Vince Gilligan on Breaking Bad: Crafting Morally Complex TV Drama

[00:00:00](applause) Hi everyone, I'm Steph Van Shilt. Welcome to the In Conversation with Vince Gilligan as part of Series Mania at ACMI.

[00:00:13]Just a bit of housekeeping before I introduce Vince. Today's In Conversation will run for a little over an hour and we'll have time for you guys to throw questions our way towards the end so hold on to those like a ricin cigarette and we'll call upon them at the very final. So Vince Gilligan probably needs no introduction. You wouldn't be here if you didn't know who he was but I'll give you one anyway. American writer, producer and director.

[00:00:37]Best known as the creator and showrunner of Breaking Bad and it's spin off, Better Call Saul.

[00:00:41]He's written and produced for the likes of the X-files and has won a bunch of different awards including Emmys, the BAFTA, so welcome Vince!

[00:00:49]Thank you, thank you so much. Thanks Stephanie.

[00:00:55]That's okay.

[00:00:56]Thank you guys.

[00:00:57]Kind of daunting, right?

[00:00:59]It is yeah, well it's wonderful seeing all these folks who like the work. Thank you guys for all being here.

[00:01:06]Appreciate it.

[00:01:07]I was gonna say, I think people more than like this work.

[00:01:10]They love it!

[00:01:12]Well, I appreciate that very much. Thank you.

[00:01:14]So we thought we'd start at the very start.

[00:01:16]So obviously we had a clip just now from the pilot episode.

[00:01:20]Tell us how Breaking Bad began?

[00:01:23]From the very beginning.

[00:01:24]From the very beginning. It was about - we were shooting about, over ten years ago now which I find hard to believe, that that scene you just watched was shot, gosh, probably about March of 2007. And before that and about 2004, I was talking to a buddy of mine, a guy named Tom Schnauz who's one of our writer, producer, directors on Better Call Saul and previously on Breaking Bad.

[00:01:53]My oldest friend, he and I went to NYU film school together, back in '86 and he and I had worked on the X-Files together. And around about 2004 we'd been out of work for two years. X-Files had been off the air since about 2002 and we're on the phone just bemoaning the fact that we couldn't find another writing job that was... I was about to say, that was near as good as the X-Files!

[00:02:18]We couldn't find a writing job at all! We were just kind of lean, slim pickings at that point. And I said, you know, "What are we going to do now?" and he said "Why don't we get a Winnebago", a caravan I guess in Australia, "Why don't we get a caravan and, you know, put a meth lab in the back of it and ride around America and see the sights and cook meth and make some money!"

[00:02:40]So this is a documentary?

[00:02:42]You heard it here first guys!

[00:02:43]Todd's got a very warped sense of humour.

[00:02:45]He was joking but what was interesting is that in the moment he made that joke, this sort of little (finger snaps) Eureka moment hit me because I'm a very boring law-abiding guy and he is too, despite his sense of humour, and it dawned on me as he was making this joke, that would be an interesting character to write about. Someone like us, who for whatever reason actually did such a thing, actually decided to cook meth. And then I thought to myself, and he kept talking, you know, whatever else he was saying sounded like, you know, the adults on the Peanut shows, "Wah, wah". Because I wasn't really listening anymore, because I was thinking instead. I was thinking, you know, why would someone like me or Tom decide to do that? And I thought well, you know, you must need money and one thing led to another. And by the time the phone call was over that moment of inspiration had led to, I didn't have a name for him yet, but led to that character who would eventually be known as Walter White.

[00:03:51]And that's very rare, having that kind of, you know, for the writers in the audience, I don't know how it is for you folks but in writing it's hard work and you got to really, you know, keep your pencil to the grindstone so to speak.

[00:04:05]But every now and then when that inspiration hits that's a wonderful thing.

[00:04:09]And were you also influenced...? Sorry, I thought you were looking for your phone (laughs) No, that was, yeah, that wasn't it.

[00:04:18]By I guess the zeitgeist of the times. So Breaking Bad's almost a comment on suburbia in America, the meth crisis, the impact of crime... that kind of all fed into it and into the process?

[00:04:33]It did and I love that people take those meanings, see those meanings in it and see it as a comment on, you know, certain topical situations in America and that's great.

[00:04:49]To me that's all I guess, you know, the cherry on top, so to speak but what really interested me from that first conversation with my friend Tom, is this one character. I was intrigued at the idea of taking a good man, the protagonist, the good guy and turning him into...that was a part I left out in this pitch, what really interested me aside from this character, you know, "Why would he do this thing and whatnot?", was it dawned on me that television, of which I am a giant fan, historically exists, TV shows exist, in a kind of a stasis world. You know, when you watch Bart Simpson for thirty years now on The Simpsons, he never grows up, he never becomes a different character than he is. All the great TV shows in history, it's helpful for the characters to not change because if they were to change, you know, you don't have that comfort of inviting them into your room week upon week and not knowing what you're going to get. It's better for Marshal Dillon to stay Marshal Dillon for twenty years on Gunsmoke and whatnot.

[00:06:03]What really excited me, and this I think it came a bit later than that phone call with my buddy, what really excited me was the idea of going against that grain.

[00:06:14]Going against the mould, so to speak, television and creating a character who was by his very definition designed to change and of course when you have a character who changes when by design, that's what your TV show is, it therefore becomes a finite TV show instead of a...well there's no infinite TV show but you want a TV show that can go on typically. You want one that can on indefinitely. Hence the stasis that you seek but I figured, you know, I'm kind of lazy. I don't want a show to go on twenty years, if I get that lucky, it's too much work. Let's do a finite TV show. The good guys are going to turn into the bad guy and then it's all over, so... So did you always plan for five seasons?

[00:06:55]We didn't really plan for five seasons per se. I never knew exactly from the get-go how long I wanted it to go but probably in the earliest days, I thought to myself two to three seasons.

[00:07:10]I didn't really share that with Sony, our studio, because they would have gotten very upset about that. Because, you know, you don't make any money for the first two or three years, the studio doesn't. They need more episodes in order to, you know, monetise the whole endeavour. So I probably kept that under my hat. But then it turned out to be, you know in my mind's eye, three seasons became four seasons, or series I guess you could call them. Four series, five series and then ultimately six, is where we ended up.

[00:07:47]And did you have any pushback from Sony and those guys because you obviously were going into this to create something different. It was the anti-hero.

[00:07:56]He's not the nicest guy by the end. Did you have any pushback from the studios?

