Here’s an interesting interview for two reasons.  First it’s with Vince Gilligan whose series “Breaking Bad” is one of the best shows on TV.  Second the interview is on scriptphd.com, hosted by scientist and creative writer Jovana J. Grbi?, so there is a science focus in some of the questions.  Some excerpts:

ScriptPhD.com: As a scientist (and PhD chemist in particular), Breaking Bad’s premise was very intriguing to me from the start. Can you share a bit about the inspiration for its origins?

Vince Gilligan: You know, Jovana, I wish I always had a better answer for where it all comes from. But I only can put a date to things—I only seem to remember when ideas came to me. In this case, Breaking Bad was an idea that came to me when I was speaking to an old college friend on the phone. He and I are both writers, and were both bemoaning the fact that—this was was about 2005—we were having trouble getting work and we were wondering where our next writing gig was going to come from. We thought instead, maybe we should switch occupations. Maybe we should buy an old RV and put a meth lab in the back and ride around in the Southwest. And we were joking around, but this character that became Walter White jumped into my head very quickly, right in the midst of this phone conversation. That’s when the idea came to me!

I have to say, as far as the science angle goes, I’ve always loved science, and yet I never had any real facility for it. I’ve always been a terrible student of mathematics in high school and in college. I’ve never even taken chemistry, I hate to admit it. But I’ve always loved science. And for most of my life, I’ve been a subscriber of Popular Science magazine and Popular Mechanics. But I’ve never made the jump from Popular Science to Scientific American! I don’t have a deeper understanding, but I love the idea that there are real concrete black-and-white answers in science and math, that we don’t unfortunately get in the rest of our life. The world, and our lives, is full of gray areas and uncertainties and opinion versus fact. And yet in mathematics, 2+2=4 and always has and always will. In science, certain chemicals put together in a certain way always create the same compound. I love that idea about science and I always have. I just wished in my heart of hearts that I had a deeper facility and understanding for it, but I have to say it is fun to live it by proxy and to write about a man who has a very profound understanding of chemistry and of science.

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SPhD: One of the things I love most about Breaking Bad is that chemistry acts like an integral character, one that plays a very important role in Walt’s identity, the cooking and production of the meth, and in some cases, their very survival in some pretty hairy situations (as in the case of the fulminated mercury and homemade battery). Was it always the plan to have it be such a big part of the show or is that something that evolved?

VG: I did always like the idea that this would be a cable TV version of MacGyver. That was not first and foremost when I was coming up with the idea. First and foremost to me, the show is a character study about a man who is undergoing a radical transformation. He’s transforming himself from a protagonist to an antagonist. The whole show, in that sense, is an experiment to continue chemistry analogy. But there was always an element that I thought we could have fun with is the MacGyver aspect, as it were and the idea of using [Walt's] knowledge to get him out of a jam every now and then. And I have to confess, as much fun as we have with that stuff, the show has taken so many dark character turns as he progresses from a good guy into a bad guy that of it goes by the wayside, although not intentionally. But those moments you speak of were a lot of fun to come up with and a lot of fun to write, and I’m hoping we’ll find a way to insert more of those moments as the season progresses.

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SPhD: What’s funny is seeing the first few episodes of Season 3, I get the feeling Walt misses the badness and the danger of it all. He wants so badly to be good and to repudiate this person he’s become, and yet, I get the feeling he misses some of the perks and the thrills that it brought. Am I completely off-base here?

VG: No you are not off-base at all. That’s very astute. He’s an interesting character, because a lot of what this show is about to me is the human capacity for rationalization. We all rationalize our behavior to ourselves, our ideas, our actions. It’s just something that human beings do, it’s part of us. We usually do it in small, minor, insignificant ways. But Walt takes that to the nth degree. He stretches that to the breaking point. He’ll go around saying to himself, and when pressed by others to them, that this criminal behavior he finds himself engaged in is done purely to aid his family. He does it for their financial benefit. And yet we put the light on that pretty early in Season 1. If you’ll remember, he gets this offer from his rich former lab partner for a great job that sounds like it’s no strings attached and with all the money that he’ll need to treat his cancer and for his family to be financially solvent. And lo and behold, he doesn’t take it. That’s one of the moments I’m most proud of on our show, because prior to that moment, the show could have gone in a very different direction—we could have had the show become a weekly procedural. This week the meth lab burns down, and next week his money gets eaten by rats, and the next week after that the police arrest him, but he has to weasel out of that.

But early on we all recognized that a show like this can’t reach its full potential if we don’t really examine this guy at a deeper level. A lot of people, millions of people, especially with the economy being in the toilet, face similar situations, unfortunately. People face the issues that Walt faces, where money is a real problem. And most people don’t decide to cook crystal meth! So we realized early on that Walt has to have some kind of darker component to him that he’s perhaps always had. This is a man who is, above all else, prideful. And he bursts with pride at this avocation that he’s taken up, and he’s prideful about his product, about its quality. In so many ways, he’s just a sad little man who has felt passed over his whole life. He feels like he hasn’t really existed until he’s become a criminal, until he’s broken bad.

This gives me a chance to drop a fancy word on you: verisimilitude.

The appearance or semblance of truth or reality; quality of seeming true.

As screenwriters, we’re not creating a documentary, we’re creating a fictional story.  However that world has to feel real to a reader.  Therefore it’s critical that we understand enough about the specifics of our characters, and how and where they live that it comes off as authentic.  In the case of Breaking Bad, that involves knowing a lot of science.  To underscore the point, here is Gilligan’s final comment in the interview:

VG: Thanks, and it really makes me feel good to hear that you think the science is authentic, because we do our best, and we will continue to.

For more of the interview, go here.