Auteur sees himself as bit of a meth maker

VINCE Gilligan's Breaking Bad creation may be the darkest character on TV.

Breaking Bad

IF this is a golden age of American television, an era of dark, sprawling visual novels, then the men they call show runners are its kings: all-powerful writer-producers such as David Chase (The Sopranos), David Simon (The Wire) and Matthew Weiner (Mad Men). As fine an actor as James Gandolfini was, there is probably more of Chase in Tony Soprano. And there's a new addition to this elite band of small-screen auteurs: Vince Gilligan, whose Breaking Bad is the latest It-show.

Gilligan's creation just may be the darkest of the lot. He is Walter White, the high school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who is found to have cancer and, to provide for his family and pay for his treatment, resorts to cooking methamphetamine.

With the series in the last episodes of its final season, Gilligan is getting closer to achieving his aim of transforming a protagonist into an antagonist. As Walter sinks deeper into the underworld, will his brother-in-law Hank, a drug enforcement agent, unmask him?

Breaking Bad, southern slang for raising hell, has become part of the national conversation in the US, and the rest of the world is cottoning on to its saturnine charms.

Bryan Cranston's portrayal of Walter, an unsettling combination of everyman angst and ruthless acumen, is integral to the series, which has won seven Emmy awards. But those qualities didn't originate with Cranston, who, Gilligan says, "is a practical joker, a fun person who loves life".

"Walter has more in common with me," he adds. He created the character after turning 40 (he's now 46) and realised later that Breaking Bad is "a show about a man having the world's worst midlife crisis. So I guess I was my own inspiration."

Given that Walter has become one of the most poisoned, tragic figures on TV, Gilligan isn't entirely happy about their closeness. He isn't entirely happy about lots of things. "I'm not the most positive person in the world," he says. It has been anxiety rather than depression in recent years, but he has had his share of both.

As is often the case, this doesn't stop him from being fine company. He laughs easily, is modest to a fault, speaks with twinkling southern formality and is courteously receptive to my theories about the series that has been ruling his life for six years.

Where he and Walter overlap, he admits, "is that a lot of what drove Walt, or what stunted him, in his past was fear. I live my life waking up in the middle of the night, worrying about things."

Since the diagnosis of his cancer, however, Walter "lives without fear. Once he has that death sentence, he sleeps like a baby."

Yet Gilligan seems keen to keep Walter at arm's length, as if his character's descent into darkness could somehow tarnish him by association. He says he is fascinated by "that process of becoming a criminal when one starts at zero knowledge of criminality". A pause. "This is not anything I would ever do! But it's fun to let your imagination wander."

Only in The Sopranos have humanity and amorality coexisted like they do in Breaking Bad. It's a debt that Gilligan acknowledged on Twitter when Gandolfini died, writing: "There would be no Walter White without Tony Soprano." It has been said that the two are mirror images: a crook who refuses redemption; a law-abider who embraces corruption. "If they ever met, Tony would wipe the floor with Walter," Gilligan smiles. "But then, if Walt survived, he might plan some long-range revenge. Ha ha!" But both cling to at least a shred of our sympathy despite their expanding portfolios of sins.

Without giving away details of the final season, Walter is testing our sympathy as never before. In recent interviews Gilligan has seemed disturbed by the number of viewers who are still rooting for him. "For me, personally, Walt is a bit of a hard guy to root for," he says. "He rationalises a great deal of bad behaviour by saying that whatever he does he does for his family. I wouldn't want to send the message that the percentage of the audience that roots for Walt is strange or flawed."

He would point out, though, that viewers "don't have to carry this guy around in their brains for 24 hours a day. Walt is a hard guy to live with. Doing a TV show, you never turn it off, you're always working because the deadlines are so fierce. I've found myself viewing the world a bit through the eyes of Walter White." When Walter was fearing for his life in a recent plot, Gilligan began to feel paranoid too. "I suppose it's akin to what a method actor feels."

Now, several weeks after completing the final episode, he is getting used to living without him: "I'm cleaning out the last vestiges of Walter White!" Is it like coming off meth? He laughs. "Walter being in my life has been much more positive than that, but there are probably parallels."

He was attracted to writing about the drug trade because he likes "stories about process, about learning things". He never wanted to "pursue it as a potential lifestyle", he adds quickly. He knows people who have sampled meth, "more than sampled it. But I've never tried it myself. I suspect that if I was a drug user I'd go for the stuff that turns my brain off, not speeds it up. I have a hard enough time sleeping as it is; I think I'd be more of a heroin man."

