Six months ago, it seemed things were stymied on the making of “Better Call Saul,” the spinoff prequel of “Breaking Bad” that tells the backstory of Albuquerque’s sleaziest attorney.
But with episodes completed and a premiere date looming of April 5, creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould may be on their way to another atmospheric hit. They and the cast of “Saul” came to visit the TV Critics Association winter press tour on a busy Saturday, including two familiar faces from “Breaking Bad,” Bob Odenkirk, who will play Saul Goodman and his earlier incarnation, and Jonathan Banks, who played grim fixer Mike Erhmantraut. Michael McKean, Rhea Seehorn, Patrick Fabian and Michael Mando are also in the cast.
“Better Call Saul” turns the clock back six years before the start of “Breaking Bad,” when Odenkirk’s character was known as Jimmy McGill of Cicero, Ill.
“I had to rethink him. He’s a different guy.,” Odenkirk says. “The guy you’re going to meet in this show is a far more dimensional character than Saul Goodman was on “Breaking Bad,” a much richer character, but by necessity, he’s on screen a lot more and the story’s about him.”
It wasn’t easy to get there, Gilligan admitted. “I was scared the whole time. I am still anxious about how it will be received. I would be lying if I said otherwise,” he said. “I feel so good about this show right now, but I don’t think I necessarily did until the writing was over, when the six of us finished writing.”
A key question is how much intersection there would be with further characters of “Breaking Bad.”
“Every time I come in the office in this show I say, ‘Has Walter White called yet?’” Odenkirk said.
But more seriously, Gilligan said, “Any of these characters from ‘Breaking Bad’ could conceivably theoretically show up in future seasons, but our intention is and our hope is that when we do, it will feel proper and fitting and organic. If it feels like the stunt, then we have, in the writers’ room, have done something horribly wrong.”
That said, having such a wealth of potential characters. “Any of these folks could come back,” he said, though “Jesse will be tricky because he would be so young.”
“We have a corkboard in the writers’ office with names of all the characters we can conceivably bring back,” Gould said. “Some of them, from the big ones, like Jesse and Walt, to ones that maybe you’d remember, maybe you’d wouldn’t, like Wendy. So it’s always on our mind.”
But, he added, “you don’t want to have the detail in the background distract you from what’s going on in the foreground. You don’t want to lose focus, and that’s really that’s what we are trying to keep our eyes on the prize.”
“I have to admit that a big part of the fun for us,” Gilligan said, “is that it allows the sky to be the limit in the sense that all the characters who are deceased when ‘Breaking Bad’ ends could theoretically show up.”
But, Gould makes clear, “In the spirit of full disclosure, Walt and Jesse will not appear in season one. We want this to really stand on its own. We don’t want to mislead people into expecting something that’s not going to happen. Walt and Jesse don’t show up in season one. Having said that, everything else is on the table.”
The visual style is somewhat similar to “Breaking Bad” in that it includes the broad vistas of the Albequerque, where the earlier series was shot. The vast flashback is largely in color while occasional scenes of the present day are black and white.
“One of the things that we talked about was ‘Breaking Bad’ had a handheld camera. There was always a little bit of motion to it,” Gould said. “In this show, the camera tends to be more static and locked down, so it changes the feeling of it.”
“When I was directing the pilot of ‘Breaking Bad,'” Gilligan said, “I was thinking of William Friedkin and the way he shot ‘The French Connection,’ that news gathering handheld … not the caffeinated shit, but the old Korean War combat photographers, the old newsreel guys who didn’t have the ability to carry a [tripod] with them, so they held it as still as they humanly could and yet it still breathed.”
But he said “Saul” is more the lines of Bertolucci’s “The Conformist” with the static scene shots and the characters sometimes found in the corner of the frame. As Gilligan said, “Good advice is always steal from the best.”