“We’re not gonna please everyone, we’re not gonna please everyone … This is what I keep telling myself so I can sleep at night,” Vince Gilligan laughed last month, even though he wasn’t exactly joking. When he spoke to Vulture, he was putting the finishing touches on the story for the third to last episode, getting very close to tackling the series finale (the show’s last stretch of eight episodes airs on AMC starting in July). The writers room had gotten “a little schizophrenic,” said Gilligan: They’ve been taking twice as long as normal, or about three and a half weeks, to break each of these concluding episodes, and rather than building from the ground up, they’ve had to do a little reverse-engineering to arrive where they must by the end. All of which is to say, he’s more frazzled than usual, anxiously working to tie things up beautifully. “It’s going to be polarizing no matter how you slice it,” Gilligan said, “but you don’t want 10 percent to say it was great and 90 percent to say it sucked ass. You want those numbers to be reversed.” Without giving anything away (would anyone really want that?), he took some time to download ten things on his mind as he heads into the homestretch.
1. The evolution of Walt’s fate. The metamorphosis of the sweet but sickly chemistry teacher into totally corrupted drug kingpin has made Walter White one of the most dynamic characters on TV, and just as he’s changed through the seasons, so too has Gilligan’s idea of how his saga would end. “I had this strange confidence in the beginning that I had an idea [for the ending] that was sound,” he said of Walt’s fate. “But I look back at the life of the series and realize I cycled through so many possible endings, it would be disingenuous to say I had always had it figured out. It has evolved in the last five years and probably has some evolving left to do.” He’s planted flags along the way to help steer the direction but still reserves the right to change course, even with two episodes left to go. “I read interviews with showrunners all the time who say, ‘I know exactly where this thing is headed.’ I always find that very interesting, and I don’t doubt them for a minute. It’s just I can’t see my way clear to do that because the characters in Breaking Bad are in a state of constant change by design,” he said. “When a character will be a different person five or six or ten or sixteen episodes from now, it’s hard to predict the future.”
2. How Casablanca got it exactly right. In terms of nailing the end, Gilligan says he and the writers don’t talk about TV — they talk movies. And for him, Casablanca remains “pretty perfect.” “No one gets everything they wanted. The guy doesn’t get the girl, but he has the satisfaction of knowing she wants him. And he doesn’t get her because he has to save the free world. What better ending is there than that?” Gilligan said. “I’m not saying we’re going to approach that or reach in that direction. Our story doesn’t line up [with Casablanca]. But we’re looking for that kind of satisfaction.”
3. His time on The X Files. Gilligan was still on the staff of The X Files when the sci-fi series reached its highly anticipated finale, but as a self-described “monster-of-the-week” guy, he says he never had to worry about making sure the conspiracies were synching. (He wrote the show’s penultimate episode “Sunshine Days,” set in The Brady Bunch house, and it had nothing to do with any of the overarching story lines.) “I sort of watched from afar as Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz broke these mythology episodes, and they always made my head hurt like, Man, how do you link this and that? Then, of course, I wind up on this insanely hyperserialized show. I should have paid more attention back then.”
Source: Full Article @ Vulture
1. The evolution of Walt’s fate. The metamorphosis of the sweet but sickly chemistry teacher into totally corrupted drug kingpin has made Walter White one of the most dynamic characters on TV, and just as he’s changed through the seasons, so too has Gilligan’s idea of how his saga would end. “I had this strange confidence in the beginning that I had an idea [for the ending] that was sound,” he said of Walt’s fate. “But I look back at the life of the series and realize I cycled through so many possible endings, it would be disingenuous to say I had always had it figured out. It has evolved in the last five years and probably has some evolving left to do.” He’s planted flags along the way to help steer the direction but still reserves the right to change course, even with two episodes left to go. “I read interviews with showrunners all the time who say, ‘I know exactly where this thing is headed.’ I always find that very interesting, and I don’t doubt them for a minute. It’s just I can’t see my way clear to do that because the characters in Breaking Bad are in a state of constant change by design,” he said. “When a character will be a different person five or six or ten or sixteen episodes from now, it’s hard to predict the future.”
2. How Casablanca got it exactly right. In terms of nailing the end, Gilligan says he and the writers don’t talk about TV — they talk movies. And for him, Casablanca remains “pretty perfect.” “No one gets everything they wanted. The guy doesn’t get the girl, but he has the satisfaction of knowing she wants him. And he doesn’t get her because he has to save the free world. What better ending is there than that?” Gilligan said. “I’m not saying we’re going to approach that or reach in that direction. Our story doesn’t line up [with Casablanca]. But we’re looking for that kind of satisfaction.”
3. His time on The X Files. Gilligan was still on the staff of The X Files when the sci-fi series reached its highly anticipated finale, but as a self-described “monster-of-the-week” guy, he says he never had to worry about making sure the conspiracies were synching. (He wrote the show’s penultimate episode “Sunshine Days,” set in The Brady Bunch house, and it had nothing to do with any of the overarching story lines.) “I sort of watched from afar as Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz broke these mythology episodes, and they always made my head hurt like, Man, how do you link this and that? Then, of course, I wind up on this insanely hyperserialized show. I should have paid more attention back then.”
Source: Full Article @ Vulture
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