[00:07:59]Not creatively. The only pushback, of course, you know we have the studio and they own the product. They're the folks who were, you know, making it and then there's the broadcaster. In the United States it's the AMC Network and they're our network and they have slightly different desires financially speaking. The studio wants more episodes sometimes, in our case, the network. Sometimes the network doesn't want as many episodes because they're always saying "We're taking a bath on this.

[00:08:32]You guys are making all the money and we've got this terrible deal" and so, in our case AMC didn't want necessarily as many episodes as Sony wanted.

[00:08:41]But as to your question, that was the only real tension so to speak.

[00:08:47]There was never, and it wasn't that bad, and they're both great companies. They've both been really good to us.

[00:08:52]As to your question about, you know were they coming down on me hard because of the creative stuff we wanted to do? They never did. They were wonderful.

[00:09:00]Both companies, the studio and the network loved the idea, God bless them, of taking the good guy turning him into the bad guy.

[00:09:10]And, you know, like I say, the only trouble then was the idea of, especially in the case of Sony, fewer episodes but they never...only once did they give me a hard time about a story point.

[00:09:20]What was that?

[00:09:21]That was a moment in... I bet you somebody here knows the exact episode.

[00:09:27]I'm going to look like an idiot here.

[00:09:29]I believe it was the one in season 1, season 2, ended with the...it was season 2 when Walt watched Jesse's girlfriend Jane die of a heroin overdose and he didn't lift a finger to save her. When we pitched that, we didn't pitch so much as we would write these outlines, these very complex twelve to fourteen page outlines of each episode before the individual writer went off and wrote them. And when that outline reached Sony and AMC and they read it, that troubled them. They said "Wait a minute, he's gonna do what?".

[00:10:13]And my original pitch was that he actually gives her a hot dose of heroin.

[00:10:18]He actually actively takes a hand in her demise and even my writers thought I was kind of...you know, they thought it was was too dark for them so we pulled it back to, you know... I just watched her die, that's fine.

[00:10:36]So he watches her die... Like a good man.

[00:10:38]That was the one moment where they said "Don't you think he's going too dark, too quickly? Because it's only season 2 and doesn't he have further away to go before he does things that dark?".

[00:10:51]And we talked about it and ultimately, and I wasn't dismissive of them for asking the question, it was a very valid question and it did give me pause. It did have me worried. I wasn't one of these guys, that's like "You're an idiot I know what I'm doing!"

[00:11:07]Because I never feel like I know what I'm doing. You're just kind of groping your way through it, constantly. So that did worry me when they said that but we talked it through and we went ahead and did it. We got rid of the hot dose thing. We just had him watch her dying. And then the way he plays it is so beautiful because he starts to do something and you can see just every thought that goes through his head, through Bryan Cranston's head. In that moment he starts to, as any normal human being would, he starts to do something.

[00:11:36]And then he hesitates and you can see the calculus, you know, you can see the gears turning in his brain. And then he stops himself and then he wells up with tears and he feels terrible. He feels a self-loathing but but then he squashes it down. It's just an amazing thing to watch. It's one of the rare times when I wasn't directing, that I was there on the set and I watched, standing behind the camera, that scene. And as great as the scene is in the finished product, there was something that I saw in the room that day that the camera didn't pick up. And I can't put it into words, but there was something, I can't even think of the right...something, you know, intangible. But I can't even think of the right word for it, but it's almost like it was too much for the the camera to even pick up. And I was so glad I was there but I'm so sorry that no one else got to see it.

[00:12:27]Obviously there are some great performances across Breaking Bad and we can't stray from talking about Bryan Cranston.

[00:12:33]Oh no.

[00:12:34]When did he get involved in the series and how did that come about?

[00:12:40]I mean, I wouldn't have been invited here to Australia, if it weren't for Bryan Cranston.

[00:12:43]I mean, no matter how the scripts came out and the directing and all of that...if it weren't for the actors, starting with him, you would have never heard of this thing. I was very fortunate to have worked with Bryan on an episode of the X-Files back in 1999. I wrote an episode of the X-Files in which basically the plot of the episode was that this scary hillbilly type guy, takes agent Mulder hostage.

[00:13:16]And for an hour, it's just the two of them.

[00:13:18]It's just the two-hander as they're driving in this car.

[00:13:22]And at the end, and he's kind of a scary guy and he's kind of nasty, kind of a repellant character. And at the end of the hour he dies and even though he's been a really bad guy, the character, you're supposed to feel bad at the end. And it was so hard to cast! Because we had a lot of scary guys come in who, you know, were ranting and raving and sitting there in the audition room like "Oh man this guy's scary" but you didn't really care for them.

[00:13:45]You were sort of looking forward to their demise, you know, not personally, but... But then Brian came in. He came in the last day. We were in trouble.

[00:13:56]Because, you know, the show has to go on. And you have to hire somebody because, you know, the train has to keep rolling. He came in, I think the last day, he was second or third from the last actor. We were even going to possibly see, and then we were going to have to go back through our list and settle.

[00:14:16]And I breathed such a sigh of relief, when he came in. And I didn't know who he was from Adam.

[00:14:19]I didn't recognise him. I didn't realise I'd seen him before in small parts, like small but memorable parts. He was the one-armed officer who sends Tom Hanks on his mission, in Saving Private Ryan. And he was in From the Earth to the Moon and of course he was in Seinfeld as a wonderful dentist.

[00:14:39]He's a chameleon. So I didn't realise I had seen this guy many times before. And he came in and he just blew us away.

[00:14:46]And I just felt this wave of relief. And I watched him do this episode and I remember thinking, and we were blessed to work with a lot of great actors for nine years on X-Files, but this guy stood out in my head. And I remember thinking, "I want to work with this guy again", and about a year and a half after the X-File episode, this show goes on the air and it's Malcolm in the Middle.

[00:15:09]And I see the commercial for it. It was our home Network, Fox was also the X-File Network. I'm watching a commercial one night and I see this goofy guy in his underpants and rollerblades and whatnot. And I said "This guy looks familiar". And he was clean-shaven.

[00:15:26]You know, Bryan in our episode had a beard and it took me a minute and I thought "Oh my God, that's that guy! That's that guy from my episode! I didn't know he could be funny!"

[00:15:35]And I really didn't. That's how he tuned out I was, I guess.

[00:15:41]All I knew was the drama part. So anyway, he was the guy I had in mind, from the minute I started writing the pilot episode of Breaking Bad.

