Happy Birthday: Vince Gilligan

Vince Gilligan

Born: February 10, 1967 in Richmond, Virginia, USA

[on introduction of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in Breaking Bad (2008)] I like the idea of Gale’s poetic justice from beyond the grave. The writers and I love the idea of revisiting previous moments in the show because we love the idea that all actions have consequences. We know that in our day-to-day lives, but very often in television storytelling characters say things or they do things and a particular episode ends and there’s not necessarily much in the way of resonance. On this show, we very much like a character’s actions to have repercussions in ways that we identify with in real life. And to that end, we love revisiting these old moments, and Walt Whitman’s poetry was something that Gale Boetticher loved. It touched his heart and he wanted to share it with his new friend and mentor Walter White. And unfortunately the sharing of it and Walt keeping this book in hindsight proved to be a bit unwise.

[re shooting in New Mexico] All the wonderful topographical and geographical elements, we put to good use in the show. Especially the clouds, which you don’t see in the blank blue skies of Southern California. They allow you to perceive the immense size of the sky. They go on forever some days. Any chance my girlfriend and I get. We went up to Santa Fe, and near there is Taos, a wonderful town, and Madrid, off the Turquoise Trail, a little artists’ community. It has an old coal mining museum that I love…The Sandias, the mountains to the east [of Albuquerque] are omnipresent. Take the cable car up to a restaurant called High Finance, which is a good place to eat. It’s stark beauty up there; you can see for hundreds of miles.

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