Now in its third season, Breaking Bad tells the story of Walter White, a mild-mannered chemistry teacher-turned-crystal meth manufacturer, played by Bryan Cranston, whose detour outside the law estranges him further and further from both his family and the man he once was. Shrugging aside the boundaries of conventional television storytelling, the series currently stands unparalleled in its willingness to pursue these conflicts to their logical conclusions, however messy those may be. Creator Vince Gilligan talked with Slant about his undying love for television, violence on the U.S.-Mexico border, and the unintentional politics of his admittedly showy brand of realism.

You’ve worked in both television and feature films. Do you have a preference for either one?

I would have to say television, because once you are on a writing staff, or once you create a television show, for as long as that show exists you know that you’re writing, you know that your work will get produced. The same can’t be said for writing for features, unfortunately. Write a movie script, you can put your heart and soul into it for months, for years, and peddle it around Hollywood and ultimately it may well go nowhere. I’ve experienced more heartbreak in the movie business than in the TV business.

Is there anything about the format of serial television itself that influences the way you write, that you have a preference for? Is it easier to write a one-off film than it is to sustain a season at a time?

They’re both hard, but I suppose that the saving grace about writing a television show is that you don’t have to wrap up everything plot-wise at the end of every episode, and you can leave certain questions unanswered. You can leave certain emotional issues not quite completely tied up. In a movie, on the other hand, you have to tie up every loose end that you have set for yourself, and you have to wrap things up emotionally in a very satisfactory manner, and you have to complete the plot in that two-hour segment of time that you’re allotted. Endings are just very tough for a writer, at least speaking personally. Coming up with an ending for a movie is always tough, and probably yet another reason that I like television better, because you have a hundred hours, in a perfect world, to tell your television story and only two to tell your movie story.

So, does that also influence the kinds of stories that you’re able to tell? Does it give you a chance to tell more complicated stories that you couldn’t resolve if you were working within two hours?

This is absolutely true. You have two different kinds of stories, and very often, especially when you try to keep a foot in both worlds, as a writer you’ll come up with a story, you’ll come up with a character or a set of plot elements and you’ll very quickly ask yourself the question, “Is this a feature or is this a TV series?” And they really are two different animals, in a sense. It all comes down to: How much story is there? Does the story self-generate? Have you created for yourself an ongoing story or is it a more hermetic story?

The US-Mexico border in is pretty central to the story that you’re telling in Breaking Bad. Were there any reasons to choose Albuquerque over, say, somewhere in California or Texas?

When I originally conceived of Breaking Bad, I intended to set it in Riverside, California. And of course southern California is not too far from the Mexican border either, but when I originally conceived of the show I wasn’t thinking as much in terms of the Mexican drug cartel component. I was thinking more in terms of a homegrown meth business that Walter White was going to establish. But early on, Sony, the studio that produces our show—this was after the script was written, and they knew I was thinking of southern California—they came to me and said, “What do you think about us placing the series in New Mexico instead?” And I said, “Well, why are you thinking that?” And they said New Mexico has a tax rebate for film and television production, and it’s a pretty substantial one. It’s a tax rebate of 25% of the money that we spend within the state returned to us by New Mexico. And really, it’s a hard [carrot] to turn down. It was established to bring production from all quarters of the U.S. into New Mexico, and it is something that unfortunately California does not have and so New Mexico very quickly became the place we decided to shoot our show for strictly financial reasons. We wanted our limited production budget to go that much farther.

But having said that, now that we shoot in New Mexico and now that I know it as a place to do business, now that I’ve learned to love Albuquerque so much, I realize that it’s just a wonderful place to set the show and I feel like I got very lucky that we wound up there, although it was not originally my decision. And the meth component of it, story-wise, really could have been any state in the Union, unfortunately, because there are meth labs probably in every state in the United States, and it is kind of a nationwide problem. However, once we got the ball rolling on our series, in the last four or five years the news of drug violence in a lot of the cities and towns along the Southwest border became more front and center in the national news, so we wound up incorporating more and more into our storyline. It certainly helped at that point that our story happened to be set in Albuquerque, which is only about 220 miles from the border. So we kind of “lucked” into that element of storytelling.