[00:15:50]And luckily he said yes. And I remember he strung us along a little bit which is, you know, good gamesmanship when you're trying to make a deal in Hollywood. But he came in and he met with me.

[00:16:04]Actually his first meeting was with me and one of our producers, Melissa Bernstein, the three of us met. And he said "Yeah good script, I like it.

[00:16:14]I've got this other thing I'm thinking of doing, there's a pilot called Nurses on Fox and I'm getting a lot of pressure to do that.

[00:16:21]It's a lot of money but, you know, this is interesting."

[00:16:24]And then later on, if you see these interviews with him ever since then, it's like "I was dying to do Breaking Bad! And the trouble is, he's such a great actor.

[00:16:32]He had us fooled!

[00:16:34](Steph) He played you!

[00:16:35]He played us good!

[00:16:37]So, yeah, I gotta keep that in mind in the future.

[00:16:40]The actor may be acting, you know.

[00:16:43]Imagine?

[00:16:43]Yeah.

[00:16:45]So he has done the comedic roles and I think that's what's interesting when you go back and watch Breaking Bad from the beginning, is there is quite a bit of comedy in how it's set up. There's kind of the odd couple dynamic between Jesse and Walt. And they just fail across the board at the beginning.

[00:17:01]Which is not good. And then by the time you get to the end, it is so fucking bleak, pardon my language.

[00:17:06]Oh yeah.

[00:17:08]I just couldn't watch it without...I'd be doing cross stitching or something at the same time, because I was so panicked watching it.

[00:17:13]Did you know, firstly that you would cause so many people in the audience to have heart attacks? And secondly, at what point did you decide to put the comedy away and kind of move into the serious drama?

[00:17:24]Well, you know, it's interesting. That's a good question.

[00:17:27]I knew from the... let me start at the beginning.

[00:17:29]I knew we needed as much humour in the show as we could possibly authentically fit into it. I'd had the experience, we had a spinoff series of the X-Files called Millennium. I didn't work on it but I watched very closely, up from a very close vantage point. I watched it. Its evolution from going on the air, to kind of coasting along the ratings, to getting cancelled.

[00:17:59]I'd go and steal food from the writers room, you know, the writers office there and I got to know the writers and I really loved the show. There is a point I'm going to get to.

[00:18:10]It was a really good show that I really enjoyed. But it was about a guy who hunts serial killers and it didn't have a whiff of humour to it. And I really think that's why the show failed because it just is unendingly bleak. You just wanted to slit your wrists when you watched this thing. Even though it was really well made, beautifully shot, well acted. And I remember, you know, learning that lesson at the time thinking, you know, "If I ever do a show that dark, I've got to leaven it with some humour". And suddenly here we are, we've got a show about a guy dying of cancer, cooking crystal meth. And obviously the crime part of it has to feel authentic and that's pretty heavy stuff. And of course what meth does to people, destroys whole families. You've got to be authentic.

[00:18:56]You've got to treat that properly. But then I thought, you know, "God if we can't get any humour in this thing we're dead. We'll just get cancelled like Millennium."

[00:19:06]So there was always an effort to get as much humour as we could get in there without it becoming, you know, the Hogan's Heroes of meth, so to speak.

[00:19:16]We had to have it feel authentic.

[00:19:18]I do want to see that.

[00:19:20]Yeah, now that I say that, that could be good!

[00:19:23]So then, as to your question about at what point did we decide to dispense with the humour, we never did. We never decided to do that.

[00:19:34]Toward the end, it naturally began to leech itself out.

[00:19:38]In the final episode, there's one little bit of comedy relief, so to speak, when Badger and Skinny Pete show up. It's like this little breeze of cool air blowing on you when you're in a sauna, or something. It just feels so good. We get to laugh here just for a second.

[00:19:56]But we never intended to get rid of it. It just naturally went away at a certain point because the stakes got so high toward the end.

[00:20:07]And I guess empathy goes hand-in-hand with the same thing, with the comedy and the humour.

[00:20:14]So you were saying about meth being so serious and I always remember that episode early on with Peekaboo, I think it was called.

[00:20:20]Oh yeah.

[00:20:21]With the family and the kid and the meth addict gets his head squashed with the ATM, which sounds kind of funny but that whole episode was awfully sad, with the kid... Yeah.

[00:20:30]...and Jesse's the moral centre of the show.

[00:20:34]And that was the kind of the first real reckoning of that.

[00:20:36]Can you talk about Jesse as a character?

[00:20:38]Jesse, you know, it's so funny, you folks probably heard some of these stories before. You might have heard this one but it bears repeating. I was going to kill him off in the first season.

[00:20:50]In the pilot episode, Jesse is Walter White's entree into the world of criminality and having served his purpose in doing that, I figured by the end of the first season, we wouldn't need this guy anymore. Walt would know what he needs to know about selling meth, about transporting and all these things.

[00:21:09]And then we could kill this kid off and it'll be a great dramatic engine at the end of season 1, in that Walt can feel guilty that his partner in crime gets horribly murdered and then he can go on a rampage for revenge in season 2. It would be a great engine for drama going forward. That was my intention back when I was writing that first episode by myself.

[00:21:35]The beautiful thing about TV is that you don't ever, except for that very first episode, you don't wind up working by yourself. The beautiful thing is that it's a very wonderfully collaborative medium and you get all these smart people around you. So suddenly I got all these really good writers around me and you suddenly got these actors enacting, creating, breathing life into these characters that you've previously only interacted with on a page of paper. So this young actor comes along Aaron Paul playing Jesse and he's wonderful and he's so much better than I ever saw the character.

[00:22:12]The life he breathed into Jesse Pinkman made Jesse Pinkman for me so much more interesting than I ever perceived him capable of being.

[00:22:22]And then I've got all these other writers around me saying "This guy's great!"

[00:22:25]"What are we going to do with this guy?", "So I'm going to kill him off!". Everyone was like"What!?" And I said "Yeah, you're right. That is a stupid idea."

[00:22:33]You got to be given this wonderful gift and why do that?

[00:22:39]And anyway, I remember, I probably told the story before, but we were on the set, actually we came to the idea very quickly that we didn't want to kill him off.

[00:22:47]So on the second or third episode I was visiting the set, hanging out in video village there, with all the directors chairs watching the monitors.

