Better Call Saul Composer on What It’s Like to Score the Best Show on Television

The post Better Call Saul Composer on What It’s Like to Score the Best Show on Television appeared first on Consequence.

Better Call Saul composer Dave Porter has a keen memory of how he got the opportunity to join the Breaking Bad universe — with a little help from his friends.

In 2007, both music editor Tom Villano and music supervisor Thomas Golubic got hired for a new AMC pilot, and, as Porter tells Consequence, “They both were just astounded by it, and were just telling me about how excited they were, as we do when people in my world stumble upon something exciting.”

As fate would have it, Porter got the chance to watch the pilot at Golubic’s house. “I was just astounded as well,” he says. “And then I made it my mission to be a thorn in the side of everyone involved until they would let me do it.”

That sort of perseverance, Porter says, is “really the only way I think that someone new can break through [as a composer], especially someone like in my case — I wasn’t an understudy of someone else, so for me an open door like that was an opportunity I had to take, never mind whether it was gonna turn into Breaking Bad or not. Just to find the work was exciting. And then to be able to follow along the coattails of such a successful series launched my career. I’m very, very blessed for that.”

He does believe that “it would never have happened except that AMC was a very small unknown network. At the time, this thing flew totally under the radar — I’m sure most composers in LA would never have even known it was what it was or where it was coming from. So in that sense, I was very, very fortunate.”

This is just the tip of the iceberg of Consequence‘s extended conversation with Porter, which reveals the process by which the Better Call Saul post-production team breaks down when to use music, how Porter approaches each new episode, and how he feels about the looming end to the Breaking Bad story as we know it.

We also dig into the composing of one of the show’s most standout pieces of score, learn how he approaches each character on a musical level, and get the story behind why, in the early days, he was showing executive producer Vince Gilligan scenes in a broom closet.

How has the working relationship with the producers evolved over the years? I’m sure at the beginning there was some amount of feeling each other out — at what point did it really feel like, you know, everyone was on the same page?

Well, I think we had all been on the same team all along, but I will say that, you know, our processes evolved somewhat. Most of this is in the earlier Breaking Bad years — once we got into a methodology that was working for all of us, it’s pretty much stayed consistent since then. But yeah, I remember, you know, in the early, early Breaking Bad years, there were meetings in broom closets with Vince and a DVD of some rough cut of something.

It was all very ad hoc and thrown together and just moving as fast as we can. And on the flip side of that, there was so little scrutiny — there was just not that much interest in the, in the show. There were not a lot of producers involved. It was just kind of, you know, pick it up and move the ball down the field and do your part.

Better Call Saul (AMC)

I think that all changed in Season 3 of Breaking Bad when suddenly you know, a lot of people were paying attention. So there were more demands, particularly on Vince’s time and later Peter, of course, on Better Call Saul. So we kinda had to streamline all this work, and it was a little less ad hoc in that sense. But the thing that hasn’t changed is that to their great credit all the producers on the show take the music and the sound very seriously, and we’ve always spent a lot of time talking before anything ever happens.

So we have these very long and exhaustive spotting sessions, and we always do them with sound and music together so that we can bounce ideas off each other and understand each person’s role in any given moment. And we talk at length about what music should be and what it should do, and whether there should be music or not music — who’s taking the lead between music or sound effects. All those questions are debated openly and honestly for however long it takes to get to an answer that satisfies everybody. It’s really the blueprint for us all then to go forward and do what we do.

I have a lot of follow-up questions about that, but to start I just want to understand more about why you were showing rough cuts to Vince in a broom closet.

[Laughs] I mean, this is a long time ago — it’s not like this now. But there wasn’t a ton of money and there wasn’t a ton of room in the old Breaking Bad writers’ offices and there was a million people doing a million things in every corner of that little old beat-up office in Burbank that we were meeting in. And it was long enough ago that we had TVs on carts and things that had to get moved around so people could watch stuff together. Like I said, it was just a different time and different circumstances.

So you were using a broom closet for privacy?

