Interview: Vince Gilligan & Peter Gould Talk About The Tragedy Of 'Better Call Saul'

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Over three seasons of squat cobblers, Fring anagrams and elderly law cases, Better Call Saul has escaped from the shadow of Breaking Bad to become one of the best shows on television. When the series started, fans just wanted to see Saul Goodman in his seedy prime; now, it has evolved into a story about decent people who make devastating-but-understandable moral compromises and find themselves inexorably pulled toward an inevitable, tragic destination. The more time we spend with the pre-Breaking Bad iterations of beloved characters like Jimmy McGill and Mike Ehrmantraut, the less we want to see them fulfill their destinies.

And so it goes for creators/showrunners Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, who have found their own assumptions about these characters challenged again and again. We got the chance to talk to Gilligan and Gould before next Monday's season three finale all about the tragic nature of the story, the future for Cinnabon Gene, morality, the separation between Jimmy and Mike, and the thing Gilligan wishes he could do over.

Heading into the finale, I want to start by asking a very general question, because it's something I've thought about a lot with Better Call Saul. Considering that we know that there is an inevitable destination for most of these characters that they are slowly being pulled towards, do you view this story as a tragedy?

Vince Gilligan: That's a great word. Do you want to start that or do you want me to?

Peter Gould: It's a big word. That's all I'm going to say.

Vince Gilligan: I do. I'd say there's a tragedy. I think you're right on the money, Ben. I didn't always. Peter and I took a walk today to talk about where things go next and it reminded me of walks we took three or four years ago at the end of Breaking Bad, four years ago I guess, when we talked about what a Better Call Saul spinoff series would look like. In the early days of that process we were talking about the possibility of a half hour comedy. We were talking about a great many different versions of this. Nowhere in all those miles and miles we walked around Burbank, California did we speak in terms of the show being a tragedy. Nowhere. The word tragedy ... Farce came up, comedy, half hour versus one hour, is it a live action Dr. Katz? Never during that process did I have an inkling that this show would turn out to be a tragedy. And it is. It's a tragedy. It took us the longest time to figure that out, which is what I love about this process of creating television versus writing a movie where it's much more closed-ended and finite.

I love the fact that this turned out to be a tragedy. When we started this process, we didn't know that the biggest, most heartbreaking antagonist to Jimmy McGill would be his own brother, Chuck. We didn't know any of these things. We went into this wanting to tell Saul Goodman's story, thinking that we liked Saul Goodman. That was one of the big impetuses for doing this. Little did I realize at that point how much I ultimately disliked Saul Goodman, certainly compared to Jimmy McGill, who we didn't even know back then. It's turned into a real tragedy, the fact that there's no escaping it. This guy has to become Saul Goodman. What did [Fargo and Legion showrunner] Noah Hawley say to you?

Peter Gould: I was at an event and I went up and I introduced myself to Noah Hawley because I'm a big Fargo fan.

Vince Gilligan: That's a great show.

Peter Gould: He said, "I've got a pitch for you." And I said, "Yeah, what's that?" In a nutshell, his pitch is that Jimmy McGill never becomes Saul Goodman, which if you think about it, is the most Fargo solution to the problem of all.

Vince Gilligan: Which is really attractive too. It's an attractive thought.

Peter Gould: The alternate universe version. I feel like it would be attractive in a way. For us in this particular setup it would be a cheat in a way that it wouldn't be a cheat for him to do on Fargo. I agree with so much, well all of what Vince said. We always knew that we liked Saul Goodman, but we didn't know we were going to love Jimmy McGill.

Vince Gilligan: To the point that now I dislike Saul Goodman.

Peter Gould: It's interesting. We had in episode nine this season probably the worst thing I've ever seen Jimmy do, the most Saul-ish thing. He ruins poor Mrs. Landry's life really just so he can get his money sooner. He is so despicable in that episode that I find it hard to watch, but it's also he's despicable in a fun way. It's a very different person from Jimmy McGill and yet that is Jimmy McGill. It's going to be interesting for us going forward when we do see Saul Goodman and we realize that, yes, that is Saul Goodman but it's also Jimmy McGill. It's evolved Jimmy McGill becomes Saul Goodman.

Having said all that, I don't think we ever thought of it as a tragedy but when Jimmy becomes Saul, I think the one ray of light is that maybe the story isn't over at that point. Maybe there's more to say about this man who started as Slippin' Jimmy and became Jimmy McGill and became Saul Goodman and eventually becomes Gene, the sad little Cinnabon manager. Maybe there's more to say about him. Maybe we haven't seen the end of the journey quite yet.

I was going to say, it would be pretty strange to keep the story of Jimmy going without dealing with those black and white Gene scenes.

