I am not turning down the money. I am turning down you. You get it? I want nothing to do with you. Ever since I met you, everything I have ever cared about is gone. Ruined. Turned to shit. Dead. Ever since I hooked up with the great Heisenberg. I have never been more alone. I have nothing. No one. All right? It’s all gone. Get it?
"I want the actions the characters take on Breaking Bad to always have consequences. I guess that in itself was a reaction to years and years of television, watching TV shows in which the characters would have some life-changing event where they kill someone or they get wounded and the next week they’re basically back on their feet and there’s no emotional repercussions. That is not reality as we know it to be; it’s a TV reality. That’s because television has to maintain a sort of a stasis and keep the characters more or less in one spot from week to week to allow for continuity, so the viewer can tune in and tune out as they choose. That’s just what television does, and it’s not a bad thing or a good thing. It’s just a structural conceit of television that is time-honored, and it goes back to the beginnings of the medium. But it’s not reality."
— Vince Gilligan (via theongreyjoy)
Q: When Jesse gets out of rehab, he says tells Mr. White, “You either run from things or you face them.” Do you have that same outlook?
AARON PAUL: Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree. I don’t think it’s healthy to run or hide from your problems. I think it’s definitely a good thing to communicate, face them, and deal with the consequences.
Q: So, you’re not a procrastinator?
AARON PAUL: Actually, you know what? I am a procrastinator. I’m the worst procrastinator of all time. They did a story on me in my high school yearbook where — and this is so ridiculous — the yearbook committee went around to teachers and said, “Do you have a student in your class that’s the biggest procrastinator?” I guess my name got brought up the most, so they decided to do a story on me. They were like, “What is your biggest procrastinator story?” I’m like, “I’ll think about it.” And then they kept asking me, “We gotta get this story.” And I ended up never getting it to them so that ended up being the story. I do truly believe you should face your problems, but that’s always the harder road.
Hector Salamanca by Tom Whalen for Breaking Gifs, a mysterious but apparently officially licensed Breaking Bad poster series
May 29th
11:00
11:00
Fuck you! And your eyebrows!
Vince says that Walter has been bad for Jesse, but Bryan has been a great example for you, Aaron.
Paul: One hundred percent. I’ve grown so much, not just as an actor, but as a human being. Bryan is very giving. I’ve learned from him that it’s not so much about what you’re saying, it’s about listening and understanding what the other person is saying. Every little thing he does is so honest and true.
(There’s a long pause, and Paul looks at Cranston expectantly.)
Cranston: I’m sorry. I zoned out.
(La Times, 2010)
"Breaking Bad is not a situation in which the characters’ morality is static or contradictory or colored by the time frame; instead, it suggests that morality is continually a personal choice. When the show began, that didn’t seem to be the case: It seemed like this was going to be the story of a man (Walter White, portrayed by Bryan Cranston) forced to become a criminal because he was dying of cancer. That’s the elevator pitch. But that’s completely unrelated to what the show has become. The central question on Breaking Bad is this: What makes a man “bad” — his actions, his motives, or his conscious decision to be a bad person? Judging from the trajectory of its first three seasons, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan believes the answer is option No. 3. So what we see in Breaking Bad is a person who started as one type of human and decides to become something different. And because this is television — because we were introduced to this man in a way that made him impossible to dislike, and because we experience TV through whichever character we understand the most — the audience is placed in the curious position of continuing to root for an individual who’s no longer good."
— Chuck Klosterman on Breaking Bad (via tvhangover)
Did Akira Kurosawa’s IKIRU Directly Inspire BREAKING BAD?
…uh, apparently. funny you should ask.
Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, was recently a guest on NPR’s Fresh Air, and during the show — unprompted — he launched into this lightly reverential aside about how Kurosawa’s 1952 masterpiece IKIRU informed Gilligan’s sensational AMC show. it’s fascinating to hear him unpack the parallels between Watanabe-san and Walter White, to see how one idea was contorted and disfigured into something so sinister, but due caution to those unfamiliar with the ending of IKIRU:
“There’s a wonderful Kurosawa movie from the 50s in which a man, a mid-level, very much a Walter White-type, or rather, Walter White, I suppose, inspired by this man. This man is very much a mid-level corporate guy who finds out he’s dying of cancer. And in the last months of his life what he chooses to do is a very good thing, it’s to build is playground, a small playground in Tokyo for the children in his neighborhood.
And this haunting ending of this movie is this man swinging on a swing set in this playground that he’s managed to build after a surprisingly hard go of it. And the snow is coming down and he singing a Japanese children’s song, and it’s just haunting and beautiful. And, of course, Breaking Bad is anything but that. It’s the flip side of that. It’s a man doing terrible things once he is freed by this knowledge that he does not have long for this world.
But I think what the two stories to share in a sense is the idea that if we found out the exact expiration date on our lives if we found out when we were going to be checking out, would that free us up to do bold and courageous things, either good or bad things, hopefully good things, then I think there’s a lot of that involved in Breaking Bad.”
