INTERVIEW WITH BREAKING BAD WRITER MOIRA WALLEY-BECKETT
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Breaking Bad
is arguably the greatest television series ever. It took its loyal and obsessive fanbase on an emotionally charged roller coaster ride as we watched Walter White go through a dramatic character arc that left a path of destruction in its wake. It has been the subject of discussion and intense debate at offices, on internet forums, and across the social media landscape.
I recently had the fortune of having a candid and insightful conversation with the extremely talented Breaking Bad writer and co-executive producer Moira Walley-Beckett. We talked about the television writing process, Breaking Bad, and overcoming the struggles we all face as artists.
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What is the television writing process like?
Firstly, all television shows engage in what’s called “breaking story”, which is when the writer’s room is convened (or, indentured, if you will) and sit in a room together for what seems like centuries and riff intensely on the characters, who they are, what their backgrounds are. And after a period of global discussion about what should happen in, say, the entirety of Season One, then you start to break story more incrementally, meaning discussing what the plot elements are per episode. What’s going to happen in episode one, what’s going to happen in episode two, etc. When we break story it’s very specific. Some shows use a more broad stroke approach, like, it’d be cool if these four things happen in this episode now here’s an assignment to the writer and they will write an outline and take a stab at it. But in the Breaking Bad bootcamp — which I think was pretty successful — we broke story in excruciating detail. We had a lot of lead time which was a real gift to us. I have that same situation here with Starz – my writers and I have had the luxury of time to sit together in the room and break in detail so that we figure out what every scene in every episode is going to be and what the content of that scene is. We really beat everything out together. Then the icing on the cake for the writer is to get to fill in the yummy dialogue and make it their own.
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How did you end up working on Breaking Bad?
I came on board in Season 2. I was obsessed with the show after watching it in Season One. I was working on another show at the time and the writer’s strike hit and suddenly I had all this time on the picket line and I just couldn’t stop thinking about Breaking Bad. So I wrote a spec script and my agent was like, “Don’t fucking do that. That’s ridiculous. You can’t write a spec script on a show you actually want to work on. You have to write a spec script of some other cable show and then I can get it to Vince Gilligan’s producers.” But I can get kind of crazy obsessive like that and I just had the need to write it. I had the characters voices stuck in my head. So I wrote it anyway because I was compelled even though I knew there was nothing to be done with it, right? Because you can’t give someone a spec script of the show they created for all kinds of legal reasons in the industry.
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Is it technically illegal or do you mean it’s frowned upon?
It’s simply not done. There are all kinds of litigious instances of precedent. I hear tell that it happened once on the X-Files. A writer gave them a script of a spec episode the X-Files – someone who was hoping to get a job — and they passed on it or passed on the writer. The trouble is, that if any hint or squeak of any part of that spec story shows up on the air the person could sue. So it’s just kind of an understood, common sense thing in the business. It’s high risk so you don’t do it. If I wanted to write on Breaking Bad I should have written a script on a different popular show that was on cable at the time like The Sopranos or something to show I could write for cable and capture voices within the framework of an existing show. But that wasn’t why I wanted to write the spec: I just needed to get it out of my system. And I promised my agent that afterwards I would write something else. No one knew what would happen with Breaking Bad anyway. The first season had been aborted because of the strike and it didn’t yet have a pickup. It was a tiny (incredible) show that nobody had heard of. It was like me and four other people watching it obsessively. Okay, here’s where the story gets fun. On the very day I was being offered a job on a network show my agent got me a meeting with Melissa Bernstein, one of the producers on Breaking Bad, basically just to shut me up. I went in and met her and I mentioned that I’d written a spec and she was like, “Really?” She was completely shocked and said that Vince would be so thrilled to know that someone loved the show enough to write a spec. I felt like a goofy fan girl (which I was) and when she asked me “What’s it about?” I just sort of pitched it out. I guess she liked the pitch because she was like, “Wow. Can I read it?” and I said, “I’m pretty sure there’s like six reasons why not.” And she looks me in the eye and says, “Can I read it?”. It was a Vegas moment. A gamble. At this point I’m getting offered another job that afternoon and I haven’t finished Act 4 of the Breaking Bad spec. I told her she could read it and I’d get it to her the next morning. So, I went to the job interview. They offered me the job. I went home. I finished Act 4 that night. I sent it to my agent the next morning, a Friday. He read it. He sent it to Melissa. Melissa read it. She sent it to Vince. Come Monday, I’m sitting by the phone thinking, “What’s going to happen in my life?” And the other show is going, “Okay, we made the offer when are you going to counter? What’s happening?” and we’re like, “Just a second.” I didn’t hear anything all day. It was the world’s longest day, let me tell you. Finally, at 4 o’clock that Monday afternoon I get a call. “Vince Gilligan wants to meet you.”