Vince Gilligan: That is true. I agree with that. I'm dying to see where this could go. It could end as dark as sin. It could end just as dark as Breaking Bad did. Or this could be the one story where things could end on a hopeful note. Breaking Bad really was sort of preordained that it couldn't end well. I'm not saying this will end well, but it's within the realm of possibility at least, unlike the last series.

Peter Gould: It could be more heartbreaking still if there's potential for a hope and it doesn't occur.

And we still don't know, obviously, what happens to people like Kim and Nacho and Chuck.

Vince Gilligan: So true.

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With those Gene scenes, do you treat them the way you did with the flash forward at the beginning of Breaking Bad season five? Was this an image where you're just kind of putting some track out and then you're going to figure it out later, or have you guys already planned out what is going on with Cinnabon Gene?

Vince Gilligan: You really have paid attention. In my mind it's a little of both. It's a little bit of a tightrope walk, as we used to do in Breaking Bad, which I always felt mixed emotions about. When we would do things on Breaking Bad like, the most egregious example was at the beginning of the final 16 episode run, we had Walter White buy an M60 machine gun. We had no idea what he needed it for. We had no idea who he was going to use it against. In my mind we're not there with Gene in Omaha because we have some ideas, but we may discard them along the way for better ideas if better ideas hopefully present themselves. I wouldn't say we're completely free climbing El Capitan without a safety rope, but there is...

It's sort of what I was talking about a little bit earlier. Kind of the great thing about doing this job is the unknown, is the challenge of figuring out where you're going. You're hiking across virgin territory. You're trying to make it to the North Pole except you don't know what's between you and there and maybe you'll wind up somewhere else instead. It's the challenge and the voyage of discovery. That sounds a little cheesy, but I kind of feel that way. You never quite know where you're going and once you learn to embrace that, which took me forever, the job becomes very exciting.

Peter Gould: It's interesting. Vince, you sound very upbeat about this now. I'm flashing back to the final couple of seasons of Breaking Bad in the writers room when I remember Vince saying, "Oh, if only we hadn't put that machine! Think of all the great things that we could have done if we didn't have to deal with that machine gun."

Vince Gilligan: I even pitched maybe it'll look like it was a dream. Maybe we'll ignore it and nobody will notice. I really did. Everybody looked me like I was insane, which I was. That was bad.

Peter Gould: I think the truth is that we've seen three of those flashback scenes, or flash-forward scenes I should say, to Omaha and each one lays down a little bit more of a marker. The second one we saw that Gene, when he carves that little piece of graffiti, he didn't carve, "JM was here." He carved, "SG was here." So Gene, as we see him in Omaha, is still thinking very much about Saul Goodman. Maybe there's more to say about that. I have to say I love those scenes in Omaha and I love the way Bob plays that character. He's so much the opposite of the ebullient, talkative Jimmy McGill. It's just fun to see this man who is so tamped down, but the flame still burns a little bit.

Vince Gilligan: There's a flicker, a little pilot light at least. There's a little pilot light that causes him to yell at some cops. I love those scenes too especially because we get to eat all the Cinnabons that we can throw into our mouths.

That is not too bad. I remember seeing some of the tweets around that time when they were very excited that Gene was joining their ranks.

Peter Gould: Cinnabon has been...

Vince Gilligan: They've been real good to us.

Peter Gould: I actually wrote the scene where Saul mentions Cinnabon on Breaking Bad. I can state for a fact that we had no idea that we would ever see a Cinnabon or that we'd ever get to meet the Cinnabon executives and watch Bob learn how to make a Cinnabon. It was all a big surprise.

Vince Gilligan: If I had to do over, I think I would have made it Hooters. Just kidding. It's a joke.

That feels like a place Saul would go for his wings and some client meetings.

Vince Gilligan: I know, exactly.

I miss the nail salon, him living in the back of a nail salon.

Vince Gilligan: I do too, actually. There's so many things along the way. I miss. On Breaking Bad when we got rid of the crappy RV, I missed that. Even though they get a shiny new super lab, I thought, "Oh man, I really feel bad about this." It's funny. In real life too, I think, the early days are a struggle. In real life and even in fiction, when you're writing something like this you kind of wind up having quite a bit of affection for the early struggling days.

You were saying before that in episode nine, Jimmy seems to do one of the worst things that he's ever done with the elderly people, and it's a real marker of the change from the Jimmy in season one and two who is just getting into elder law and sort of giving back, contributing to society in a way he never had before. It seems to me that the dividing point in the season, the moment when there was no turning back for Jimmy, was the trial. Since then, he and Chuck seem to have gone down very different routes, where Chuck is now finally having a moment where he's really examining himself and working on himself, which he hadn't done in a while, and Jimmy has sort of given in to his worst impulses. Did you see that as this breaking point in the season and for Jimmy going forward?

