Monday, February 23, 2015

The X-Files Lexicon: Interview with Vince Gilligan


Matt Allair, writer and scholar at The X-Files Lexicon has just posted a lengthy and informative new interview with writer/producer Vince Gilligan, mastermind of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.  

Here's a snippet, but please check out the whole interview!  The following passage suggests just one source of inspiration in the Chris Carter series that Gilligan took to his own work:

Another way that Breaking Bad is similar to The X-Files is that Chris always went into each episode by saying, “What’s the visual element of this episode?” Chris is a very visual thinker, and a very cinematic thinker. Cinema is important to him; that’s why The X-Files was the first show I can think of, that really felt like a little miniature movie every week. It was very important to Chris that The X-Files look like a movie and feel like a movie, and tell the story cinematically. In other words, not rely strictly on dialog. There was a lot of good television, but a lot of it felt like a stage play, like a lot of talking heads, they would tell their story through their words, through their dialog, and Chris really wanted a different kind of show than that. He wanted a dark, a moody, a cinematic show in which a lot of the story came across through images rather than simply words. I have taken that idea and run with it, because I, too, love cinematic story-telling, and so much of that was inspired by Chris. On Breaking Bad and now on Better Call Saul, we always think in terms of the image – what are we seeing, what we looking at? 

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