Aaron Paul as Jesse. Photo: Netflix Spoilers below for El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie. After a most distressing turn of events in El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie — which include a touching and suspenseful reunion with his buddies, flashbacks of his torturous time in captivity, and having to commit two more murders — Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) is safe and free in the Last Frontier. Yeah, Alaska! Or, yeah, writer-director Vince Gilligan, creator of the Emmy-winning series that introduced the world to the immature, sweet, broken Jesse Pinkman, lover of pizza and connoisseur of magnets! The film, which just premiered on AMC following its Netflix debut last October, picks up after Jesse, driving his captor’s El Camino, smashes through the gates of the white-supremacist compound where he was enslaved in the last season of Breaking Bad. What follows in El Camino is the story of how Jesse finally manages to pull himself out of the tragic chaos that became his life, after agreeing to a meth-cooking partnership with his former high-school teacher Walter White. Of course, his escape isn’t easy. But Gilligan told Vulture he almost wrote a different ending for Jesse’s story, one that would have made the show’s fans very, very sad (or very, very mad). Why did he change his mind? Because, he says, “sometimes you just got to give folks what they want.” Gilligan also discussed bringing back Walt (Bryan Cranston) for a flashback from the duo’s good old RV days, and why he chose Dr. Hook’s 1978 “Sharing the Night Together” to soundtrack the sociopathic adventures of Jesse Plemons’s Todd. After Breaking Bad ended, you said that Jesse Pinkman was free, that he successfully got away. All these years, you maintained that. But I wondered if you had second thoughts as you started to write the movie. Were there other possibilities you considered? I pitched it to my girlfriend, Holly, and she said, “Are you out of your mind? You can’t have him in a jail cell at the end. You got to let him get away. People will riot.” I said, “No, don’t you get it? It’s art. It’s artistic.” And then I said, “No offense, you’re not a writer. I respect you, of course, and I love you. But you’re not a writer.” And then I went the next day and pitched it to Peter [Gould] and the writers of Better Call Saul, and they all looked at me in silence. They said, “Are you crazy? He’s got to get away at the end.” [Laughs.] As the saying goes, if enough people tell you you’re drunk, you need to sit down. So I dispensed with that idea. Had you worked out who this new character was going to be? Well, it was your gut instinct that Jesse gets away in the end. Jesse has just suffered so much. In the movie, we see even more of his suffering. So I, for one, am so glad he’s in Alaska. I found Todd’s role in the movie so interesting. We know him as this villain who shows up in the last season of the show, but he’s crucial in Jesse getting away because Jesse needs his money. Can you talk about how you landed on making Todd such a key figure? The original idea was Uncle Jack riding shotgun, so to speak, with Jesse. Not literally a ghost, but a figment of Jesse’s post-traumatic stress showing up and saying, “You’re not going to get away, you’re just stupid, you’re too much of a rat.” Or things like, “This 7-Eleven clerk just saw you, you better shoot him while you have the chance, you better kill him. It’s kill or be killed.” I love the actor Michael Bowen, who played Uncle Jack, and it’d be great to have him back. But I kept thinking about it, and I thought, “God, what a bummer that would be. We’re going to need every ounce of humor we can get because this is going to be a depressing, dramatic story.” And then I thought: Todd. Except for being a crazy sociopathic murderer, he’s a likable young man who’s just got a screw loose. He can fake it, but he doesn’t innately feel empathy for other people. You could be his housekeeper and he honestly likes you and he’s nice to you, and yet God forbid you find his money hidden in his World Book encyclopedias, he’s going to go, “Well, that’s it for you” and he’ll strangle you to death with his belt. And then he’ll say, “Gee, I feel bad about that.” Then in the next instant, he’ll be thinking about something else. It’s like killing a mosquito to him. But in the end, he’s weirdly likable and it’s the damnedest thing. And Jesse Plemons played the hell out of that part, so we went in that direction. Todd drives to the burial site singing “Sharing the Night Together.” Please tell me how a song from the ’70s even entered your mind and how the scene developed for you. What really makes the scene for me, that makes me laugh every single time, is when the truck passes and Todd makes the universal “honk the horn” sign and the guy doesn’t honk the horn and he goes, “Oh well, whatever.” That was completely Jesse Plemons. That was not scripted. When he did it, I was riding in this big giant truck that tows the car that Jesse is pretending to be driving. I’m watching on a monitor, it’s cold outside so you’re bundled up, and I’m huddled next to my director of photography and script supervisor. I say “Action!” and we start rolling and he starts singing. We were all laughing so hard. It’s amazing it didn’t get picked up on the audio track, even at 50 miles an hour with all the wind noise. When he does the horn honk, I almost fell out of the truck I was laughing so hard. He nailed it in one take. It was such a thing of beauty. And our camera operator, thank God, he can contain his laughter, because he operated it perfectly. Where exactly was that scene filmed? That drive leads to one of Aaron Paul’s best moments in the movie, when he finds the gun in the car but he’s unable to shoot Todd. What direction did you give him and Jesse Plemons in that scene? The pizza conversation is so uncomfortable. I wanted to yell, “Stop!” Some fans speculated that Walt was still be alive. Of course he wasn’t! But the flashback with Walt and Jesse together made me wonder if you were deliberately trying to make him more sympathetic. Did you want to remind us who he was in the beginning? What were the different considerations for that reunion? Walt’s last words in the movie are interesting: He tells Jesse that he’s lucky because he didn’t have to wait his whole life to do something special. He was such a clear monster by the time the show ended, but I did feel for him when he said that in El Camino. Were there any characters you wanted to bring back, but the actors weren’t available? Can you tell us where Walt’s family is now? The Wild West shootout was very Heisenberg of Jesse. This interview has been edited and condensed. The Breaking Bad Movie Almost Had a Very Different Ending |