Peter Gould: Yeah, absolutely. We knew that this was one of the biggest moments of confrontation these two guys could ever have in public and Jimmy wins. He wins the day. Chuck loses, but it's interesting you point out, these two guys take something very different out of that. Kim may feel guilty about it, and maybe Jimmy does too, but he sure as hell doesn't admit to it. He defends their actions every inch of the way, whereas Chuck, as you point out, it seems for a bit that Chuck may actually turn this terrible defeat into something positive for himself. That's part of the tragedy.

Critics and a lot of the fans talk about the division in the show between the Jimmy/Chuck/Kim lawyer stories and then the Mike/Salamanca/Fring Breaking Bad prequel stories. I was curious, did you guys always picture the show dividing in this sense, or is this something that just naturally evolved and naturally separated the two sides?

Vince Gilligan: I think it evolved, and I can tell you going back to Breaking Bad we had a similar thing happen in season four, I guess it was where our peanut butter and chocolate, Walt and Jesse, who were more fun together than they were apart, nonetheless grew apart story-wise and they had to spend a lot of time separate from one another. Back then I was beyond worried. I was scared that the audience was going to rebel and they were going to say, "Why are Walt and Jesse apart?" But they had to be that way way back then story-wise.

In Better Call Saul, we came to realize that, if we're being honest with ourselves and we're being honest with characters, Mike Ehrmantraut does not have a great deal of affection and probably never will for Jimmy McGill, let alone Saul Goodman. There has to be legitimate reasons for them to work together, to be together, and when we find them, like we did at the beginning of season three when Mike had no one else to turn to to go suss out the inside of the Pollos Hermanos restaurant, those moments are wonderful. They feel like a great victory when we can put these two guys together, but otherwise we can't. We feel like it would be dishonest to force them together. They have to want it and we have to earn it in creating and plotting this thing out and creating a story.

And by the way, I would also make the argument that the two main characters of Better Call Saul may indeed turn out to be ...there's two other really strong candidates for the main characters. There is Jimmy and Chuck and then there is Jimmy and Kim. I worry less about Jimmy and Mike spending not that much time together. And who knows, the future may hold something very different indeed because the closer they get to Jimmy being Saul Goodman, the more chance that, as we saw from Breaking Bad, Saul Goodman and Mike do tend to spend a fair bit of time together. I have gone from being scared of it to embracing it. Now I feel like you get two shows for the price of one. It's like putting a Pizza Hut and a Taco Bell in one building. You get two for the price of one!

I know it's like picking children, but do you guys fall towards one side of the show— do you prefer writing one side, or find one just a little more exciting in some way?

Peter Gould: I think all these characters are incredibly exciting. I'll speak for myself: I think the most difficult character to figure out is Jimmy McGill because Jimmy is changing. Whenever we get stuck—and to be honest with you, it was a little bit like this on Breaking Bad too—when we get stuck, it's usually because there's something about Jimmy, or maybe it's about Kim too sometimes, that we haven't really thought through, we don't fully understand or we're taking something for granted that can't be taken for granted. That was generally true on Breaking Bad too. It was often when there was something about Walt that we hadn't quite fully understood that we would get stuck. I think all of it is incredibly fun and rewarding.

Probably in terms of the stuff that's the most fun to break in the room, that goes most quickly, it's when one of our characters is scheming. When one of our characters has something that they want and they're scheming, when Mike is trying to figure out how to bust Hector's truck without any blow back, when Jimmy is trying to figure out how to get Irene to finally agree to settle the Sandpiper case, those moments, those problem. In some ways, you would think those would be incredibly difficult problems, and they are, but they're very tangible and they're problems that our characters are working on.

Generally, I find if the character has a problem, it's much more interesting to work on than if it's a writer's problem like saying, well, how do wrap this up or how do we make this happen or that happen. Because usually when you're trying to make something happen, in my experience it means you're assuming that something should happen that maybe shouldn't. It's always the question. Maybe this thing that we're trying to make happen shouldn't happen. This is why it takes us so damn long to figure out the episodes because we have to go down all these pathways.

Vince Gilligan: I tell you, conversely, the stuff that is the hardest to write is the law stuff.

Peter Gould: Oh god, yes.

Vince Gilligan: That's just like I'm getting root canal, which is a weird thing to say considering it's a show about a lawyer, but Peter or I always said, "Oh my god, we're actually doing a law show?" I'm not a lawyer. I've never had any interest in being a lawyer. I'm not a law show aficionado. There's some darn good ones over the years, but my brain doesn't work that way. Peter said, "Well, it's not really a law show. It's a crime show." That always helped, but I thank God we got Gordon Smith because Gordon, he would probably say otherwise, but he's the one that seems the most natural at writing the legal stuff. He's got kind of a legal mind. He would have been a great lawyer.

