As of writing this, we are over halfway done with the first season of the Breaking Bad spinoff, Better Call Saul, and I think by this point, we can all breathe a sigh of relief.
Not only does Better Call Saul avoid the pitfalls of most failed spinoffs, it rockets past them to become a truly great piece of fiction. In hindsight, we probably didn’t have anything to worry about anyway.
Why? Well, because so many of the people that made Breaking Bad a masterpiece returned, and it’s not like they weren’t going to give the show their all.
One of those Breaking Bad alums is writer/producer Gennifer Hutchison, who wrote some of that show’s finest episodes, including “Confessions” and “Cornered”, which gave us the now-famous “I am the one who knocks” line.
So needless to say, when Adam and I sat down on spooky Friday the 13th to have a phone call with Gennifer Hutchison, we were both pretty jazzed.
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VIKTOR HERRMANN: What were the early days of your career like? How difficult was it to get where you are now, and what kept you going through the years?
GENNIFER HUTCHISON: That’s a good question. My first job in LA was as a PA in the writers’ office at the X-Files, which was a pretty awesome opportunity. I ended up becoming Vince Gilligan’s assistant in, I think, Season 8.
That was sort of my start. And then from there I kept moving up and I eventually kept consistently getting jobs as either a writers’ assistant or a producers’ assistant. But every show I got on would either get cancelled, or my boss would leave, or I would have to leave, and so after X-Files, every show I was on I was only on for a season.
This went on for quite a while. It was pretty difficult because I was never able to really get any traction, as far as an assistant who could then pitch possibly writing a freelance [episode]. I was writing my own stuff, but I definitely had some days where I was like, “what could I do instead?” [laughs]
But I kept doing it, mostly because I just didn’t know what else I would do. It was the only thing I could think of that I wanted to do.
Then I was working on Mad Men in Season 1, for Matthew Weiner. Season 1 was wrapping up, and one of the AMC producers said, “Oh, we’re working with your old boss, Vince Gilligan,” and I was like, “What is the show?” and they said, “It’s this thing called Breaking Bad.” And so I immediately contacted him and said, “Please hire me in any capacity.”
So he brought me on as his assistant, and then it just kind of hit, where I managed to get on a show that was great and sustained. And since I had this prior relationship with Vince, he knew what my goals were, and he had always been really supportive. When I came back for Season 2, I had a conversation with him and said, “I want to write for the show. What do I need to do to show you that I’m ready?”
And he said, “I need to read your stuff, any extra work there is on the show, webisodes, blogs, do those, and just show me.” So basically Season 2 was kind of my audition. [laughs]
And by the end of that, I said, “So, what do you think?” And he was like, “Well, why don’t we give you a freelance in Season 3 and see how that goes?” And it went really well, and that’s when he ended up staffing me.
VH: What was it like in those days, both as an assistant and when you first came on to the writing staff? How comfortable were you pitching ideas, versus how often you bit your tongue?
GH: When you’re a writers’ assistant you tend to not pitch as much. It varies by room. Some rooms don’t really like writers’ assistants to pitch, some do. You basically wait until everybody else has talked. [laughs] And then, if you have a pitch, you’ll volunteer it.
The difference of pitching as an assistant as opposed to pitching as a writer is you only want to pitch your best ideas. You want to make sure that it’s a great idea that you’re really confident in. When you’re on staff, your job is to keep the flow going, so a lot of times you pitch, “Oh, this is the bad version, but here’s what I’m trying to get to.”
As an assistant, you’re never really pitching the bad version. You want to pitch your absolute best. So transitioning from that? My first season as a full writer, that was interesting. It’s like, “Oh, I don’t have to be 100% sure of every detail of my pitch. I can take a flier, and it’s going to be okay. I’m not disappointing them.”
As a staff writer, you want to make sure that your pitches are great, but there’s definitely a little more freedom. You’re on staff. That’s your job. They believe in you, at least to a certain extent. [laughs] There’s more comfort.
ADAM GREENE: As we know, in Hollywood and pro-filmmaking, it’s pretty male dominated. What advice would you give to female writers for how to get to where they want to go?
GH: It’s tricky, and I think that there’s more attention being paid to it now. There’s definitely a huge disparity. I think it really comes down to, honestly, just being your best. There’s the idea that with women you have to be twice as good to be considered half as good. But it’s generally advice I would give to anybody who’s trying.
Do your best job, no matter what job you’re in. So if you’ve got that writers’ assistant job, be the best writers’ assistant. But make sure, especially for women, that people understand that you have goals beyond that.
Don’t be afraid to speak up; don’t be pushy, there’s a difference between being persistent and harassing people. But I think a lot of times, women tend to be quieter. They tend to not self-promote, just because of the culture we’re raised in.
