing Breaking Bad for a fifth season.
After watching three seasons of Breaking Bad , I'm a little concerned for your mental health. How do you possibly decompress after writing such dark episodes?
[Laughs] There is a great quote from the French writer Flaubert -- and I am going to show my ignorance by trying to paraphrase him -- about being neat and orderly in your life so that you can be extravagant and crazy in your work. (Ed: The quote is "Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.") I can't speak for my other writers but I live a pretty boring life, and I think the short answer to your question is that all of this crazy crap that may be deep inside my brain is something I kind of exorcise by writing it instead of living it. I think it is actually kind of therapeutic to write this kind of dark stuff.
We hear a lot about method acting. Do you find that as you write each episode, you are in effect method writing -- assuming each role as you figure out their arc for that hour?
I think you're somewhat accurate. You have to go deep inside your brain for some of that stuff. When I am sitting there writing, I get into a pretty dark mood but luckily, unlike an actor, I don't have to physically act it out. The most I'll do is say dialogue before I write it.
You do kind of try to get into the mind of whatever character you are writing about. If it's a dark scene with dark characters who are up to no good, you do your best to live it -- at least in your mind -- and it can put you in a weird place in your head, but usually it doesn't last too long. You get a sandwich or have a beer or watch a little TV and it kind of fades away.
While writing the second season of the show, you said your ethos was "go big or go home." What was your ethos for writing the third season?
Maybe, "go bigger or go home." We didn't really come up with one for the third season. We just kept the old one in place.
When Breaking Bad first premiered, it was lumped together with Weeds because both projects centered on desperate characters who resort to making money off of drugs. I think it's impressive, though, that even though your series is working within cable parameters, Breaking Bad is so much grittier and darker than Showtime's series. Your show makes Weeds look like Gossip Girl. Had you seen Weeds when you were pitching your show?
I hate to admit it, but I don't have Showtime, so I don't regularly see Weeds. I watch the screeners when they come around Emmy time every year and I think it is a very good show. I have to admit, though, that the first time I even heard about Weeds was at a pitch meeting. Before AMC was involved, I was at a different network about halfway through the pitch and one of the executives said,"This sounds a little like the world of Weeds." I said, "What is Weeds?" After the meeting, I educated myself as much as I could. I got a copy of the pilot and I made every effort I could to make our show as different as possible.
The worlds of marijuana and crystal meth are so different already, though...
Right, I think that you can be a little lighter with a show about selling marijuana because it is probably more palatable to a larger audience. It could be argued that there are good things about marijuana: it makes you feel better if you are going through chemotherapy, it can help out with your glaucoma. There is really nothing good to be said about crystal meth. I mean, it makes you feel pretty great, I suppose, when you first take it, but the consequences are far too high. There is no medical reason to be taking it. It is an awful drug, and to be as honest and realistic as possible about that world, you have to go pretty dark.
I haven't really seen Weeds for awhile, though, because as I said, I don't have Showtime. I should probably go ahead and upgrade to the premium cable package.
When AMC picked up your pilot, Mad Men was in pre-production but the network was still showing movies pretty much 24/7. Were you worried that they might not be able to make that leap into original programming successfully?
That was a huge concern and I am so happy that all of my concerns turned out to be ill-founded. When we started, AMC was just prepping Mad Men for its first season and they were just starting to push into scripted television. Honestly, at first I thought the show would simply never happen. I had had so many meetings in my 20 years in the business at that point to know that sometimes people kind of shine you on and tell you they have big plans for your project and then you never hear from them again. I was used to those kinds of meetings in the movie business, anyway, but AMC was as good as their word and better.
They even let you direct the pilot.
They did, which was kind of unheard of. Luckily, I didn't botch it. I learned so much from directing that, though, and being able to make sure it looked and sounded and felt like I wanted it to. It was a good template for the other directors who followed. To answer the other half of your question from before, I was also concerned that the network would wimp out after shooting the pilot when they realized how dark the show was. I thought they would think, "Jesus, we have to make this less edgy," but AMC has never wimped out on us. There was only one time in season two when the executives called me up after reading a script and said, "Gee, this one is dark. Are you sure you want to do this?"
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.
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.