[00:22:56]And the director is setting up a shot and Aaron comes ambling over and I say "Hey..." And I thought I was doing him favour, said "Aaron, guess what? I was going to kill your character off but you're so good, I'm going to keep you now!" And his eyes, just like a deer in the headlights, he was like "What?" and I said "No, this is a good thing!"

[00:23:16]"I'm going to keep you around because you please me!" You know and he was so... and Bryan Cranston was standing nearby, swirling his tea around, you know, putting the sugar in his tea or whatever. He overheard this and he didn't make much of it at the time but he is such a practical joker.

[00:23:37]From that point on, pretty much for the next six years, Bryan would make a point of reading the next episode first, before Aaron got a chance to and then he'd come over to Aaron, because they usually read the episode while they're shooting the previous episode. He'd come over to Aaron and he'd sneak up behind him and, his chair, where he'll start massaging his shoulders and he'd say "Buddy, it was a great run. I gotta tell you. This next one you go out like a champ!" He would do that time and time again to poor Aaron Paul and Aaron fell for it everytime!

[00:24:12]Awww! (Steph) Such a sweet guy, the greatest guy ever.

[00:24:16]There was a lot of anticipation leading up to that final episode. How was it for you?

[00:24:21]Oh man, I was so nervous.

[00:24:24]We knew sixteen episodes out that we had sixteen episodes left.

[00:24:28]We knew, which is actually a great blessing.

[00:24:34]We didn't know that with the X-Files. Most TV shows, certainly in the past, you didn't know when you' were going to end and suddenly you might hear two months after the most recent episode that it was the last one.

[00:24:47]And so you can't work towards something. This was a real blessing. We knew we had a very finite amount left and then we worked toward wrapping things up in a satisfying manner once we had that information.

[00:25:04]I was very nervous leading up, especially the final eight.

[00:25:08]The pressure of folks loving your work...it's a champagne problem!

[00:25:18]It's a high-class problem but even champagne problems none the less, the self-imposed pressure that you feel when you think about all the folks... you're so lucky when folks are attracted to something you're doing, then you don't want them to be disappointed. You want people to to love the final episode, to feel like that was the way it should end.

[00:25:43]And it led to a great many sleepless nights.

[00:25:46]I was going to say people were more than just interested.

[00:25:48]They were speculating constantly online. My partner and I were talking about how you get the title of the episode ahead of the episode release and people would just be like "What does it mean? What does it mean?"

[00:26:01]There'd be articles like "Ten plausible possibilities of what's going to happen in this episode?" That's a lot of pressure and a lot of love around it.

[00:26:09]You know, now that I think of it, a thing that released a fair bit of pressure, and this was a good realisation that the writers and I had, Breaking Bad was known for plot twists that folks didn't necessarily see coming throughout its run. And when it dawned on us, late in those final eight episodes, that perhaps we didn't have to come up with an ending that was a complete "Oh my God! I didn't see that coming!".

[00:26:40]But instead when we realised that sometimes the best ending, the best ending being the most appropriate ending, may well be the ending that you do see coming. For instance that he does indeed die.

[00:26:51]I mean, he was given a death sentence in the very first half of the very first episode.

[00:26:57]Why not pay that off? And it only seems fitting.

[00:27:00]So once the writers realised "Maybe we don't have to have a giant corker of a twist ending", that actually helped, that took a little of the pressure off us.

[00:27:12]But it was desperately important to us that we not drop the ball in the final hour.

[00:27:20]Because we've all seen shows, I'm not going to name any names of shows, but I've been a fan of TV all my life and every now and then is a show you'll love and then you see the final episode and you come away thinking, even if you don't hate it, "Wow, man, I wanted something else."

[00:27:36]"I kind of wanted something else." and it's only human nature.

[00:27:39]But with those memories fresh in my mind of all those shows, through which I've had those experiences, it became very important for us that we do our damnedest to get it right.

[00:27:54]I think that particular sequence that we just saw then was a really good articulation of the elements of lightness and darkness that you were talking about, the use of music I think in particular. Obviously it's really the bleakest and he dies but it's Baby Blue coming out and you can't help but have a slight chuckle at that. The use of music throughout the series is really interesting I think. Can you speak to that a little bit?

[00:28:18]We have two gentlemen, all credit to them.

[00:28:23]They did Breaking Bad now they do Better Call Saul, our spin-off series.

[00:28:29]It's our composer Dave Porter who creates the creative music for both shows.

[00:28:35]And then there's a gentleman named Thomas Gilovich who is our music supervisor who finds the so called "needle drops", the pre-existing music. They both do amazing work and we have a spotting session once every episode is edited, in which the sound folks watch the episode with me and they sit through and say "I want a sound effect here. I want silence here.", this and that, and part of what we're doing is responding for music as well and what I love about both these guys is... you think their job is to put music in these things, they are surprisingly delicate and spare in their desire to have music.

[00:29:33]So quite often we'll be sitting there and a whole act will go by and I'd look to these guys "Want any music?

[00:29:40]Haven't heard from you guys yet. Are we missing any music here?"

[00:29:43]And both these guys are like "Meh - you don't need any music.". That's what I love about these guys.

[00:29:47]To have music in these shows, philosophically the way we approach it, is that there better be a darn good need for music, either composed or sourced music. And the one thing we never wanted to do is to tell the audience how to feel emotionally. We don't ever want to use music as a way of saying "Ok, you should feel sad right now or you should feel happy right now.".

[00:30:15]And these guys are right in sync with that philosophy and always have been.

[00:30:20]If you like the music on these shows it's all due to them.

[00:30:26]They're so talented both of them.

[00:30:29]You mentioned Better Call Saul. Have people being watching or have watched? Yes? Yeah!

[00:30:34]At what point did you decide Saul Goodman was going to be who you thought of?

[00:30:39]It started off as a joke! It really did!

[00:30:43]So what we take away from today is, any jokes write them down because they'll become really successful television shows.

[00:30:49]It was really a goofy joke. Peter Gould, my partner on Better Call Saul, created the character Saul Goodman in a season 2 episode of Breaking Bad and we cast Bob Odenkirk in that episode. And that was a real coup for us, because we're both big fans of Mr Show with Bob and David, of which Bob obviously was one of the stars, we're big fans of this guy.

[00:31:17]So when we get him and we see how funny he is in this character that we were writing, very quickly we started to joke around in the writers room.

[00:31:28]We'd say "When we're doing the spin-off of Better Call Saul, we'll do thus and so..." It was a goofy joke that would get laughs from our fellow writers.

[00:31:37]And we made that joke so many times over the years that it dawned on us "Why the heck shouldn't we do this?"