So I jumped in my car and raced across town and… it was kismet. He uttered the best sentence ever to me. With his sweet Virginia accent, he says, “I don’t know how you did that. I don’t know how you knew the characters so well, but my intention is to offer you a job — I just don’t know if I have a job to offer.” And I was like, “I’ll TAKE IT!” and he’s like, “Wait, wait, wait you better talk to your agent. Because we don’t even have a pickup and I don’t know what’s going to happen.”And I was like, “I’ll TAKE IT!” So I turned down the other job and I waited. I waited for over 6 weeks to hear if there was even going to be any more Breaking Bad at all. Finally, they got picked up for Season Two and I’ve been on the show ever since.
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Well bless your soul. I’m so glad you took that gamble. That’s extremely tough. Not only are you gambling that this show is even going to get picked up but there’s a legitimate offer of other employment on the table. At that point how do you pull that trigger?
Well…it was really easy for me. What do you want the quality of your life to be, you know? I was going to make half of the money on Breaking Bad that I would have made on this other show but it didn’t matter because I knew that Breaking Bad was the right place for me. It was the right place for my sensibility more so than any other show at that time. So it was a no brainer. It was worth it to me to gamble.
If you’re doing anything in the creative arts and probably beyond that, just in life in general, do you think part of the difference between people who make it and are “successful” and those who aren’t is down to being able to take calculated risks?
Yeah, but I would say in this business a lot of times that’s completely out of your control. I think you have to be tenacious. You have to be ambitious. You have to be sincere. There’s a lot of writers working on shows that they simply can’t abide and it’s a very, very hard job anyway, but every once in a while the blessed few end up in exactly the right place. I was willing to trade a lot to get to be on Breaking Bad. In my humble opinion, you also have to be willing to start at the bottom. You have to be willing to pay your dues and put in your time gratefully. I think there’s a bit of a culture now of, “I want to sell something. I want the brass ring. I really just want to sell my pilot” and while that’s a great aspiration, I’m glad I learned in the trenches and I couldn’t be more thankful. It has served me really well to have to fucking duke it out in writer’s rooms and learn the trade and learn the craft.
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How have you overcome the struggle and ultimate depression most artists feel at some point in their career. That they’re just not good enough or they just won’t make it?
First of all, I’ve been incredibly lucky and I have had many incarnations in the arts. I danced and I was employed doing that. I was an actor and I worked. I started writing plays. They got produced. So everything’s progressed pretty organically, one thing after another, but all within the arts. I consider it to be of a piece. But that being said, sure, there’s plenty of times where you’re not feeling that you’re accomplishing what you want to accomplish. You’re salivating for this opportunity and you either don’t know how to get it or every stride you take toward it is thwarted somehow. Sometimes the adage is true: luck and timing. If you put in your time, if you have ability, then sometimes you get lucky, too. Like you’re sitting in a waiting room about to take a general meeting with someone who’s never heard of you and you strike up a conversation with the writer sitting next to you who, as it turns out, happens to be the show runner of a brand new show on NBC and he says, “You seem really interesting can I read your shit?” And you say, “Yes, sir.” and you get a job. Sometimes that shit happens. It happened to me.
You get beat down a lot in this business and sometimes success feels really elusive. It’s important to just hold fast and remember what it is you love to do and just keep putting it out there. Just keep putting it out there. Another thing is that “living your life” is really important. Everyone gets out of school and is like, “I’m gonna make it! I have this screenplay and I have this thesis…” But you have to make sure that you’re living your life. Because any fucked up stuff that happens to you, any relationship stuff, any strange interaction with some guy at a bus stop, it’s all fodder. You can pillage everything. It makes you a more interesting writer. It makes you more hirable. I think it’s something that made me desirable – it helped that I’d had a “life” and had done some weird and interesting stuff. I’ve worked a bunch of odd jobs in my time and met some interesting people and I had a lot of stories to tell. That’s important I think.
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As the writer you’re sort of the architect of everything which is very empowering but were you also intimidated in the Breaking Bad writer’s room?