Peter Gould: From a family of lawyers too.

Vince Gilligan: He comes from a family of lawyers so his stuff always sounds legit. He wrote episode five, which had the biggest courtroom scene we've ever had. Better him than me. Thank God it wasn't me, that's all I have to say.

AMC

Would you say that Jimmy is the ego and Saul is the id?

Vince Gilligan: I'm not as up on my Freud. What's the ego and what's the id? Which one is which? I always get them confused.

The ego is the organized, rational part of the brain that basically stands between the id and the superego, which are the parts that go a little crazy. The id is just your impulses and your desires, and the superego is your moralizing and your critical thinking.

Vince Gilligan: Where's the part where the cigar turns into the penis?

Peter Gould: You ever seen the movie Forbidden Planet? Forbidden Planet, that's the id monster. That's all I know about the id.

Vince Gilligan: Leaving Freud out of it, because I'd just embarrass myself if I tried to incorporate Freud. The best way I can answer it is, Saul Goodman, I realize now after three or four years of doing this, is like the dried up husk of Jimmy McGill. I guess there's a different philosophical outlook on life or a different moral outlook, but I think it's a lack of morality on Saul Goodman's part. It's just a chaotic kind of...no, chaotic is not the right word. It's just this calcified, dried up husk of a human being in a lot of ways.

On the one hand, when we first met Saul Goodman, I kind of liked him. I kind of was jealous of the guy. I used to say this on Breaking Bad, this was the only guy in the Breaking Bad world who is truly comfortable in his own skin, really seemed to enjoy life, didn't have any qualms about who he was, didn't have any compunctions, morally speaking, didn't wring his hands and suffer about, "Am I doing the right thing? Am I bad? Am I good?" What a wonderful freedom that Saul Goodman, of all people, had on that show. He was comfortable in his own skin. He didn't pretend to be something he wasn't like Walter White did time and time again.

Now that I've seen Jimmy McGill, Jimmy can be pretty comfortable too and I just think of all the things Saul Goodman lost when he lost that part of himself, I just think he's a mummy. He's a mummified version, he's a freeze-dried version where all the goodness kind of got leached out. I see it more in those terms rather than maybe a Freudian term.

Peter Gould: We're intensely moral. That's a funny way to put it. I'm joking when I say that...

Vince Gilligan: It's kind of true though. We think a lot about morality.

Peter Gould: Psychology, by its nature, is about understanding behavior. We're interested in that, but I think the way we generally try to think about it is what's the right thing to do? What's the right way to live? Those are the kind of big questions that I have no idea about, so that's why we struggle with it. It's interesting.

I got to go up to Stanford to talk to some lawyers about the show and one of the things that, apparently, beginning law students have trouble with, I'm going to slaughter this synopsis, is that there are things in the law which are at war with common morality. If you follow the law carefully, it doesn't necessarily take you to what you would think, instinctively, would be right and wrong. A lot of what legal training is is to be able to justify how things might be legal.

In some ways, Saul Goodman is someone who is completely untethered from what most of us have a sort of instinctive morality. He's always arguing that things are efficient or that things may be the shortest distance between two points. He doesn't seem to care, or maybe he does and he's just hiding it, about innocent people who may be hurt or damaged through his actions or the actions of the people he's working with. That is a big, big difference from Jimmy McGill. People who are in Jimmy McGill's orbit often get hurt because of things that Jimmy does. I'm thinking about the two skate rats back in the beginning of season one. But Jimmy doesn't go into it with his eyes open knowing that these two guys are going to get hurt.

Saul Goodman does. He does intentionally allow people to be hurt for his own ends. This is the kind of stuff we talk about all the time in the writer's room. This is the kind of stuff that we struggle with and then we try to come up with examples and often those examples become scenes.

AMC

Now that you've got to this point, how long do you see the show going?

Vince Gilligan: Good question. It's definitely not over yet. I would say that with certainty. I'm not saying we have a pickup or anything like that. I'm saying in our sense.

Peter Gould: There's more story for sure.

Vince Gilligan: We have way more story. As to an exact number of episodes, as to exactly how much story we have left, that's harder to say. We're not just being coy when we say we're not sure as to the answer to that.

Peter Gould: It's limited, that's for sure. This is a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. I'm really proud of having been part of Breaking Bad, which of course I think Vince really stuck the landing with that show. I think our dream is that we can pull off the same trick with this show, but we're not quite there yet.

Well, like I said, it feels to me as viewer that episode five, "Chicanery," and everything this season has felt like a midpoint in this story. I'll be very curious to see where this all lands in a couple more seasons of story.

Vince Gilligan: Interesting. That's a very interesting ... That's something to talk about, you and me.

Peter Gould: Absolutely.

Vince Gilligan: That's an interesting observation. I like that.