Last week Bunting interviewed the show's director of photography, Michael Slovis. A transcript follows the video.]





DAVE BUNTING: "Breaking Bad" is clearly not your typical television show, for a number of reasons. Obviously you've been given a lot of freedom to take visual risks, which is one of the things that sets the show apart. How do you feel that your approach to certain types of heavily stylized shots, like the point-of-view shots or the time lapse shots, help to tell the story?

MICHAEL SLOVIS: Well, that's a great question. Unfortunately, you've asked, like six questions in that one question. It really covers a lot of what interests me as a filmmaker.

Let me start with the beginning, and you made a very true statement in the preface to your question, which was that I've been given a lot of freedom. I have been given and extraordinary amount of freedom, never before seen by me in television, and very rarely given to anybody. When I was first asked to do the show, I saw the pilot and the following six [episodes], and I was so blown away by the content that I said, "This is, like, the best thing I have ever seen, and I believe it deserves a very dynamic, strong, involving look, one that evolves with the story." In that first season, there's a lot extraordinary stuff going on. But I told them, "I'm not interested if you're not interested in the look," because I had just been traveling for many years, I had just come home and I really wanted to stay home in the New York area, and this was going to be taking me out to Albuquerque. It was really my wife who said, "You're going to go do this show, just make a deal and go do it." Because she had seen it, and just said, "This is what you've been waiting for."

And she was right. And [AMC] said, "Yes, yes, yes: we're filmmakers, too!" And you have to understand that at that point [in 2009], AMC was nascent. It was an embryo of a network, not what it is now. It had one original program going on, "Mad Men," and they were just starting to build their brand. Nobody even knew where on the dial, or on the guide, to find them. So, they said, "We know what we're asking; we're filmmakers, and we want you to do this."

When I spoke to Vince [Gilligan], I had the same conversation, and he said, flat-out, "Michael, I'm going to give you the ball, and I'm going to support you, and I really want you to run with it, and I don't want you to hold back." And, I've heard that many times before in television when the truth is that they don't want you to pain with a bold brush. They don't want chiaroscuro, they don't want darkness, and if ever there was a story that demanded it, this was it.