I got hired for the show and it was sort of a miracle. It really was. You show up for the first day in the writers room and you’re having a massive panic attack because
a) You admire Vince Gilligan.
b) He’s the visionary. It’s his project.
c) How will I ever measure up or be a valuable contributor?
I was a wreck for a couple of months. You try to lock in and be valuable. Being in a writer’s room at all is kind of antithetical to the writing process to a certain degree because writing is generally a pretty solitary endeavor and all of the sudden you’re in a room with other people breaking story and thinking out loud. It is a skillset that you have to acquire and thinking out loud in the presence of something that feels so special is intimidating.
I can empathize with you right now because I’m interviewing you and when I say something there’s this voice saying, “She’s going to think I’m an idiot.”
(Laughing) We all do this shit to ourselves, though. In fact, statistics show that it’s kind of pervasive for everyone to think that they’re not good enough. Psychologically speaking, most of us walk around thinking, “I’m a fraud and someone is going to find out that I’m not good enough.” That’s just human nature and you’ve just got to push through.
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Do you feel that the incredible attention to detail on Breaking Bad is impacting how you approach projects now?
It has enormous impact. It has had universal impact for me. I learned so fucking much from Vince Gilligan and his totally OCD process but it’s incredibly valuable. As far as I’m concerned that’s how you do good work. You take the time. You suffer through the details. You suffer through the creative process without settling for something that merely might work. You wait. You talk. You debate. You go round and round and round again on every single moment until it feels right. That’s how I was raised. I think Breaking Bad reflects the attention to detail, the countless hours we spent asking the essential questions, “Where’s Walt’s head at? Where’s Jesse’s head at? Where’s Skyler’s head at?” and letting the characters tell us what the story should be, as opposed to making any rushed or arbitrary decision just based on what could be a fun or cool idea.
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In the age of reddit and with fans that are so obsessed how do you deal with that?
We always said our fans made us smarter then we are. We just avoided reading stuff. We were so isolated and we were isolated on purpose. We simply didn’t read the buzz. We didn’t want any opinions other than ours as to what we had done and what was legitimate to us. In terms of security it got really tight towards the end and scripts were redacted. There was super secrecy in place. Everything was on lockdown, storylines etc., because we didn’t want anything to get out in advance. In terms of the social media, chat rooms and discussions, we all just tried to steer clear as best we could. It just seemed to be the smartest play.
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Do you ever fear with Twitter or social media that if you speak your mind it could hurt you professionally?
I’m actually kind of new to Twitter. Tom Schnauz talked me into getting on there a couple weeks before “Ozymandias” aired because he was having so much fun with the Breaking Bad fans who just wanted to reach out. I kind of wear my Luddite status with pride, but he talked me into it and it was this incredible onslaught and then the episode aired and there was a lot of mayhem surrounding Ozymandias. On Twitter, on occasion I’m remarkably incautious because Tom and I sort of settled into a happy Bickersons routine where we like to give each other shit and he’s probably the grossest person on the planet. Pridefully so. Anyway, sometimes I get caught up in that banter with him but in terms of other folks work I stay respectful and I don’t comment. I’m not going to bag on some movie that I didn’t like because I don’t think it’s appropriate and regardless of the result someone spent thousands and thousands of hours and effort. There are parts of my personality that I’m happy to share and I’ll mess with Tom all day long because I enjoy it, but there was only one time that I said something that I regretted and I deleted the tweet right away. There was a famous person who said something disparaging about Breaking Bad and I had a reaction. I was like “Fuck this guy.” Then I thought that’s not appropriate. That’s not appropriate because we’re peers and he has a right to his opinion. So, I try to be respectful and still be myself.
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Did you have a favorite character to write for?
The schizophrenia of writing is fun because you get all these characters voices in your head, but I will say in Season Two, the first time I got to write Jesse (back in the days he was “Idiot Jesse”, as we affectionately referred to him), that was really, really fucking fun. It’s pretty hard to pick a favorite because writing for Walt was so complicated and interesting, writing for Skyler was so nuanced and emotional, writing for Hank was a blast, writing for Saul was hysterical trying to come up with lines about Vietnamese masseuses and happy endings. That show was so great. I loved writing for Jonathan, Betsy, everyone.
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Can you speak about the Easter eggs in Breaking Bad?