You’ve been incorporating elements of northern Mexican narcoculture into the series for awhile now. The narcocorrido from last season was particularly exciting, and I was surprised to see Mexican cult figure La Santa Muerte in the premiere. So by framing your subject matter within a particular, historical set of social and economic forces, do you see the development of the series as an opportunity for cultural critique?

We don’t intend to make the show feel like a “ripped-from-the-headlines” show a la Law & Order. This really is a story of a small set of particular characters, Walter White first and foremost among them. And Breaking Bad is truly an investigation of one character’s change, his transformation from a “good guy,” from a law-abiding citizen to a criminal. And that is the wellspring that everything else in our series flows from, that idea of transformation, and furthermore how [Walt’s] transformation changes those people around him, those loved ones, those family members that he ostensibly cares for and yet whose lives he is hurting through his actions.

That said, the writers and I really do try to incorporate what’s going on in reality into the series. As we are set in Albuquerque and as Albuquerque is about 200 miles from Juarez, and currently in the news there’s so much unpleasant and unfortunate drug violence along the border, a lot of which is due to the meth trade, we do find ourselves incorporating those elements into the story. We want to portray reality as well as we can portray it, and the reality of any ongoing meth concern in Albuquerque would involve some dealing with the border trade and the competition from drugs coming from Mexico. Anyone who is trying to make a go of a drug business would have to see that as competition and would have to deal with the cartel members who were dealing in central New Mexico.

Our narcocorrido that we created for our show really was created by Pepe Garza, a music producer here in Los Angeles. We gave him the highlights of what the subject matter of the song should contain and the names and the places. But if it’s an authentic narcocorrido, we have Pepe Garza to thank, as well as the wonderful band that he found for us, Los Cuates De Sinaloa. That authenticity that we strive for is only achieved by the help of some really talented people. We don’t do it all ourselves. We hire the best folks we can find and we let them do their thing, so we’re very proud of that one.

Do we have another music video along those lines to look forward to this season?

We have another one coming up this season, but it is wildly different than that one. And that’s all I can really say about it. It’s pretty dark, but I think people will enjoy it. [laughs]

To go back to this notion of transformation a bit, it seems to me that one of the things the show does really well is to look at the systemic causes for this transformation. It’s not just any bad situation that this character is put in, and he’s not just any kind of typical guy. He’s an educated, upper-middle-class guy who’s put in a particular situation at a particular time and I feel like as a result, this transformation that he’s experiencing, or that we are vicariously experiencing through him, comes to offer a kind of—I think you used the phrase “cosmic indictment” of him at the end of the last season, and I have to ask whether it’s not also an indictment of the social and economic circumstances that led to the position in which he found himself.

One thing I like about our series, one thing we strive for is to create “water cooler moments.” That’s certainly not an expression we created, but the way we define a water cooler moment is: Is it a plot development or is it a scene in which people can gather around the water cooler at the office and discuss what the scene meant? Not simply get them talking about it, but have them discuss it and argue over what the scene meant, what it forebodes, perhaps, for the future. And all of this to say that I personally have no particular political or social axe to grind, because I think that stories that set out to do that become kind of didactic or polemic. Stories about characters are always more interesting to me, personally. There is no deeper social indictment at work here, at least not consciously. However, when I speak of water cooler moments, I like for the audience to have the ability to perhaps argue that there are [social or political prerogatives]. I like for people watching our show to have different viewpoints on what exactly the show means. And Walt’s behavior—I like folks being able to argue over his behavior. Is he completely wrong, or is there some rightness to his cause?

I don’t want to insist too much, but I think that even that dedication to portraying the sorts of circumstances that this character would realistically confront were he to make these kinds of decisions [in real life] is already a political stance. You take a show like Weeds, for instance, and it’s not about realism. It’s about crossing a line, being a transgressive. Which has its value, but it’s not about asking us as viewers to question why these are the choices that are available to us.

