Vince Gilligan Teases Some ‘El Camino’ Deleted Scenes, Admits The Movie “Does Not Need To Exist”
El Camino: A Breaking Bad Moviehit Netflix and limited theaters last Friday, and the general consensus about the film is that it’s well-executed but ultimately inessential. Turns out writer/directorVince Gilliganagrees about that last part; in a new interview, he admits that “this movie, strictly speaking, does not need to exist.”
Read Gilligan’s comments calling the film a “gift to the fans,” learn about the lengths he and his team were willing to go to preserve some of the film’s surprises, and read about some of theEl Caminodeleted scenes which will be available on an eventual Blu-ray release. Warning:spoilersahead.
Gilligan gave a lengthy interview toRolling Stonethat’s worth reading in its entirety, but I’ll highlight a few of the best quotes here.
How The Film Came To Be
After spending years thinking about what happened toAaron Paul’s Jesse Pinkman following the events of theBreaking Badfinale, Gilligan began to formulate an idea for what would eventually becomeEl Camino:
When the 10th anniversary of the show came along last year, I started to think, “Maybe we get a little money from Sony and we do a mini-episode. We’ll call it ‘63,’ like the 63rd episode. And it’s maybe 15 or 20 minutes long.” That quickly morphed into an hour-long episode. And then that morphed into a two-hour movie. It’s not really cost-effective to put a crew together to do one hour’s worth of story. It grew into this movie quickly.
Many of hisBreaking Badwriters (many of whom are working onBetter Call Saul) didn’t like the idea of referring to the potential mini-episode as “63” because that implied that there was something unfulfilled aboutBreaking Badthe series. Gilligan didn’t want to make that implication to audiences, so he ended up evolving the project from there – including one permutation in which Jesse Pinkmanended up in jail.
El Camino Deleted Scenes
Gilligan teased two scenes that didn’t make the final cut. One is an alternate version of the shootout at the welding factory:
Jesse stands toe-to-toe with [Neil] and asks for $1,800. I believe in my heart of hearts, if the guy had given him the money, he’d have been out of there. But Jesse read the room right, so he was going for Plan B. It was a very dangerous gambit, because he nearly was shot in the process. And by the way, for what it’s worth, in the original script, and the version we filmed, he actually gets shot through the side, and then goes off and recuperates with help from Ed [Robert Forster]. When the Blu-ray comes out, we’ll have that as a deleted scene.
The other is a lengthier version of the brief conversation we see between Jesse and his girlfriend Jane (Krysten Ritter), which Gilligan says “was a longer scene in the movie, and you’ll be able to see that in the deleted scenes on the Blu-ray.”
Bryan Cranston’s Cameo
The Hollywood Reporterhas a detailed piece on the secrecy Gilligan and his squad utilized to ensure word of the cast’s appearances in Albuquerque didn’t leak online – especially Bryan Cranston’s return as Walter White in a flashback sequence. There’s some interesting stuff in there, like the fact that every shot with Cranston’s head involves CG because his bald cap didn’t look right, but the Rolling Stone piece has Gilligan explaining the set-up in his own words, so I’ll use his quote below:
“This Movie…Does Not Need to Exist”
And finally, Gilligan admits that when it comes right down to it, this is not a story that was begging to be told:
…This is probably not something I should be saying to you, but to say it again, this movie, strictly speaking, does not need to exist. I stand by the fact thatBreaking Badstands on its own. And I’m proud as hell of that. This started off as a bit of a trifle. Having said that, it morphed into this somewhat big-budget, event-type movie that I couldn’t be more proud of. Netflix was wonderful, Sony was wonderful in allowing us to make this thing. But ultimately, are you required to watch this as a fan ofBreaking Badto have a complete experience? No, you’re really not. But I’m hoping people will take it for what it is: something that’s meant to be a gift to the fans, and a gift to Aaron Paul, who I truly believe deserves many more movies where he’s the star. It was something done for the love of it, something that I hope people will enjoy and get some sort of deeper satisfaction from.
