Vince Gilligan offers more details on Breaking Bad movie: “We don’t slow down to explain things”
The post Vince Gilligan offers more details on Breaking Bad movie: “We don’t slow down to explain things” appeared first on Consequence of Sound.
After six long years, Jesse Pinkman will finally return October 11th in El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie. Although it’s been teased all year, Vince Gilligan and his team have kept mum on any details, save for a leaked logline and a teaser trailer featuring Skinny Pete.
Today, however, The Hollywood Reporter published a new cover story on the highly anticipated sequel movie, which includes interviews with both Gilligan and star Aaron Paul. Again, they were both hesitant on revealing too much, but we did learn some things.
It’s For the Fans
“If, after 12 years, you haven’t watched Breaking Bad, you’re probably not going to start now,” Gilligan says. “If you do, I hope that this movie would still be engaging on some level, but there’s no doubt in my mind that you won’t get as much enjoyment out of it. We don’t slow down to explain things to a non-Breaking Bad audience. I thought early on in the writing of the script, ‘Maybe there’s a way to have my cake and eat it too. Maybe there’s a way to explain things to the audience.’ If there was a way to do that, it eluded me.”
It’s Going to Look Big
At one point during the series, Gilligan and his cinematographer, Michael Slovis, made an unsuccessful pitch to Sony and AMC to shoot Breaking Bad in the CinemaScope format that Sergio Leone had used to shoot Clint Eastwood’s Dollars Trilogy. On El Camino, Gilligan got his wish — Better Caul Saul DP Marshall Adams shot the movie on the ARRI Alexa 65 camera used for The Revenant and in a 2.39 wide-screen format that seems designed to showcase a gunslinger’s squint across the desert.
It Started Out as A Five-Minute Movie
It was while planning events in 2018 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the premiere of Breaking Bad that Gilligan first told his inner circle he had an idea to revisit Jesse, perhaps a five-minute short film, he mused to his longtime producer, Melissa Bernstein. “He just started letting his mind run over that,” Bernstein says. “And he started to realize, ‘I have a lot to say about this.’ “
It Also Came to Mind Before Breaking Bad Ended
Gilligan first started ruminating on the story that would ultimately become El Camino before he finished making Breaking Bad. “I didn’t really tell anybody about it, because I wasn’t sure I would ever do anything with it,” he says. “But I started thinking to myself, ‘What happened to Jesse?’ You see him driving away. And to my mind, he went off to a happy ending. But as the years progressed, I thought, ‘What did that ending — let’s just call it an ending, neither happy, nor sad — what did it look like?'”
It’s Been the Best Kept Secret
Gilligan’s producers Bernstein and Diane Mercer went to great lengths to keep the film under wraps during production, shrouding locations from onlookers’ view, covertly ferrying key castmembers to the set, and warning crewmembers to be discreet around town. “Don’t be sitting on a barstool somewhere and talk about the project you’re working on, because God only knows who’s sitting next to you” was the mantra, Gilligan says.
There are a few other revelations: a trailer will drop during this Sunday’s Emmys, Badger (Matt L. Jones) will tag along with the previously confirmed Skinny Pete (Charles Baker), Netflix will distribute the film to theaters, and it’s going to be full of Easter Eggs.
Update: The film will screen in theaters between October 11th and 13th. Tickets to the screenings are now on sale.
In the meantime, stay tuned to Consequence of Sound in the lead up as we’ll be publishing a number of features and stories tied to Gilligan’s New Mexico universe.
Vince Gilligan offers more details on Breaking Bad movie: “We don’t slow down to explain things”
Michael Roffman
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