[00:31:43]"Let's go ahead and give them a spinoff."

[00:31:47]When Breaking Bad ended, and part of the reason I was into it, I have to confess now, is that I wanted to keep working. I wanted to keep the crew together and I wanted to keep as many of the actors and the writers and the directors and producers together as possible once Breaking Bad ended. And also I was afraid that if I stepped away from the success of Breaking Bad and took an extended sabbatical or vacation or what-have-you, because the reaction that Breaking Bad was so beyond my wildest dreams, I really feared that I would become paralysed creatively afterward. I'd think to myself "I've got this idea for something but is it good enough? Will it be loved as much?"

[00:32:32]Answer's probably "No." So it was best for me to keep working.

[00:32:36]So for all these reasons we pitched to our network and our studio "We want to do a Better Call Saul spin-off, because we can have it up and running quickly."

[00:32:50]So what I'm here confessing is that those were not great reasons to do a spin-off.

[00:32:54](laughs) Beause they could easily be. (Steph) The best reason is to keep everybody working and keep the family together.

[00:33:00]But even that's not a legitimate creative reason.

[00:33:03]So we pitched it to these guys, both companies and they were they very nicely said "Yes we'll do that." And then Peter and I embarked upon a series of meetings. Long walks actually in the Burbank area, where we have a writers room, trying to figure out what such a show would look like. And only then once the ink was drying on the contracts, did we realise we had not a clue, as to what to do with this show.

[00:33:32]We thought it'd be a half hour comedy.

[00:33:37]We thought of great many things that didn't come to pass.

[00:33:43]It was really an ass backward way of going about it.

[00:33:44]Slippin' Jimmy approach by the sound of it.

[00:33:46]It was very much a Slippin' Jimmy way of doing it - you're right.

[00:33:50]Kind of fell ass-backward into it.

[00:33:52]I wouldn't recommend that. That's a bad idea.

[00:33:55]I'd recommend watching it though it's very good.

[00:33:57](coughs) Well thank you.

[00:33:59]So it's based a few years before Breaking Bad.

[00:34:02]Based six years before.

[00:34:04]Albuquerque, New Mexico. It takes place long before Jimmy McGill, who's eventually going to become the character known as Saul Goodman, before he is really a dirtbag criminal attorney. Not a criminal attorney but a criminal attorney and it's before he meets Walter White.

[00:34:23]One of the things we didn't realise when we embarked upon the show is that, we didn't even know at first that it would be a prequel but once we knew it would be a prequel, we did not realise until later how much we would like this character, Jimmy McGill, and how sad we would be at the thought of him eventually becoming Saul Goodman.

[00:34:45]It's gonna be a bit of a tragedy when it finally does occur.

[00:34:49]Yeah, it's another "Demise of a good man" kind of story.

[00:34:53]How do you foresee it going on?

[00:34:56]So we're three seasons in now.

[00:34:57]Three seasons in.

[00:34:59]Do you think it will surpass Breaking Bad?

[00:35:02]Or do you have a plan in mind for...?

[00:35:04]Do you mean in terms of raw numbers of episodes?

[00:35:05]Yeah.

[00:35:06]Well, I think it'll be neck-and-neck. I think we had sixty-two episodes of Breaking Bad.

[00:35:13]I think we'll be in the ballpark, when we're done, of Better Call Saul.

[00:35:16]We'll be in that ballpark figure wise and we're having fun doing it.

[00:35:23]Bob Odenkirk is a wonderful number one on the call sheet, as we say, he's a great leading actor. He's the linchpin of a wonderful cast.

[00:35:37]Rhea Seehorn, who plays Kim, she's such a dream to work with, such a wonderful actress.

[00:35:44]We're just very lucky, yet again, like we were on Breaking Bad.

[00:35:47]We're very lucky to have an amazing cast that makes us all look good.

[00:35:51]I'll throw to the floor in a minute so have a look out for the ushers and get ready to start putting your hand up.

[00:35:57]I did want to ask about Better Call Saul, in terms of the decline of "a good man family" central to his relation, his downfall. As much like it was with Walt.

[00:36:08]There's a lot of pressures from family. It's just a bit different.

[00:36:11]A bit more Shakespearean, almost, with his brother.

[00:36:14]Oh l like that, "Shakespearean." Oh, makes it sound good!

[00:36:17](laughs) It is good though! It's okay!

[00:36:21]Oh no, I love Shakespeare! That's wonderful!

[00:36:25](laughs) In terms of the television as a medium, and a lot of the shows are based around nuclear families or family disruption, I think in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, you take it a step further.

[00:36:37]Did you want to talk a little bit about Jimmy's relationship with his brother?

[00:36:40]And how the family dynamics for it play in Breaking Bad as well?

[00:36:43]Peter and I realised we tried to do something very different when we got going with our spin-off with Better Call Saul.

[00:36:53]We didn't set out to, yet again, tell a story of devolution, of a good man turning bad.

[00:37:00]And we just fell into it nonetheless. But when we got going on it we thought "Well, we've already done that. We shouldn't do that again."

[00:37:08]"We'll look like one-trick ponies" And indeed, I guess we are one-trick ponies because here we are doing it again. But there's something fascinating about that for us and I'm not sure why that is.

[00:37:20]We probably need psychoanalysis for us to have an answer to that.

[00:37:25]But, in the case of Jimmy McGill, he has a lot of pressure on him from his brother Chuck, who is his older brother. If you haven't seen the show, Jimmy who's going to eventually become Saul Goodman, his older brother's a brilliant lawyer named Charles McGill.

[00:37:44]And Charles, when you meet him, you sense that he loves his brother Jimmy but he's very judgmental of him. And he's a bit holier than thou and he's always talking to Jimmy. He's always pained by Jimmy's moral failings.

[00:38:01]And then you realise as the show progresses he's actually very jealous of his brother. Not jealous of his intellect but just jealous on a very profoundly simple, human level. Jealous of the fact that his brother is beloved by people. That no matter how hard he, Chuck, works to please his mum and dad and the people around him by being brilliant and by excelling in his knowledge of the law, his brother Jimmy can always walk in the room right behind him and make some goofy joke and everybody's got their arms out and wants to hug him. Everybody loves this guy!

[00:38:36]And Chuck just can't compete with that and it leads to a lot of issues on the show.

[00:38:43]And it's been really fascinating for us because, again, I have to stress we didn't set out knowing we're going to tell that story.