Precisely, just to find space that somebody else wasn’t already using for something else. .

And were you literally showing stuff to him on a TV on a cart?

Yeah, absolutely, we rolled carts around — again, this is long enough ago that we were watching things on DVDs.

I’m really glad you mentioned the spotting sessions because one thing that’s so fascinating about the show is how well it uses silence, and so I imagine that a big part of the conversation when approaching a new episode is simply just how much music you’re even going to have.

Yes, we do take a lot of pride in how we use music. I think my philosophy has always been, and Vince and Peter definitely backed us up on this, is that there has to be a reason for there to be music, and the more music you have, the less impactful it is when it does appear. So we take very seriously, you know, the thought process of where to use music, where not to use music, where to start music, where to end music, to use it as a tool to help the storytelling.

Now obviously, you know, this is possible in part because all of the other aspects of the show are of such high quality, right? They stand on their own two feet, all of these scenes — you could watch any of these episodes without any music at all and enjoy them. But that’s not true of everything that you see on TV. Sometimes TV is frankly just used to help tell a story that couldn’t be told as effectively as somebody might have wanted, because of budget reasons or acting, or just the general level of how it’s crafted.

This is a very unique situation, in that, you know, it’s so good and so much thought gets put into how all the different elements of the creation of the show work together. Meaning that, you know, just from the writing and the directing and the acting and editing and sound, all these things come together with a singular focus to create the best possible experience.

Yeah. It’s so fascinating to hear you talk about it that way, because it reminds me of how a reason they say soap operas have overly dramatic music is not that they think the audience is stupid. It’s because they think the audience is in another room folding laundry, or dealing with the kids or whatever, and the music is meant to be a tool in helping a distracted viewer know when to pay attention. But the music of Better Call Saul is not here to provide that kind of helping hand.

No, it certainly isn’t. Because if you’re not paying attention to Better Call Saul, you’re gonna miss something in absolutely every shot. There’s something important about everything that they have to say, those guys and gals, and for me, it’s just such a joy to be able to pick and choose the moments where I think music could really heighten an experience, because there is often so much going on in Better Call Saul, so we can put a little bit of a spotlight on one little thing that maybe you wouldn’t notice, or maybe you’re not thinking about, but we want you to make sure you don’t miss.

Better Call Saul (AMC)

So one way of thinking about composing is kind of the John Williams school where you have a bunch of characters, and every character has their own theme, and you can combine them accordingly. But watching both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, I’ve never identified any sort of character-centric theme. And it could be just something I’m not picking up on, or it could just be not how you approach this at all.

I’ve always felt, with the Breaking Bad universe in particular, the stories are so strong and the characters are so strong, and I think most importantly, all the characters are never static. I don’t think an audience in this world needs to be reminded, every time Walter White appears, that he’s Walter White. [Laughs] Because it’s just not necessary.

But television is very different from film in that respect, and especially as we were starting to work on this, this was right at the advent of streaming, when people were watching multiple episodes at once, all in a row. And part of my thinking on this was very honestly that I didn’t want an audience to get clobbered over the head by the same thematic theme for four or five hours in a row — it’s a long time and would be, I think, maybe a little heavy-handed in a way that wouldn’t necessarily be true in a film, where you’re there for a very set period of time and you’re out. These are long stories, hours and hours and hours worth of stories to be told. So I think that was part of it.

And then the other part was that because these characters are constantly changing and our viewpoint of them is constantly changing, to define them very concretely in any way — and I think this applies to other things other than just music — but for me, particularly to define them with something very concrete and musical would’ve been tough because then it would’ve either kept them static, it would’ve would’ve hurt their ability to change and develop as characters, or I would have to be doing an awful lot of musical gymnastics, to be constantly evolving with them.

In this universe specifically, [character themes] are something we haven’t done a lot of. Not to say that there are some instances where we have. One notable exception to that are the Cousins — the Salamanca men who are not cousins, they’re brothers, but we know them as the Cousins, because that’s how they’re introduced to us, as cousins of Tuco.