It took me a long time to speak up, and say, “Vince, this is what I want.” And I think if I had spoken up earlier he would have been just as open to it. So I think it’s mostly about having that confidence in yourself, and being able to self-promote.
Whereas I think guys are told, “Go in there! Go in there! Do it!” And I think women need to start being told that as well, and people need to listen.
VH: What are your writing habits like, and do you find that those habits change based on different projects you’re working on, or do you tend to stay consistent?
GH: With this show, we break all the stories together. We do all of them on 3×5 cards and then you take those to write your outline, and from there you write your script.
When I write on my own projects, I tend to do something similar. I like to break on cards, or I might skip the cards and go straight to outlining, but I definitely do the outlining.
As far as my personal writing habits, I tend to write in bursts. I’ll write for 45 minutes, and then I’ll take a 20 minute break, and then I’ll write for 30 minutes, and take a 10 minute break. I’m very bad about procrastinating, so deadlines are very good for me.
On my own projects, I tend to have to impose deadlines, or I tend to languish a bit more. That’s why TV is a really good place for me. It’s a world of deadlines. [laughs]
VH: I don’t think you’re the only writer who struggles with procrastination.
GH: [laughs] No, no, it’s something I always beat myself up about. And then once I started working, I was like, “Oh, everybody does this.”
AG: When you are faced with no idea how to continue or resolve or even start a scene, what gets you in the zone, as a writer?
GH: Other than fear?
AG: Other than fear and coffee.
GH: [laughs] You know, I actually don’t drink coffee. Mostly what I tend to do is I try to step away for a minute. I might sit and play a video game for half an hour, or go outside and take a walk. And then it just comes to a point where you have to force yourself to sit down.
It also helps me to talk to other people. The TV shows I’ve worked on, and TV in general, is very collaborative. Talking out ideas helps get you past writers block in a lot of ways. Sometimes I’ll just go and talk to my husband and say, “I’m having a real problem.”
He’s not a writer, and usually he won’t give me an answer. As I’m talking, I’ll figure out the answer. But just being able to say it out loud to someone helps get past the issue.
VH: Your first episode, 308, “I See You,” I imagine was a tough episode to write. It’s very different than most Breaking Bad episodes. It’s much quieter. What was your process writing that, and what were the challenges? I’m sure there was a lot of pressure to get it right.
GH: Yeah, there was. You don’t want to let your boss down, especially when they’ve taken a chance on you. Breaking that episode was tricky, and the big sequence with the Cousin crawling across the floor on his severed legs was a late addition.
I remember when it got pitched in the room and Vince was really excited about it. I had this moment of panic, where I was like, “I have to do what?” Our most iconic scenes actually came from a pitch where we thought, “That’s completely insane, we can never do that.” And the more we talk about it, and refine it, we realize that it will totally work. That was sort of my first panic moment, and then, ultimately it ended up being great.
The other thing that was interesting about that episode is that it was the first of my Walter White monologues; I tend to get monologues of his in my episodes. That was really fun for me write, but getting it right was a lot of pressure.
I remember when Vince gave me notes. “This direction is good, but I think you need to do a little bit more of this. Why don’t you take another stab at it?” And I was able to refine it from there.
Vince was really great through the whole process, and really allowed me to address my own notes, and find my way through the script.
AG: What is your unwritten rule of screenwriting? What’s something that’s maybe overlooked by aspiring writers or teachers, but you consider crucial?
GH: Honestly, I’m a character driven person, and I don’t think that’s necessarily overlooked, but I think there can be this idea that the idea should come from a concept instead of a character. I think you can have amazing concepts, but if you don’t have this great character driving your story, then it’s just not going to get where you want it to go. I think getting trapped in the plot as opposed to letting the character guide the plot can be a real problem.
A lot of times when I’m working on my own stuff, I’ll find myself thinking, “Okay, and then I need a run-and-jump here,” and it’s like, “No, no, no. What would the character actually do here?” That’s where you’re going to get the best drama. How would a real person, your real person that you’ve created, react in this situation?
AG: It might not even be something that you want to happen to the character.
GH: Exactly. We found ourselves in that situation a lot on Breaking Bad, and we would always go, “Why isn’t this working? We need this, we need that,” and it’s like, “Okay, no, no, no. Where’s Walt’s head at? What would he do?” And that usually got us through.
VH: Moving onto Saul. So far this first season feels to me very, very deliberate. Even more than Breaking Bad did. Sometimes things are set up very subtly, and they take several episodes to pay off. Can you talk about the process in the Better Call Saul writers’ room compared to Breaking Bad, and how broadly you might have planned things out this time around?