[00:38:51]There's a joke in a minute ago about how haphazard our process seems.

[00:38:55]It is a bit haphazard but it's one of the things I love about television as an art form, is that aside from the collaborative nature of it, it's very interactive. And when we started, if you allow it to be, you can learn a lot from your actors, from your fellow writers, from the show itself as it's becoming real versus just ink on a page.

[00:39:27]And in the case of this show, we didn't realise Chuck McGill was going to be such a fascinating character in the early going until we saw the way that the actor who plays him Michael McCann, was doing his job. We thought in the early going that Chuck was going to be not quite so Machiavellian, not quite so withholding of his love. And then we saw certain things that Michael was doing and Michael's actually a very warm sweet guy in real life.

[00:39:57]But he was playing this character in a somewhat imperious fashion and we started working those nuances into the subsequent scripts. And this is what I say when I say I love TV, for how you're able to roll with the punches in TV.

[00:40:11]You're able to change the direction, you can steer the ship in different directions as the episodes progress in a way that you can't do with a movie.

[00:40:22]In a movie you have to get it right the first time and then you shoot it and then it's done.

[00:40:26]But I love TV for the fact that we can go in the direction of what we find interesting and it's such a great art form for that.

[00:40:39]And I'm so lucky to get to work in.

[00:40:42]Do the fans impact on those decisions as well?

[00:40:44]Particularly for something like Better Call Saul, there is an element of fanservice to it. I know that when I'm watching it, I'm like "Oh I get it!"

[00:40:51]and it makes me feel special.

[00:40:53]And we love our fans.

[00:40:54]God bless all of ya! But I think, and there's a lot of different ways to do it and you can absolutely, especially now in the age of social media, you can absolutely listen to fan reaction, pretty much in real time.

[00:41:08]Well yeah, with Breaking Bad there was a podcast and then the show after the show, to talk about it.

[00:41:13]Oh yeah, right, right.

[00:41:15]But those were all kind of one-way communications.

[00:41:17]What works best for me, as much as I love our fans, is to try to try to keep the writers room a bit of a sterile space. So we would definitely like to interact with the fans. Giving them some value added things, like the podcast and whatnot but I am not a person who goes on social media and culls it for fan reaction. Just because, it's just for me it's not mentally healthy thing to do. There's nothing wrong with it, and to each his or her own but for me, I try to keep it a bit more hermetically sealed and I would love to hear anecdotally from people saying "I like this or I like that" but it always worked best for me, when it was a little bit later. There was a bit of a a chronological remove from the episode versus the reaction.

[00:42:11]So I wouldn't say fan reaction has ever really helped steer the ship.

[00:42:20]It's enough for us to look at the way the actors are playing the roles and what we're getting on film versus what our mind's eye perception of the the episode is beforehand.

[00:42:35]Those kind of things are probably for me a better way to steer the ship, so to speak.

[00:42:40]Yeah I understand that and I like that a lot in terms of extra textual stuff to talk about afterwards, rather than impeding on the creative process.

[00:42:50]And it doesn't have to impede on the process.

[00:42:53]I guess we say process (USA accent) in America. I was gonna sound all classy and say process (UK accent) but that would have... Classy!

[00:43:00](laughs) There's nothing wrong with that, I want to hasten to add, there's nothing wrong with being more attentive immediately to fan reaction.

[00:43:09]It's just, you know, what works for some doesn't necessarily work for others.

[00:43:13]You were saying before that you'd like to see more of Breaking Bad on the big screen in a cinema.

[00:43:18]Yeah I would love that.

[00:43:19]Not saying, I think we could make that happen.

[00:43:21]I think there's enough fans that I'm pretty sure people in this room would book tickets to come and see a Breaking-Bad-athon.

[00:43:27]I would love that. I'd love for people to be able to see it on a big screen in a communal environment like this.

[00:43:33]We had such wonderful DOPs, cinematographers, throughout the run, starting with John Toll who shot the very first episode. Wonderful double Oscar-winning cinematographer.

[00:43:47]We're so lucky to get him and then we had Michael Slovis.

[00:43:49]We get, leading up to now on Better Call Saul, Marshall Adams. And the look of the show was always so important to us and it really was meant to be seen on a big screen in a sense but, you know, there's always legalities, always getting in the way.

[00:44:03]I'm hoping this changes in the States, everywhere I hope.

[00:44:09]But the music rights are what jam you up for being able to show stuff like this in a communal theatrical venue.

[00:44:18]The music rights that we secure... We only secure the rights, historically so the rights are only secured for television airings and not for theatrical distribution, so that's probably what would jam us up from being able to do that. But it would be really cool.

[00:44:34]Come on people power! We can make it happen.

[00:44:36]I know, we got to get the lawyers out of the way here.

[00:44:40]Better Call Saul.

[00:44:42]That's right, yeah.

[00:44:43]Does anyone have a question? It is time.

[00:44:48]Yup.

[00:44:51]Don't forget - just wait until you have the microphone in front of you.

[00:44:56]Hi! Whenever I watch Breaking Bad I'm always really struck by your use of colour. And there's all these things, like, you know, obviously there's Marie's obsession with purple but there's subtle things like Walt tends to wear a lot of green and Skyler a lot of blue. But when she starts going along with his crimes she starts wearing green as well.

[00:45:17]And in this "I am the danger" scene that we saw, Walt's wearing this excellent violent red and there's that pink sweater that I'm sure is burned into everyone's memory.

[00:45:25](laughs) Oh yeah that was...yeah... And I find it really interesting and I'd love to hear more about kind of where that came from? That use of colour as a metaphor and reflecting the changes in the characters?

[00:45:34]Great question.

[00:45:36]It was very important to us, colour. And at the beginning of every season, specifically having a discussion, having a meeting with our production designer and our costume designer, we would have palette meetings. We'd talk to the beginning of every season about the use...specifically about that. I'm so glad you noticed that.

[00:45:58]It's not necessarily that any specific colour meant a specific thing. In my mind it was more about changing the colour palette of each character...was a way of letting the audience know that those characters were indeed undergoing a process of change. So in other words, when you watch the first episode of Breaking Bad, Walt wears a lot of beiges, a lot of cream colours and that's you know, that's not like groundbreaking or anything. To take a boring guy and put him in beige. But by the end of that first episode, he's gotten his mojo back so to speak, just a little bit at the end of that first hour. And we put him in a green shirt, I think, toward the end. And so that was that philosophy writ small in one episode. And then when we realised we're going to get to be on the air for a whole season or more, we started to think in terms of a palette that would subtly and slowly change throughout ten or thirteen episode season. So we had Walt... we had a season where Walt went from...got into reds and then blacks and Skyler was in blues and Marie was the one constant. She never really... although, actually, in the final episode of the final season, we got her out of purple a little bit just because she was grieving because her, you know, "spoiler alert" because her husband had a...well I won't finish the sentence, in case anyone here hadn't seen it all. But so we...it was a great deal of thought went into it.