The interesting thing is, it very often takes other people to tell a writer what it is that he or she is writing about. It’s that old expression: Sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees. And while I don’t actively have a political or social agenda to soapbox about, at least in my mind, perhaps I can’t see the forest for the trees. Maybe the show is about something that is entirely other than what I think it’s about. But regardless, I’m always delighted when our show is talked about and discussed and hashed over in any way, shape, or form. And I’m delighted when different viewers have different takes on what the show is really about, and I truly think there is no wrong take. My dream for this show is that it is complex enough and rich enough in its storytelling to support many different views on what it is truly about. If we can create a complex and shaded and interesting enough world here in Breaking Bad, people can define it in many different ways. I am all for that.

You mention these water cooler moments, and I noticed in seasons one and two you preceded each episode with a flash-forward that was meant to misdirect us a bit, to get us to imagine what could possibly lead to this series of images that we’re seeing. But then for the premiere of series three, you don’t seem to be using this device any more. Is that going to indicate a shift in the content of the season?

For season two, we came up with a bookend device in our storytelling. We wanted to end season two with the very images that began it, so we had a circular sort of feel to the season. I can tell you, it took an awful lot of beating our heads against the wall in the writers’ room to come up with that bookend sort of storytelling. It took an awful lot of work, and it was painful and it was scary because we knew how we had to end the season, but we didn’t quite know how to get there story-wise, plot-wise. And there were a couple of moments of sheer panic, at least on my part. We already had all this other stuff shot that begins the season; I didn’t know how we were going to pay it off completely. So, I feel like we did it once, and I’m very proud of the way it worked out, but I’m not someone who likes to repeat himself in my work. Since we accomplished what we set out to accomplish last season, we should change up the formula yet again and start off a different way in season three. And if we get a season four, God willing, we’ll hopefully change things up yet again. Because I think that’s something that this job requires, the ability to change things up and keep the storytelling interesting.

Having gone through this transformation from being an upstanding citizen to someone who imagines himself to be outside the law, Walter White is now faced with the consequences of his decisions. So the question I have now is about redemption in general, the question of redemption as a narrative structure. I see Breaking Bad kind of like a Shakespearean tragedy in a lot of ways. This character who has free will, who has the opportunity to make better choices, continues toward his own doom. And so I wonder if redemption isn’t actually what’s at stake anymore in this story. Is there something bigger than redemption that could be at stake?

I hope so. [laughs] I should probably start by saying that this show in and of itself is kind of an experiment. To begin with, television as a medium is all about protecting the franchise. When it works well, television invites itself into your home week in and week out, in the guise of a favorite character or favorite series. And you as a viewer visit with a favorite character week in and week out and you know what to expect from that character. And television gives you what you expect, more or less, week in and week out. It’s what television does, and I think it actually does it very well. In other words, for 20 years you could visit with Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, and in season 20 he was the same good-natured, fast-drawing, honest marshal as he was way back in season one. Agents Mulder and Scully in The X-Files were basically the same characters throughout the entire series. The folks on The Andy Griffith Show, Archie Bunker on All in the Family—these were all fundamentally the same people throughout, and that’s what television does. Historically, that is. It keeps its characters in sort of a stasis that at times can seem sort of artificial because, as we all know in real life, we age and we progress and we very often change in our viewpoints, in our outlook on life. And as much as I love all these great examples in the history of television, I wanted to try to do something different. I wanted to experiment with the medium a little.

And all of that is to say is that what we are about on Breaking Bad is transformation. We are taking our main character, starting him at point A, back in our pilot, and we are taking this decent, good, law-abiding citizen and we are transforming him in little fits and starts into somebody else entirely. And part of the reality of doing that is that, in practice, where that leaves my writers and myself is that even we don’t know exactly where he’s going to wind up. And that’s the exhilaration and the terror of it for us. We don’t really know how far we can take Walt, how far we can stretch this conceit before it breaks. And we may indeed break it. We may indeed have Walt turn some corner at some point in his character that makes him so unredeemable in the audience’s eyes that people no longer want to watch him. Or we may not. As we proceed along with this experiment of taking Walt from who he was to who he will become, we really are in kind of uncharted territory. And I can’t think of any other show to look back at that would help us out in this endeavor. I’m unaware if this is ultimately going to be a story of redemption, or a cautionary tale. Hopefully it’ll be a little bit of many things.

