A big part of the job of being a showrunner is, in my way of thinking, being a good communicator because there's really no other way to have hope for getting what you want, at the end of the day.
Vince GilliganRead
I'm very glad people love 'Breaking Bad,' but the harder character to write is the good character that's as interesting and as engaging as the bad guy.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Creating compelling good characters is more challenging than writing bad characters.
In the realm of storytelling, particularly in television, it is often easier to craft intriguing antagonist characters, whose flaws and moral ambiguity can captivate an audience. Vince Gilligan emphasizes the difficulty of writing heroic characters that possess the same level of interest and depth, suggesting that the complexity of moral stakes adds layers to storytelling.
Themes
CharactersStorytellingGoodBadWritingComplexity
In practice
Example use cases
During a workshop about character development, this quote can illustrate the challenge of creating relatable heroes.
More from Vince Gilligan
All quotes βYou don't make a movie by yourself; you certainly don't make a TV show by yourself. You invest people in their work. You make people feel comfortable in their jobs; you keep people talking.
Vince GilliganRead
I never thought anyone would come up to me and say, 'I like 'Better Call Saul' better than 'Breaking Bad.'' If you had asked me before we started, 'Would that bother you if someone said that?' First of all, I would have said, 'That's never gonna happen. And yeah, it probably would bother me.' It doesn't bother me a bit. It tickles me. I love it.
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A typical TV show is always about protecting the franchise - it's all about stretching it out as long as you can take it. And it's about taking the characters in any given hour as far as you can take them, but then resetting them more or less back to zero so at the beginning of the next week, so they're still the character you know and love.
Vince GilliganRead
The sad truth is, there's more Walter White in me than I'd care to admit, because if I truly was as kind as people think I am, I wouldn't be able to write Walter White.
Vince GilliganRead
For many decades - and this was reinforced by the broadcast networks' standards-and-practices department - bad guys on TV had to get their comeuppance, and good guys had to be brave and true and unconflicted. Those were the laws of the business.
Vince GilliganRead
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Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
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