[00:47:35]Thank you for noticing.

[00:47:39]Next question?

[00:47:47]Hey.

[00:47:51]Hello. I was wondering...you've spoken a little bit about television and the collaborative process and how much you sort of love that.

[00:47:59]I was more interested to know...did the X-Files really influence you're being a showrunner on Breaking Bad? And what sort of were your influences when you created this show? And it seems like you really enjoyed all the people you worked with. Was that something you were really conscious of, sort of, in your creative process?

[00:48:23]Very much so. Good question.

[00:48:25]I mean, I wouldn't be here.... It's not an overstatement to say I wouldn't be here today, I wouldn't have been able... I wouldn't have the skills to run a show if not for what I learned on seven years of the X-Files. It was a wonderful job.

[00:48:38]And it really...I always felt like I was going to film school but being paid to attend. It was just marvellous. But I tried to learn, I learned a great many good things from the show. And I tried to learn from, as well from things that I thought could work better. The way I saw them being done on the X-Files.

[00:49:01]And it's just...it's an interesting job.

[00:49:06]I didn't really....I was lucky to be so ignorant, when I got the opportunity to be a showrunner. I thought I knew what I needed to know. But I recall now, one of the producers on the X-Files, a guy named Frank Spotnitz - still a very good friend of mine - he was much more of a producer than I was, when I was on the X-Files. I was just writing and rewriting. I was just in an office, just pounding away on my laptop all day long and he would say to me "You know you're a co-exec producer now. You want to come to the budget meeting? Do you want to hear about how much money we have to spend?" Thus and so...And I would say "I don't have time for that crap! I'm writing. I gotta write. That's not..." And then, when I got on the Breaking Bad suddenly people asking me about budgeting and whatnot, I was like "Oh, I wish I'd gone to some of those meetings."

[00:49:59]So...I learned so much and then I realised there's so much more I could have learned had I availed myself of the opportunities. But yeah, great job.

[00:50:11]On that, how much did you exactly do with Breaking Bad? So, a showrunner does what exactly?

[00:50:17]We don't really have them in Australia. Can you explain that a little bit?

[00:50:20]A showrunner does...well you know, if I hem and haw it's partly because there's different ways to do it. You don't...There's not...You know when you're a lawyer there's basically...you're, you know, what a lawyer does, what a doctor does. It's pretty cut-and-dried as far as the responsibilities. A showrunner, to me the most important thing a showrunner can do, is ensure that...and by the way here I'm about to contradict myself. There's writing showrunners and there's non-writing showrunners. I'm only going to talk about showrunners who are writers because that's my knowledge base, that's my experience. But the most important thing a showrunner can do is to oversee the writers room and to ensure that the writing is going, that the storytelling of the season at hand is going along properly. That the characters are being attended to properly and that the stories, the scripts are coming out in a timely fashion and that they represent the best writing, the best storytelling possible. That's the primary job. For me, control freak that I am, I wanted to weigh in on the colour palette, as we were discussing earlier.

[00:51:40]I wanted to weigh in on the kind of...on the cars. The picture cars that Walt, you know, I wanted to say "I want Walter White driving a Pontiac Aztek."

[00:51:49]I want to weigh in on the locations. I want to be in the editing room, every minute that I can. The great thing about being a showrunner is you are able to take on all of these responsibilities. The bad thing about being a showrunner is that if you do this and you know, you attend every single one of these meetings, it'll eventually kill you.

[00:52:12]You'll get an ulcer or something, you know. But it's...the short answer is... Are you okay?

[00:52:18]I'm sorry what?

[00:52:18]Are you okay?

[00:52:19]I'm fine. I've gotten very lazy the last year or two. I got Peter Gould now, my partner on Better Call Saul, who's actually, I guess it's Saturday back there, but you know he as we speak, not literally but figuratively, they're plugging away on season 4 of Better Call Saul. And I'm reaping the benefits, getting to hang out in beautiful Melbourne.

[00:52:38]So it's good to learn how to... It's good to be the king.

[00:52:41]Oh yeah! It's good to learn to delegate, for sure.

[00:52:44]But it's a great job and it can be whatever you want it to be, when you are show running and what I like is, I like to weigh in on everything I possibly can weigh in on because of the control freakiness in my nature.

[00:52:56]But most importantly it's getting the scripts right, overseeing that process.

[00:53:00]Cool, next question?

[00:53:03]Hi, at what...Going back, at what stage do you know that your show is going to be a real winner?

[00:53:09]Good question.

[00:53:10]I don't have a great answer for you.

[00:53:13]Every step of the way with Breaking Bad I was astounded that I felt like I was robbing a bank and getting away with it. I'm not even being...I'm not even kidding or being falsely modest. At every step of the way, because I had been doing this, I hadn't been show running but I had been working in Hollywood so to speak, writing movies, writing TV shows for a great many years before I got the Breaking Bad opportunity. And I was used to the other shoe eventually dropping.

[00:53:40]I was used to being told that whatever movie script or whatever I had at hand was "Oh it's great! It's great!" you know, "We're going to make it. It's going to be big!".

[00:53:49]And then suddenly the phone call stopped coming. So I was fully expecting, especially with this crazy idea of a guy dying of cancer and cooking crystal meth, I was expecting the other shoe to drop at any moment. The show to end. So I really kept my head down. Kept my mind on just getting one episode at a time done.

[00:54:08]Thinking at the end of that episode, you know, "Well, okay, we did a pilot."

[00:54:12]I got to direct it. That was an amazing bit of good fortune for me. I'll have that for my resume in the future and they're never going to put this thing on the air. What? Well they're putting it on the air. We're getting nine episodes, first season. Great! First series I guess you'd say.