Nevertheless, the show luxuriates in the minutiae of the narcotics world, from the meticulous chemistry of meth synthesis to the brutal logic of turf wars. Does he worry about imparting so much detailed information? He shakes his head. Worryingly, all this stuff is just a mouse click away -- he says it took him 15 minutes on Google to learn the basics of meth production.

While Breaking Bad is good at the exotic criminal stuff, it's equally strong on the more mundane business of human misery. Walter juggling crime and cancer; his wife, Skyler, dealing with the repercussions of both -- like The Sopranos, it's a rhapsody of depression. Gilligan looks touched when I say this. "Oh, thank you. Well, you know what they say: write what you know." Another laugh.

Tackling topics such as depression and the effects of the economic crisis may be one of the reasons the show was embraced in the southern and southwestern US before the chattering classes on the coasts discovered it. As Gilligan says, "There are an awful lot of towns like Albuquerque", many of them struggling financially, as the Whites are before Walter's career change.

Gilligan can even claim to have boosted the economy in Albuquerque, where tourists can go on Breaking Bad tours and buy fake sachets of meth and T shirts with the slogan "Yo Bitch!", a catchphrase of Walter's former student Jesse Pinkman.

The fact his show, unlike Mad Men and others, is set and shot in the US interior led to The New York Times calling Gilligan TV's "first red-state auteur". He lives with his girlfriend in Los Angeles but he is proud of where he's from: Farmville, Virginia.

He won a scholarship to study film at New York University, after which he had two of his scripts turned into films: Wilder Napalm (1993), with Dennis Quaid, and Home Fries (1998), with Drew Barrymore. His real break came in 1994, when he started working on The X Files, where he spent seven years. "I learned pretty much everything I know about producing and writing TV from that job."

Between The X Files and Breaking Bad came some fallow years. This was when the latter show was born, as Gilligan and another unemployed writer jokingly kicked around the idea of starting their own meth lab. Gilligan also had plenty of time to wonder whether he would fulfil his potential. Making the most of a second chance is something else he shares with Walter, whose regret at selling his stake in what became a multi-billion-dollar business fuels his desire to reach the top a different way, by becoming the best meth cook in the southwest.

If there's an overarching theme to Breaking Bad it's that actions have effects, Gilligan says. "These final episodes are truly about the consequences of Walter's actions as relates to his family." So he feels obliged to show crime doesn't pay? Not quite, he says. He talks about the 1930s gangster films that he loves, whose flawed antiheroes, the Hays censorship code insisted, had to get their comeuppance. "We are under no such obligation, which is liberating."

Still, though crime may pay economically ("Idi Amin died sleeping in silk sheets"), he likes to believe that there is "some psychic or spiritual toll". He classes himself as agnostic, but says he hates the thought "that the universe is as chaotic and meaningless as it often seems. If you don't get that in real life, it's nice to have it in your fictional world."

How does that tally with his recent comments about the conclusion of the series, due at the end of next month, representing a victory for Walter? "That is going to be very much in the eye of the beholder. The viewers are free to agree with me or disagree."

Gilligan is refreshingly keen to underplay the power of the auteur. There has been much online speculation about the links the show makes between Walter and poet Walt Whitman, and with Werner Heisenberg, the scientist who came up with the Uncertainty Principle. (Walt's street name is Heisenberg.) But both came about by chance as much as anything, he insists. "A lot of people give us credit for being smarter than we are."

With all those Emmys in the locker, though, surely the world is his oyster? "I'm just not wired to ever see the world as my oyster." Although there was "a certain relaxed familiarity" with failure, success has brought a new feeling: expectation.

Happily, there is (relatively) light relief on the horizon in the shape of a spin-off show for Walt's fabulously crooked lawyer, Saul Goodman (his name is a homophone for "S'all good man!"). Given that the character is played by comedian Bob Odenkirk, it would "by its very nature have a great deal of humour".

While Breaking Bad was split about 80-20 between drama and comedy, this would be the opposite.

Crucially, it would allow Gilligan to get Walter White out of his head. "I find it easier to root for Saul," he smiles.

Unlike Walter, Saul has self-awareness and, in a weird way, is true to himself. "And he's comfortable in his own skin. Which is something we all aspire to."
The Times

The final season of Breaking Bad is being broadcast on Mondays on Foxtel's Showcase.