I personally want to see you break Breaking Bad. I want a show that’s not afraid to take that risk. The scene in season two where Walt watches Jane die, for instance, is a real transgression. That is a brutal scene. Sitting through that girl’s death really does push the boundaries of what your audience will endure.

It would sound egotistical to say that we’re trying to reinvent the medium, but we are trying to push forward the typical boundaries or rules of the medium. And the old expression, a man’s reach should extend beyond his grasp. I don’t know if we’ll succeed, but that is the experiment we’re trying, to push forward those rules of television a little bit further, trying to change up the medium a bit. Not because I don’t personally love the medium; I’m doing it out of affection for the medium. I’m trying to take things a little further than I know them to be.

And we never try to be shocking on our show, believe it or not. That will probably ring false to some people, but it really is true. We believe in showmanship. We try to keep things interesting and to keep stirring the pot, and keep folks watching in all these old-fashioned and time-honored ways of showmanship, but we actually never really intend to be shocking, certainly not for the sake of shocking. We try to be honest in our storytelling and keep our characters honest and keep the plot moving in ways that have to do with the characters’ motivations. We never insert a scene into the show that shocks people just for the sake of it.

Then I have to ask about the infamous tortoise bomb scene.

[laughs] That’s showmanship.

That would seem to be the example that’s most open to the criticism that you have a certain taste for spectacularity that sometimes might exceed the bounds of realism.

I will definitely cop to the sin of going big for the sake of showmanship. But the other old expression is: Truth is stranger than fiction. And truth is oftentimes scarier than fiction. We base certain elements of our show on reality and we do often take them a step or two beyond reality. And of course, as we know, there’s unfortunately a spate of beheadings that go along with some of the drug violence along the border. And so we started with the idea of a beheading and we took it a few steps further to mounting a severed human head on a tortoise. But you know, as shocking and over the top and awful as that scene is, lo and behold, we read in the news a few months later that in real life, one rival drug gang skinned and mounted a competitor’s face on a soccer ball. As over the top as putting a human head on a desert tortoise is, stitching a man’s face to a soccer ball is beyond anything even we would have come up with.

You mentioned going big, plot-wise, and it seems to me that there’s this progression starting from episode one, this sort of outward radiation where initially the conflicts that Walt encounters are restricted to the immediate surroundings of his hometown: “Where in the desert can I go to cook meth and not get busted?” And then as he starts to incorporate himself into the existing economy for crystal meth, he has to deal with the local dealers. And then he moves up to wholesaling. And then he moves up to regional distribution. This progression reminds me of The Wire, the other great TV drug saga. With each season, The Wire kept broadening its purview, asking what city hall, what the public education system, what the media has to do with the drug trade. Is there a similar logic to how you see a potential fourth season developing?

That’s an interesting comparison. The Wire is a wonderful, wonderful show that really does in many ways feel as much like social criticism as it does wonderful storytelling about individual characters. I think about The Wire and I think about how that show is so advanced and all-encompassing in its storytelling about that one city, Baltimore. I wouldn’t know where to begin to do that. As a show-runner, I really have to keep it simpler than that. Because evoking an entire world is a very daunting prospect, especially when you set out to do that from the get-go. But I get the similarity you just mentioned, of our show broadening its scope and Walt or his partner Jesse Pinkman going from making a few corner deals here and there to expanding the business and then being local and regional and then statewide and international players in the business, as you can imagine we will continue to do as our series progresses. I think it’s just part and parcel of the idea of growth in general. Any drama should contain within it growth, and should not feel like stasis.

From the get-go I pitched to AMC that this was going to be a show where we were going to take Mr. Chips—mild-mannered schoolteacher Mr. White—and we’re going to transform him into Scarface. And I kind of meant that. I kind of like the idea of this guy turning not just bad, not just turning criminal, but through fits and starts learning to be very good at what he’s doing now. And he’s not quite good at it yet, and I don’t know how far he’ll get along these lines of growth and change, partly because I don’t know how many seasons we’ll get to do the show. But if we get long enough to do it, he may get there yet, he may become some homegrown version of Scarface before it’s all said and done.