We were particularly prideful about our Easter eggs and we delighted in dropping things in that initially were legitimate to plot or character and then leaving them alone for awhile. Then we’d drop them in again and trust that the audience was smart enough that we didn’t need to spoon feed them and that they would put it all together from the one season to the next. Sometimes we wouldn’t come back to something for two seasons. Two years and suddenly something would show up and we thought it was cool and delightful and we hoped everyone felt the same way. I got lucky in the season finale of the first half of Season Five. In “Gliding Over All” I got to throw in all these great callbacks to previous episodes. There’s one that was really fun because there’s a line in Season Two that Tuco said after he forced Walt into business with him. He turned to Walt and said, “We’re going to make a lot of money together,” and I thought it would be so cool if Lydia called back that line after she pitches Walt this whole scheme in Czechoslovakia. So I wrote it in and that was a cool little Easter egg but said in a completely different context. It was now another kind of dangerous business venture for Walt who was rather transformed at this point in the story and it therefore those words had a completely different impact on him.
I included some other things, too, like with the dripping hose at the White house and some call-backs to the pilot visually, imagistic Easter eggs.
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When you write that into the script do you reference that it’s a call back?
When writing it you’d sometimes say “We remember from Episode 305 when (fill in the blank)” because the crew’s reading it and the crew is prepping the episode so you have to spell it out and make sure it’s clear.
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Breaking Bad is being heralded as one of the greatest shows ever. How important was not having an ego to the success in the writers room?
Everyone has an ego but I’ll tell you it was a pretty swell group of people. Everyone was super civilized. We were good to each other. I think being an asshole is a choice and I’m not up for that. Nobody in our room was unfriendly. It was a really considerate, collegial environment. No one stepped on each other. It’s a competitive career but Vince fostered a good environment. Sure, you can get a good result with your hands in fists and your jaw all tight and your teeth gritted or you can just sit back and enjoy the people you’re with and keep everything civilized. And I think the flow’s better when you attempt the latter so we got really lucky with our group and everybody and we’re family now.
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As Breaking Bad was coming to a close I felt so emotionally invested and had invested so much time in the show it was hard not to be scared that it would be a let down. Can you talk about that from a writer’s perspective?
When we were breaking the final season we broke Season “A” and Season “B” globally first. We had some ideas and placeholders of what we wanted to happen, but it was an excruciating process. I don’t mean that negatively necessarily. We had an incredible and remarkable time taxing ourselves to our maximum capabilities in terms of brainpower and creativity. Breaking the last season was brutalizing for all of us, especially Vince, because we felt the weight of the legacy. We didn’t want to fuck it up. We didn’t want it to not be satisfying. We wanted it to be meaningful. We felt this obligation powerfully, to ourselves and to everybody who loves the show. It just had to be right. We tortured ourselves to make sure that we did the absolute best we could. It was really, really hard. The burden of the legacy weighed heavily on us.
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If you could write for any television series in history are there any you wish you could write or have written for?
Working backward in time… Deadwood actually got me into writing for television because I felt like it was theater for the screen. The character of Swearengen monologuing while getting a blow job was probably some of the most brilliant television I had ever seen at that point in time. The language was spectacular. It was just super inspirational to me. I loved that show.
Continuing historically back in time; M*A*S*H, All in The Family. These were seminal shows, character based shows attacking important, interesting, topical dynamics. That was some super cool television.
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Your latest project is Flesh and Bone? You mentioned earlier that you have a background as a dancer? Can you tell me a little bit about it?
Quentin Tarantino’s producer Lawrence Bender, who is my partner on the project, also has a background as a ballet dancer and he always wanted to do a series set in that world. It was all just kind of kismet because there are not that many fucked up cable writers with a background in ballet. So they found me, I conceived this show, we sold it to Starz and now we’re doing it.
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When is Flesh and Bone going to air?
We are shooting in New York at the end of April. It’s a straight to series order. So there’s no pilot. There are 8 episodes right out of the gate. For the last several months we’ve been in the writer’s room breaking story. We’ve cast a few of the roles that require brilliant, company level dancing and I have a fabulous choreographer, Ethan Stiefel, attached to build my fictional company. And now we’re just starting to cast the actor roles. We’re meeting deadlines now and turning in outlines almost weekly. I just finished writing Episode 2 which goes into the network tomorrow. Fingers and toes crossed!
About Jon Connor
Filmmaker. Writer. Co-founder of Masters in Motion.