At the Saturn Awards tonight, Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad, was on hand to receive an award for Best Syndicated/Cable Television Series. Whilst there, Hunter Daniels and I talked with Gilligan about the past seasons of the show and the ongoing fifth season. The thirteen-minute conversation covered many a topic – the full transcript to which, I will post later. But for now, I wanted to quickly post choice highlights: namely Gilligan’s interest in creating a real deal Western post Breaking Bad.

“I would love to do a Western. And in fact I think of Breaking Bad as a Western in a great many senses. We shoot in beautiful Albuquerque, New Mexico. The enormous skies with the beautiful cumulus clouds and the stark desert landscapes make me think of ‘America’. Indeed [Billy the Kid], one of the most famous western outlaws of American history, his stomping grounds were New Mexico. And apparently Jesse James made his way out there at some point. There’s also all this marvelous Western history that takes place in the Southwest and in large part in New Mexico. I feel lucky that we shoot there and I’d love after this is all over just to do a full-out, pullout-all-the-stops Western”

For more highlights from the Gilligan talk (including his thoughts on the ’rumored’ Saul Goodman spinoff), hit the jump.

On what motivates Walter White:

“He’s very constant when you think about it. He has the one goal and that is the self-aggrandizement of Walter White. The betterment of Walter White. The accruing of power and of money. Money is really a yardstick to measure his power, to measure his potency. And potency and power are things he’s never had as an individual for five decades on the planet. Not until we first meet him in episode one does he feel like he has amounted to much. It’s always about one thing: him becoming more powerful. Becoming more potent. In that sense he’s a very constant and predictable human being.”

On What To Look Forward To In the First Half of Season Five:

“We have one hell of a great caper episode coming up in episode five. I’ll tell you that. Maybe our best yet. You’ve got three more weeks until that one comes. The next couple episodes are fantastic. I’m so proud of all these episodes. I can’t wait for people to see the final six. I want them to linger. I want the weeks to go by slowly so that we can really parcel out these episodes. Because I want this feeling to last – of people enjoying them. And yet I’m also greedy to have people jump to the end of it all and hopefully they’ll say ‘Man – Wow, that was a great season.'”

On Whether We’ll see Gretchen and Elliot Schwartz again (Walt’s rich grad-student friends he refuses money from):

“I don’t want to promise anything. But there’s a very good chance we will meet up with them again. Or at least hear some more information related to that period of [Walt’s] life.”

On the ‘rumored’ Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) spinoff:

“There’s no truth [to that] but I’m hoping it would come to pass. Because I love Bob Odenkirk. And I love Saul Goodman. I hope that would be the case but I can’t promise that it will be. But I sure would like to see that happen. I, for one, would vote for that.”

Breaking Bad airs Sundays on AMC.