Here’s an example of some characters who do not change, they are who they are and they are exactly what they should be at every stage. So they have a very distinct universe for them. I have worked at different times to subtly use different — even though maybe they’re not melodically related — orchestrational choices for different characters. They have been more consistent in that sense. So there are certain instruments that I may use for certain characters just to give them a little bit of their own world.

Better Call Saul (AMC)

Well, now I’d like to go through the list of characters and see which instruments you associate with them. To start, does Jimmy/Saul have an instrument?

Well, Jimmy has a lot of instruments — Jimmy is such a big topic, in terms of where we are, that I can’t define him in any singular instrument. But I will say that for example, compared to how he is in Breaking Bad, where he is a pretty one-dimensional character, relatively speaking, compared to how we know him in Better Call Saul.

But he is the reason why the score for Better Call Saul overall is more organic, it’s more live, it features more acoustic instruments than I did in Breaking Bad. Not to say that it’s solely that way, but there is a lot more live stuff. When we were very early on talking about Better Call Saul and Jimmy/Saul, I took a lot from his roots, his Midwest kind of Americana kid growing up in the late sixties and seventies. So it’s just a lot of what I call my seventies rock palette — organs and mellotrons, and older-sounding guitars and drums. That world of instruments influences most of what would I do with Jimmy and Saul.

That’s really cool, and also maybe that wasn’t the right one to start with.

That’s a big one.

But now I’ll toss out Mike.

Mike. Yeah. So Mike also has been around of course a long time, and we’ve seen a lot of iterations of him. But, and this is not uniquely true, I do lean on some older electric pianos for Mike. It gives that kind of crusty, kinda beat up, clunky vibe that just seems to go very well with his personality.

Gotcha. Okay, next up — Kim.

These are all big characters that have changed so much. But I’ve been trying to, over the course of the time that I’ve been working with Kim, infuse a little bit of woodwinds into her world. This is actually pretty rare for what I do, in the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul universe, but I use orchestral instruments. They’re always of course mixed with other things, but there’s some alto flute for her and even a little piccolo here and there.

Let’s do Gus now.

Gus. Yeah. So Gus is… he’s just dark basically, you know, it’s just dark and powerful. In terms of specific instruments for him, his stuff tends to be very methodical as he is very plotting. Very slow tempo, very bass-heavy stuff. And when we’ve gotten into using instruments for him, there’ve been a few things I’ve used for him, but the most interesting that I’ve brought in and out here and there are actually some South American flutes that are lower in register but still have that very breathy quality about them.

There’s a few scenes, particularly when we get to those moments when we get a little glimpse of the person behind all the method, those little bits of emotion when he’s remembering something personal or something like that — those are the moments that I’ve snuck that in.

Was the choice to use the South American flutes tied to the character’s background?

Originally, yes. Yes, exactly.

That’s really cool. Does Howard have an instrument?

Huh? No, I don’t think that Howard does.

Poor Howard.

Poor Howard. [Laughs] And that’s a tricky thing too, you know. I think when we talk about score and the ways that score is most effective, I think a character like Howard gets lumped into some moments that are more like he’s the foil, right? The more humorous moments or the sadly humorous or darkly humorous moments, those are always very tricky to comment on musically. We have to be really careful — I think, more often than not, he’s such a good actor that those moments often stand on their own.

Better Call Saul (AMC)

What about Nacho?

Nacho is one of my favorites to write music for. This is just me speaking, but, you know, I make a connection between him and, and Aaron Paul’s character, Jesse Pinkman, from Breaking Bad. There’s a little bit of a, a moral center, as lost as it is, with both of those characters and they’ve been some of my favorites to write for. In both cases I’ve gone to a lot of guitar for those two characters.

It gives them, you know, a little bit of an edge — they’re the more youthful characters in both stories. But obviously, the range that you can achieve with electric guitar is so great that it gives you a lot of width to work with which I’ve certainly needed for both of those characters.

