Vince Gilligan and Aaron Paul Discuss the BREAKING BAD Movie, Which Will Include 10 Familiar Characters
When the Breaking Bad movie was initially announced, fans wondered why in the hell Vince Gilligan would want to make it because the the series ended perfectly. Well, Gilligan obviously had a story he wanted to tell with Jesse Pinkman.
The movie is called El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, and it centers on what happens to Jesse after he drives out of that compound covered in physical and psychological scars. According to THR, the series will also feature more than 10 familiar characters from the original show. It was already announced that Skinny Pete (Charles Baker) and Badger (Matt L. Jones), would be among them.
Apparently Gilligan started developing the idea for El Camino before he even finished making Breaking Bad. Of course, he didn’t want to tell anyone about it at the time. The creator explains:
"I didn't really tell anybody about it, because I wasn't sure I would ever do anything with it. 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 was around the time of the 10th anniversary of the premiere of Breaking Bad that Gilligan revealed to his inner circle that he had an idea to revisit Jesse. When Gilligan eventually brought his idea to the executives SPT co-president Chris Parnell explains:
"We all just fell silent in the room. It was one of the moments when you think to yourself, 'Did I just hear that? Is that something he genuinely wants to do?' "
Then he started shopping it around Hollywood where it landed at Netflix with a partnership with AMC. It’s explained that the film plays “like a coda to the series” and “is thick with details that will tickle the superfan base.” Gilligan goes on to say the the film caters to the fans of the original show:
"If, after 12 years, you haven't watched Breaking Bad, you're probably not going to start now. 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."
As for what series co-star Aaron Paul was thinking about the concept when Gilligan told him about it, he said:
"I'm like everybody else on the planet — I think Vince and the rest of the writers really nailed the landing with the ending of Breaking Bad, and why mess with that?"
He then added, "But it's Vince we're talking about. I would follow Vince into a fire. That's how much I trust the man. I would do anything that he asked me to." Then before he knew he was back in the role of Jesse! When talking about playing the character again, Paul said:
"It was so easy for me to just jump into where Jesse's at mentally, emotionally, because I lived and breathed everything he went through and then some, and so, honestly, it felt like a part of me had gone through that as well. All I had to do was just memorize these words and then play them out when they yelled 'action.' "
While I was a little apprehensive about the movie when it was first announced, I’m now pretty excited to see what happened to Jesse and how his story continued.