Breaking Bad: Vince Gilligan interview

(applause) Hi everyone, I'm Steph Van Shilt. Welcome to the In Conversation with Vince Gilligan as part of Series Mania at ACMI. Just a bit of housekeeping before I introduce Vince. Today's In Conversation will run for a little over an hour and we'll have time for you guys to throw questions our way towards the end so hold on to those like a ricin

cigarette and we'll call upon them at the very final. So Vince Gilligan probably needs no introduction. You wouldn't be here if you didn't know who he was but I'll give you one anyway. American writer, producer and director. Best known as the creator and showrunner of Breaking Bad and it's spin off, Better Call Saul.

He's written and produced for the likes of the X-files and has won a bunch of different awards including Emmys, the BAFTA, so welcome Vince! Thank you, thank you so much. Thanks Stephanie. That's okay. Thank you guys. Kind of daunting, right? It is yeah, well it's wonderful seeing all these folks who like the work. Thank you guys for all being here.

Appreciate it. I was gonna say, I think people more than like this work. They love it! Well, I appreciate that very much. Thank you. So we thought we'd start at the very start. So obviously we had a clip just now from the pilot episode. Tell us how Breaking Bad began? From the very beginning.

From the very beginning. It was about - we were shooting about, over ten years ago now which I find hard to believe, that that scene you just watched was shot, gosh, probably about March of 2007. And before that and about 2004, I was talking to a buddy of mine, a guy named Tom Schnauz who's one of our

writer, producer, directors on Better Call Saul and previously on Breaking Bad. My oldest friend, he and I went to NYU film school together, back in '86 and he and I had worked on the X-Files together. And around about 2004 we'd been out of work for two years. X-Files had been off the air since