From how you described the spotting process, it seems like you don’t necessarily write a lot of extraneous music, but am I misreading that? Have you written a lot of additional music that’s just never made the cut?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, extraneous is maybe not the right word, but if in doubt, I will write it, because it’s very hard to then come up with it at the last minute, if we decide we need it. But I definitely go into it knowing that there’s a likelihood that some of this stuff doesn’t make the show. I think it’s a very important part of the creative process to try both for me, I learn along the way how to better do my job and how to better work within the confines of this world by writing more.

I think it also educates the producers when they see something to say, oh, okay. I see now what music would do in this moment and it’s not what I thought it was going to do. That’s maybe a good thing, or maybe a bad thing, depending on what the scene is and how I did my job. But I do think it’s just all part of getting to the right answers about using music and where it’s gonna be most effective to help the storytelling.

Have you ever been in a situation where there’s a scene that you had scored something for, and then in the edit, they decided to drop the music for it, and you were like, that was the right choice?

Oh, that happens all the time, for sure. And I’m the first to admit it, and I’m the first one to raise my hand and say, this is going to work better without it. And the opposite is also true. There are some scenes, you know, that I look back on and I think, “Ah, boy, that was a tough choice.” I mean, it’s never so clear cut that, that, you know, there’s a right or wrong answer necessarily. I’m pretty good about remaining detached and unemotional in those moments.

But there are a few in the history of working on the show that I think, oh, that would’ve been interesting with music. There are even some scenes we’ve released on previous DVDs as extras with the score in it — it wasn’t in the final product, but just to show as an exercise to show, you know, what it would’ve been like with the music in it.

Can you think of an example of that?

I mean, there are many, but I think the one I could think of right now offhand is from El Camino. There’s that tremendous scene out in the desert with just Jesse and Todd and the gun that’s in the glove compartment. That’s a piece of music that I released on the soundtrack for El Camino because I loved it and I thought it was interesting and it does change that scene into something different. I absolutely think Vince made the right choice in not including it, but that’s not to say it didn’t work [with it] too. It was just a different interpretation and a different way of storytelling.

One piece of music I want to make sure I ask you about it is “Border Crossing” — honestly I’m asking about it simply because such a great bit of score, but also on its own, it’s just a great instrumental song. What was the process of creating that piece?

It was a lot of work and a little outside of our usual purview, which is one of the wonderful things about working on a show like this — every few episodes, they’re going to throw something your way that you never expected, or you never imagined. So it was super fun — it was obviously a moment where music could take center stage, which isn’t always the case for sure. And nor should it be, in score music.

But here there was not significant dialogue. And it was just a beautifully shot five minutes or so, a long scene that was uninterrupted. So it gave me this very long piece of space to work with. And it involved one of our favorite things, of course, which is the mechanics of the bad guys getting one over on the good guys, and how it all works — you know, the intrigue and the process and the excitement of all that.

So yeah, to be able to build a piece that had that energy and that excitement, but to have the real estate of all that time to very slowly kind of put together the pieces of the puzzle as we are learning them visually, to add a little here and a little there with the music to help build the intensity and to point out certain things that we don’t want you to miss along the way in that long, long shot… it was a neat challenge, and I loved doing it.

Yeah, it builds rhythmically so interesting. It’s just layers on layers of percussion.

It is. I love to write for percussion and the way that marries so nicely with film in picture… I spend a long time when I’m writing for film just working with tempos, working with click tracks before I ever start writing music because I’m just, I’m such a believer in the importance of tempo and drive and percussion and all the things that, and beat just simply beat that, that, that are inherent in the magic of film.

Innately, I think that when you can find that sympathetic tempo that works with the music and follows the picture, it is a such an important part of the process, at least for me, of how I think about making music for film and how they work together at its best.

So let me ask you — have you seen the finale?

No. Not even close, actually. There’s whole aspects of what happens here where I don’t know any more than you do. I can honestly say that. As composer, I’m last. Literally the last step. I of course could read the scripts if I wanted to, but I’m so blessed — when the show shows up in my studio, it’s almost done, so I get to sit down with a stiff drink and watch these episodes just like a fan does (and I am a fan, you know).