[00:54:28]Great! It'll never go past nine, and in fact that first season didn't. We had a writer's strike, we only did seven but that's an aside. So every season that went by I was thinking, man they're going to find me out here any minute. They're going to shut this thing down. So it probably wasn't until late season 3, early season 4 that I started to kind of lift my head up and look around and realise that people were actually watching this show. And the confusing thing is that we were never a big hit in the U.S. We never had raw numbers in terms of viewership but luckily we had Bryan Cranston winning Emmys for Best Actor. We had those kind of bits of critical acclaim that really got us over the goal line. And...but it was probably four years in that I realised that people all over the world were really attuned to the show and were paying attention to it. And that was a very slow, daunting but wonderful realisation.

[00:55:25]Any other questions?

[00:55:27]Good, over there. I can't really see.

[00:55:32]Is that, is there Tio in the background with a bell?

[00:55:34]You know what that is?

[00:55:35]That was Don Hector yes it was.

[00:55:38](laughs) Vince can you please give us a clue about what you're looking for in the casting process. Because your actors bring a depth and multi-layered fascination which is addictive and learning how these characters evolve is what brings you back every episode. How do you find that in your casting?

[00:56:04]Good question. Casting is so crucial isn't it? I mean if you don't, you can have the greatest script ever and if you don't cast it right, you know, you don't have much at the end of the day.

[00:56:16]Gosh, I don't know even know where to begin with that, except to say that the... I guess if I had to boil it down to one word, it would be authenticity. We're not looking... Quite often our marching orders to our casting associates, who do such a wonderful job at finding us all these men and women, is to say to them "Have the actor throw it away." We just, we wanna see...we don't want to see any acting per se. We don't wanna see, you know, any extra stink as we call it, added to the performance. We just want one. The old Spencer Tracy thing. Spencer Tracy would always say "There's not a lot to acting. You just have to plant your feet and say the lines. But you have to mean them." and that's, I guess we're looking for that Spencer Tracy element. We're looking for folks to not feel a need to put on any extra bells and whistles but just say the lines and be authentic and project a basic underlying humanity. And you know, we're really looking for that. And in general we're looking for actors who look like real people in art. You know we were accused in the early going of, you know, we need some folks on the show who are a little more... And...See I'd better say this carefully cause this is going to be misinterpreted. You know in a lot of American filmmaking, American television, there's a desire to get really, really good looking people and there might have been...In the early going there might have been a little pressure. Like you know, "Can we get some more good looking people on this this show?" but our people are perfectly good looking as it is. And so, that was a weird digression.

[00:58:04]I wish I could rewind the tape on that.

[00:58:06](laughs) They're all good looking folks. All the folks we hired.

[00:58:10]Anyway, that's...Authenticity I think is what we are looking for.

[00:58:15]I should have just ended it there.

[00:58:17](laughs) Another question to put Vince out of his misery? Thank you.

[00:58:22]Hi Vince, welcome to Melbourne. Have you... Thank you.

[00:58:25]...thought about writing a show about a character going from bad to good as opposed from good to bad?

[00:58:32]And how successful do you think it would be?

[00:58:34]That's a very good... You know, I realise now we've done it twice in a row. We're taking a basically a good guy turning him bad, on our original mothership show and now on the spin-off.

[00:58:45]Yes I think, you know, the all time...One of my favourite stories ever, really it's truly one of my favourite stories is A Christmas Carol, is the wonderful Dickens short story. That is the prototypical, quintessential story of a bad guy turning good and one of the things I look forward to every Christmas is watching the Alastair Sim movie version of that story.

[00:59:16]And I just, I guess when Breaking Bad started I felt like I had seen it done perfectly, in the case of Dickens and I was looking for, at the time, something that seemed a little more unique. Taking the good guy and turning him bad. Not to say it had never been done ever in the history of storytelling cause of course it has.

[00:59:35]But now that I've done it twice that probably would be a good way to go.

[00:59:40]You know, the shame of it is, and this is kind of a shame, it's a shame to point out the obvious here but bad guys are, dramatically speaking, are often times more interesting than good guys.

[00:59:59]And that's a shame and I'd wish it weren't necessarily so. But it takes more work sometimes to make the good men and women, the good guys dramatically interesting. Not to say it's not impossible and really good writers are doing it all the time. I probably need to work on that so...Because I myself, at this point, ten years in and thinking "Boy, enough with the dark stuff." you know.

[01:00:22]Maybe it's time to tell a more hopeful story about someone who's not an absolute crook or a meth dealer or whatnot. So not a bad idea.

[01:00:30]I might try to do that next.

[01:00:32]We've probably got time for one or two more questions.

[01:00:36]Thank you.

[01:00:38]Vince, in practically every episode of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, there always seems a quite profound moral or ethical issue arises either out of the nature of the characters themselves or the situations they find themselves.

[01:00:54]How much of that have you as a writer and the team planned that sort of thing?

[01:01:00]Or does it kind of emerge?

[01:01:02]I love that question. There is a lot of... Sometimes I hesitate to say there's a lot of morality in Breaking Bad but there probably is, ultimately, there's a lot of investigation of morality in the show. We don't...It probably, as in your words, it probably emerges more than it is necessarily pre-planned. But I think a lot about, I think we all do, I'm saying something everybody else thinks too I'm sure, but I think we all yearn for a just universe and a universe in which good is rewarded and bad is not rewarded.

[01:01:47]And, you know, we look around and we see the world, sometimes the universe, seems much more chaotic and random than that.

[01:01:54]But I think there's probably, there's some very simple desire on my part that has become...It has infested my writers as well, that the world that we create...If the world that we really truly live in is not necessarily a just world, that the world that we create on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul can nonetheless be. Which is weird that we're kind of basing these shows around characters who really are not good people.

[01:02:30]But nonetheless we're kind of yearning for justice on these shows and I think that's why you sense that those kind of moments come up. Also because sometimes these kind of moments are just naturally lead to drama. And we're always looking for, you know, the dramatic moments on all these shows. Even when they're comedic, we want them to be dramatic nonetheless. So I don't know if I answered that very well but I think that's something we think about a lot. It probably does come out in various discussions in the writers room and we want to make our little fictional universe as just as possible.

[01:03:06]Okay, we have to wrap it up unfortunately but we're going to end on a clip from Better Call Saul for those who haven't seen it.

[01:03:14]It's from the first episode. You can watch all three seasons on Stan now, like I did in one week - enjoy it.

[01:03:22]Wow!

[01:03:23](laughs) If you'd like to join me in thanking Vince.

[01:03:26](applause) Thank you guys. I appreciate it very much.

[01:03:29]Thank you!

[01:03:30]Thanks for coming!

[01:03:31]Thank you!