SARAH FERGUSON, PRESENTER: The television series Breaking Bad has been described as the best of a century. It's the story of Walter White, a middle-aged Chemistry teacher diagnosed with cancer who turns to making methamphetamines to provide for his family. The first episode introduces White in the New Mexico desert carrying a gun, dressed in his underpants and never lets up from there.

BRYAN CRANSTON, ACTOR (excerpt from Breaking Bad): To all law enforcement entities, this is not an admission of guilt. I am speaking to my family now. ... There are going to be some things, things that you'll come to learn about me in the next few days. I just want you to know that no matter how it may look, I only had you in my heart.

SARAH FERGUSON: The creator of Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan, learned to write for TV on the sci-fi series X-Files. He says the character of Walter White became darker and more complex as they wrote. It's also one of the most violent TV series ever made, which makes the experience of meeting its gently-spoken writer even more surprising. In Australia for the Sydney Writers' Festival, I spoke to Vince Gilligan earlier today.

Vince Gilligan, welcome to 7.30.

VINCE GILLIGAN, CREATOR, BREAKING BAD: Thank you, thank you for having me.

SARAH FERGUSON: You've described the idea of Breaking Bad, the meth-cooking Chemistry teacher in his Winnebago as something that came up in a casual conversation with a writer. Did you have any sense at that time of the potential for that idea and for the character?

VINCE GILLIGAN: No idea whatsoever. I am continually amazed. I mean, I'm here in Sydney, Australia, a place I'd never been before, a world away from where I grew up, talking about a show that I, back at its earliest days, I never would have thought would be successful. I simply knew I responded to this character and this story myself and I could only hope that other people would respond as well.

SARAH FERGUSON: And what about the character of Walter itself, did you have a clear idea in your head of the complex character he was going to be or did you start off with a much simpler model?

VINCE GILLIGAN: I think he was a simpler model in the early going and so much of the complexity and the nuance and the onion skin, onion layer-type characteristics of the character really needs to be credited to Bryan Cranston, the amazing actor who played Walter White. But the thing that always interested me from the get-go was - I realised in hindsight was the idea of a man having the world's worst mid-life crisis, and again, in hindsight I realised I was about to turn 40 years old when I came up with the idea and I was thinking, I guess, in terms of terrible mid-life crises.

SARAH FERGUSON: So you didn't know how bad Walter was going to become?

VINCE GILLIGAN: I knew he would become bad. The thing that interested me was the idea of a good man turning bad, transforming him wilfully from a hero into a villain. But no, I did not know quite how bad he would get. That was very much a collaborative effort that took place over six years.

SARAH FERGUSON: Did you always intend though to make a moral universe with good and evil slugging it out the way that it does?

VINCE GILLIGAN: I think we all - I'm going to speak - I'll speak for myself, but I think I speak for a lot of us when I say I think we all yearn for a moral universe in which to live. And if you can't have it in reality, you can have it in your fiction. Having said that, I didn't want - none of us on Breaking Bad wanted to trowel it on too thick, so to speak. Walter White does a great many things, bad things and gets away with them for a long time. But at the end of it all, to our sense of thinking, the writers and myself, there was kind of a moral clockwork of the universe within the reality - the false - the fictional reality of Breaking Bad that kind of lined up and people more or less got what they deserved.

SARAH FERGUSON: It's an extremely violent program. You say - I've heard you say that you actually are - you don't really like violence. Why is it so violent?

VINCE GILLIGAN: Well, the most - one of the most important things for me setting out to do this show was to make it realistic. This is a show about criminals and about criminality and in particular about criminals who manufacture and sell methamphetamine, which, in the great scheme of things, there are criminals who - white collar criminals or criminals who embezzle money and then there's bank robbers and there's - it's really far along the scale of nastiness to manufacture methamphetamine. There's really not much that can be said about meth that's good.

SARAH FERGUSON: By the way, do you ever - are you ever worried, given the extraordinary success of the series, the way you've made methamphetamine a bit cool?

VINCE GILLIGAN: I hope not. I do think of that from time to time and I would hope that would not be the case. There's nothing cool about methamphetamine. And that goes to the answer of the previous question. It seemed responsible of us on our parts, it seemed most responsible to show the nasty consequences of the lifestyle that Walter White chooses to live, and to that end, there's terrible violence in the show and I don't - I mean, violence - the real thing terrifies me and I want to stay far away from it. I don't want anything to do with it. And blood, for instance, is something I find myself queasy at the sight of.

SARAH FERGUSON: You see, that's an extraordinary thing. I'm not too good with violence. Sometimes I have to see it, but I'm squeamish too, so, you lost me for a little bit in some of those extraordinary scenes.

VINCE GILLIGAN: Yeah.

SARAH FERGUSON: So how can someone who has that sensibility pile it on in the way that you do?

VINCE GILLIGAN: I can see that it could be very off-putting. In a sense, that is what I think of as being responsible. The worst version that we could do would be the - and I hesitate to say this 'cause actually I like this television show - but we wouldn't want to be the Hogan's Heroes of the meth trade, a comedy set in a Nazi prison camp where hijinx prevail. Not to put down Hogan's Heroes. But the reality of - you know, to use meth as the example, the reality of that business is such that it feels responsible to be somewhat unblinking in the depiction of the violence that is, that is part and parcel of it. So even though I have a hard time - the hardest thing I had to watch over and over again in the editing room was a scene where one character cut another character's throat with a box cutter and I watched it in the editing room like this (places hand over eyes). I would look away. I had to edit it, I had to put in my two cents about the editing of it and the sound mix and all that and it became very wearying to watch it because it is very realistic to look at. And by the way, it hopefully goes without saying Breaking Bad is not a show for everybody and it's certainly not a show for children.

SARAH FERGUSON: You talked before about the moral universe. Was it important for you to have the plot completely resolved? You didn't choose to have an ambiguous ending.

VINCE GILLIGAN: I really wanted a complete and - the most important thing for me was to have a fitting and proper ending to the show, and to that end, ambiguity didn't feel like the right way to go. There's nothing wrong with an ambiguous ending. I - for instance, the ending to The Sopranos, which I thought was a wonderful, stellar a TV show.

SARAH FERGUSON: And that's where someone - the bell on the door rings and that's the end, so you assume that - well, you can guess.

VINCE GILLIGAN: Yes, exactly. Do they go on with their lives just as before or does something - is something terrible about to happen that we do not get to witness? I thought that was a very interesting and very courageous and I think ultimately fitting ending for The Sopranos, but since The Sopranos had already done - had achieved the height of ambiguity as far as endings to great television series go, I figured we should go the opposite way and be as concrete and unambiguous as possible and that just felt right for Breaking Bad.

SARAH FERGUSON: Boy, did you achieve that. (Laughs)

VINCE GILLIGAN: Good. (Laughs)

SARAH FERGUSON: Thank you very much indeed for joining us.

VINCE GILLIGAN: Thank you, Sarah.