GH: Sure. It’s funny, because I think Better Call Saul benefits from the fact that we did five seasons of Breaking Bad, and so many of us came from there. We really had that basis, and we really refined our process. Coming in [to Better Call Saul], it was more about figuring out what the show was, and not how do we get there. We know the best way to break stories for us as a group.
And yeah, it is really serialized in a lot of ways. Which is funny because I think a lot of people expected it to be, you know, Saul deals with a whacky client every week. And that’s not at all what it ended up being.
It was really a learning process for us when we started. It’s interesting that you say we placed so many things that don’t pay off until later. As we were going through, we really took it step-by-step. And there were definitely points where we had discoveries. So sometimes we went back to make sure we had laid the groundwork.
It really was a brick-by-brick process with Season 1 on this show. Because [Jimmy] doesn’t have this thing of, “I’m learning how to be a drug dealer,” it really is about, “How does this Jimmy guy become Saul?”
AG: Knowing that you have to be true to the Breaking Bad world, has that been a challenge or something that’s been good?
GH: Both. [laughs] It’s good to have parameters when you’re writing, because if you can do anything, you often can’t decide on what’s best. We know that there are certain characters that just don’t exist in Albuquerque at this point, so that’s good.
But there are other times where we’re like, “Oh, what if we did this?” But we can’t because we know that in Breaking Bad era, this character is not in jail, or isn’t here. So it really was a mix of feeling constrained, but then seeing opportunities, and wanting to pull as much of the Breaking Bad mythology as we could.
VH: Do you have any nightmare stories? A scene that was particularly tough and memorable to write?
GH: You know, it’s mostly in the breaks. When we’re putting an episode together on the board, that’s the hardest part. On both these shows, we tend to break in such detail that once you get to script, usually you have a really good idea of where you’re going.
As far as being in the room, all the Tuco stuff was very tricky. We wanted Tuco to be not exactly where he was in Breaking Bad, and we needed to introduce this new character, Nacho, in an interesting way.
As far as writing, the salon scene in “Hero,” when Kim and Jimmy are talking and she brings the cease and desist, was really interesting for me, because there’s a couple different things going on in that scene.
It was a challenging scene, not in a bad way, but just making sure that you establish their rapport, you show that she doesn’t like that she has to give this thing to him, but she also thinks that he needs to stop what he’s doing. He’s kind of trying to let her know his feelings for her. There’s a lot of little things going on in that scene. That was definitely something I spent a lot of time on, but it ultimately ended up being a great scene.
I just think Rhea and Bob did such an amazing job with it, and it was probably my favorite scene in the episode.
VH: In the performances, but in the writing too, there’s such a humanity between those two characters and how they interact. It’s wonderful.
GH: Yeah, those two have such great chemistry.
AG: Who came up with the allergic to electricity psychosis condition that Chuck faces? And has that world been fun to play in?
GH: That was pretty early. We knew that we wanted Chuck to have some sort of condition that kept him housebound. We liked the idea of it being something that was like, “Is this a real thing? Or is this a psychosomatic condition for him?”
As far as the electricity thing, I don’t know who specifically came up with it; it may have been Vince. I remember it coming up pretty early. Refined from, “This guy is stuck in his house, what is it that’s keeping him there?”
That’s been fun. Although, it causes problems, because a lot of stuff is like, “Okay, and then Chuck calls Jimmy,” and we’re like, “Chuck cannot call Jimmy.” [laughs] It’s fun, but it is very challenging.
Chuck also maintains such a sense of dignity, so you want to keep that balance. You don’t want him to come off like this stereotypical crazy guy in his house. You want him to feel like a real person. That’s definitely a fine line to walk.
VH: One last question: We already know that you’re a fantastic writer, but do you have any plans or aspirations to direct in the coming seasons?
GH: It’s funny, when I was in college, I wanted to be a director. I think that’s what everybody knows. But I had always written, and so I was like, “Oh, you can do that too. Great!” And so I started heading down the writing path, and I didn’t really think about directing for a while, but it is something that I still have interest in.
I would love to direct down the line, for sure. It’s something that I would hope to be able to do. It’s also a really tough job, and a specific skill set. So there’s definitely a lot of learning to be done. [laughs]
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You hear that, kids? You can be one of the best writers working in television, and there will always still be learning to be done.
I hope fans of the shows and of Gennifer’s work found this entertaining, but more than anything, I hope aspiring writers found it useful. Mrs. Hutchison gives out the kind of sage advice people usually charge multiple digits for, so study up, writers!
PS: If you enjoyed this interview, check out our earlier conversation with another Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul writer, Tom Schnauz. Some of the hints he gave us as to what Saul would contain are only now becoming evident.