I’ve read that you had initially conceived of Breaking Bad as running for four seasons. Are you rethinking that now?

Well, not really rethinking it so much as I don’t know where we stand right now. We’re off to a good start for season three, we have good viewership, we have good Nielsen numbers, and hopefully that trend will continue. And if it does, it’s much more likely we’ll get a season four, but as you and I speak here today, we don’t have a pickup yet. I just don’t know if we will be offered a fourth season. And conversely, if we start to do really, really well in season three I don’t know if the golden handcuffs will snap on my wrists, and I’ll be cajoled into trying to do five or six or seven seasons at this point. But it is a question I think about every day. I ask myself, “How long can Walt’s story go on? How long can we keep this going? And should we?” There’s no satisfactory answer right now, at least in my own mind.

When season three ends, it will end with a big, dramatic moment, just like season two ended. And it will end with a reason to continue watching beyond season three. Knock on wood—we will go beyond season three. But it really is like most television shows in that sense that you build toward a cliffhanger and you hope that if the worst case scenario comes to pass and that is your last season, you hope that it will be an interesting enough ending for a television series. We’ve got some crazy stuff coming this season. I think if you’ve liked us in the past, you will continue to. I think we take it some pretty dark and interesting places this season.

Speaking of dark and interesting, will we be seeing more of Bob Odenkirk as Saul Goodman this season? Was it your decision to cast him?

He’s much more front and center in season three, so you’re going to see a lot more Saul Goodman this season. He’s a wonderful guy. I think it was my idea to hire him, but it might have been one of my writers. The funny thing that happens in a writers’ room is that when you spend enough time together, you really do form a group mind. And that’s a good thing, because you kind of forget whose idea was whose at a certain point. They’re just community property and they all belong to the show. I can tell you that I’ve always loved Bob Odenkirk’s work, dating back to Mr. Show that he and David Cross did back in the early ‘90s. When I invited Bob Odenkirk to play Saul Goodman I was very excited, and when he said yes he would do it, I was over the moon because he is one of the funniest guys around, and a very talented actor to boot. As season three progresses, you’ll see a few other dimensions to Saul Goodman; he’s not just a goofy character, there’s going to be more to him this season.

I’ve read that Will Farrell is interested in doing your screenplay 2-Face. Is it going to redeem him of his many sins against popular culture?

[laughs] You know, 2-Face is a script I wrote in 1991. When I think of how long ago that was, it just blows my mind. And Mark Johnson, who is my executive producer on Breaking Bad and who has been my mentor in the business ever since I first met him in 1989, has been trying to get 2-Face produced now for 20 years, and yeah, the most current actor interested in it is indeed Will Farrell. I don’t know, honestly, where it stands. We had some meetings about a year and a half ago with Will Farrell and his manager. I think he’d be quite good in it, but I honestly don’t know where it stands. I’ve had my heart broken with 2-Face for 20 years now. I’ve had so many directors and so many actors sort of pass by and show a big flurry of interest and then the heat dies down and they go away, and then somebody else comes along. [laughs] It’s been a wild ride. I don’t see it [happening] in the near future, but maybe in the next few years we can get it going.

Do you have any projects that are a little closer to being realized, then?

No, not really. I wish I were a J.J. Abrams-type of producer who had a lot of different things going at once, but I give my heart and soul to Breaking Bad and it is all that I do, and all that I’ve been doing now for two, three [years]. It’s the only way I know how to work. I have to be there front and center and weighing in on every decision, whether it’s wardrobe or giving an opinion on the timing in the finished episode. Anything and everything I want to have a hand in because I guess I’m kind of a control freak, and because I love this job so much. I love this world we’ve created so much that I want to be not just a part of it, but front and center in the creation of it. Breaking Bad is going to leave a big hole for me, personally. [laughs] So I’m hoping it goes for at least for a while longer.

Well, I’m glad that you’re not J.J. Abrams.