That actually really helps me because I love to watch it, without any music in it, and then think about, wow, this was great. This was great as it was, or I could help here, or, you know, music would be even more powerful here. But in that sense, I’m the last to know anything when it comes to the Breaking Bad universe. Right now I’m working on several episodes at once, but I’m nowhere near the end.

Why don’t you read the scripts?

Oh. Because I hate to be spoiled. I mean, that’s the simple answer. There is a little more of a creative answer to it too, which is that I think I’ve been writing music for picture for so long now that reading the scripts often don’t help me unless there’s something — I say that broadly, obviously, if there’s a reason why the producers want me to go back and look at something in the script, because it has some story point relevance that I need to know about or that they, they want to make sure I know about, of course they will tell me or I will go read it.

But in general, I’m very visually motivated as a composer. And sometimes when I read a script and then I see it on the screen and it’s very different from what I had personally imagined in my head when I read the script, it can actually throw me and I want to stay true to all of the creative decisions that get made before I get to make mine, which all influence the decisions that I make musically.

That goes way beyond just the script. The script is just the very first part of it, but it’s how it’s acted. It’s how it’s shot. It’s how it’s edited, which is super crucial. I think for composers all those things are so important to the mindset that I take into writing the music that I think seeing only one piece of all that, which would’ve in this case be the script wouldn’t be enough.

So during your first viewing, is there temp music on it at all?

No! Blessedly, one thing that we’ve never done is include temp music. So that leaves it a totally blank slate for me and there’s no preconceived conceptions about where music should be, and that’s an important part of our process actually, to the great credit of the editors and the producers and all the staff, because it makes cutting the shows harder. But it leads to more creative freedom for me down the road.

When I first watch it, that is all I do. I don’t take notes. I sit on the couch with the drink and I just watch it and enjoy it. And then I’ll go back and start thinking, you know, from a more work brain side of things, about what I need to do.

This means that when you said earlier that you can watch this show without music and really enjoy it, you were speaking from literal experience.

I’m speaking the absolute truth. I’m testament to it. I know for it a fact. Not to say that it doesn’t get better with the music, but it is an amazing, amazing show.

Better Call Saul (AMC)

So you’re still working up to the ending, and I’m curious — is there something you’ve been waiting for waiting to use until this final season?

Yeah, I’m not brave enough to guess where they’re going to go. Honestly, I would waste an awful lot of time putting music aside that I thought might be useful later, because I’ve never been able to guess, any more than anybody else, where these folks are gonna go. I have been told that there are shows within a show for sure in this final season — I think we’ve already seen that, as we just had this incredible arc with Nacho. But beyond that, there’s just really no way to prepare. Sadly. So I haven’t slept much.

It’s certainly a labor of great love. Just in the same way we were talking about earlier about, you know, trying to pin down a theme on any of these characters. I mean, the show is just so unpredictable that I try as best I can to keep a very open mind, and to be willing to make a hard right turn at a given point, if it comes to that, because wherever the story may lead us, I need to be able to follow along as best I can, and to be useful as best I can.

How much of you is looking forward to the finale, and how much of you is kind of dreading it?

Oh, gosh, much more dread than excitement about being done. Honestly, part of being absolutely buried in it for me is emotional, because I don’t want to be thinking about the end of it. I just want to bury myself in the minutia of each little scene and each little moment and try to do my absolute best not to screw any of it up between here and the finale and just really enjoy it. I mean, it’s been a centerpiece of not only my professional life, but my personal life too.

These are my friends that I’ve worked with and have been consistently working with for almost 15 years which is incredibly rare and a very very special thing. So I’m trying not to think about the end. I’m just laser focused on all the details, and enjoying every moment that I have left.

New episodes of Better Call Saul air Mondays at 9:00 p.m. on AMC.

Better Call Saul Composer on What It’s Like to Score the Best Show on Television
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