For your reading pleasure, please enjoy this preview with Better Call Saul‘s Thomas Schnauz from Issue 34 of Backstory.
TV DVR’d: Better Call Saul
Executive producer and writer Thomas Schnauz pens the darkest moment yet in the downfall of Jimmy McGill
By Danny Munso
“S’all good, man.” How could a simple, playful line be so foreboding? Therein lies the genius of Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad prequel that has become so magical on its own it almost feels wrong to identify it as such. Saul promised to tell the downfall of Bob Odenkirk’s Jimmy McGill and see him transform into Saul Goodman, the fixer/lawyer who assisted Bryan Cranston’s Walter White in his criminal endeavors during AMC’s seminal series from 2008 to 2013. But as series creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould and their writing staff continued to pen episodes, that metamorphosis kept getting pushed further down the road. At the end of the just concluded season four, we finally got that climactic moment, and one of the men who co-wrote that powerful scene was executive producer and writer Thomas Schnauz.
Schnauz was a key component of Breaking Bad, joining Gilligan and Gould — along with writers Gennifer Hutchison and Gordon Smith — in moving to Saul, a series that has deftly mixed new characters such as Jimmy’s brother Chuck (Michael McKean) and lawyer girlfriend Kim (Rhea Seehorn) with important figures from the Breaking Bad universe, including Jonathan Banks’ Mike Ehrmantraut and Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), the drug lord who tangles with Walt with iconic results. But Schnauz explains that their writing process for Saul never deviated from the previous one. At the beginning of a season, the writers convene in the room and discuss general overall ideas for about a month before plotting any individual episodes. “We spend a lot of time talking big picture and things we hope to see,” he says. “We talk about where we last left our characters, which is why for a lot of our seasons, we pick up right from where we previously left off.” For season four, that meant picking up from the series’ most notable moment to date—when season three concludes with the death of Chuck in a house fire he purposely caused after a ruthless fight with Jimmy. This season deals with the fallout from that event, one Jimmy represses for the majority of the episodes. That’s where the writers start to plot their story. “Our way of working is to ask, ‘Where are our characters heads at? What are they thinking about? What do they think is happening versus what is happening that they don’t understand?’” Schnauz adds that their writers’ room has an unusual luxury in that they convene about six months before any filming begins, which gives them an extra cushion to nail the story arc.
The Saul writers have an inherently strict timeline. Season four takes place about two years before the events of the Breaking Bad pilot, and so the scribes must hit certain character and plot moments, particularly for Jimmy and Mike, for both series to fall perfectly into place. Because of this, the writers have talked through some of what the endgame for Saul would look like, although they have allowed themselves to deviate from it greatly. For example, several are on record as saying they thought Jimmy would become “Saul” at the end of season one, which obviously never happened. As the writers got into the characters more, Saul became a show whose emotional resonance surprised even them, and they felt an unexpected affection for Jimmy and his slow, dark downfall. “We have to go with the best story and not worry all the time about bending too much to get characters to where they were on Breaking Bad,” Schnauz says. “We certainly have big tentpole moments we’d love to happen, but if it doesn’t go there, then we don’t go there. We throw out a lot of stuff that feels really fun—we can’t hold on to those kinds of things. If we’re bending to make a character do something and we need to reexamine it and ask why we are doing it, then it doesn’t feel real.”
Schnauz co-wrote the season-four finale – “Winner,” the series’ best episode yet — with Gould, though that certainly wasn’t the plan when the season started. Schnauz is more than a writer on the show. He has also directed some of the series’ standout episodes and was slated to both pen and helm this season’s penultimate episode, “Wiedersehen,” but he was diagnosed with cancer and had to undergo surgery. Though he has recovered and is thankfully in good health now, Gould was hesitant to throw his longtime friend back in the director’s chair so soon after the operation, despite Schnauz’s protestations. Instead, Gould wanted Schnauz to co-write the finale with him, which paid off for viewers since their resulting script contains major character moments that will have seismic repercussions for the remainder of the series, which was renewed for season five before season four had even dropped.
The Saul writers’ room likes to break each story down in a meticulous way. More than listing a series of beats they want to hit in each episode, they go scene by scene, offering specific details so that a particular episode’s assigned writer knows exactly what marks to hit. Schnauz himself has a unique writing process in that he never pens a script in chronological order. “I’ll look at the board and just have a feel for certain scenes,” he says. “If I start at the very beginning, I might never finish the script, because sometimes you just get stuck—and if you stay stuck for too long, it’ll never get done. So I’ll jump around and think, Oh, there’s a Jimmy scene or a Mike scene that is clicking for me, and I’ll start with that. Then eventually I’ll go back to the other stuff I was getting stuck on.”
“Winner” is the episode where Jimmy finally starts his real transformation into Saul— something the fans and writers have been waiting for. Throughout the episode, Jimmy and Kim have been working on getting him another chance to appear before the bar association in an effort to keep his law license. They finally do so, and Jimmy gives an impassioned plea centered around his love for Chuck and what their complicated relationship taught him about the law. The board is moved, and Kim is so happy that Jimmy is finally confronting his feelings for his brother that she starts to cry in the courtroom. Only it was all a farce. As soon as they get outside, Jimmy excitedly tells her it was all a con, a ploy to get his license back. He says he’s going to begin practicing law under a different moniker, uttering the phrase that doubled as his moniker when he was a con man: S’all good, man. The events themselves are riveting because of their implications on both Jimmy and Kim’s futures, but they’re also incredibly layered. Yes, Jimmy was conning the board when he bared his soul about Chuck, but was he lying or was he actually expressing his real feelings and just using them to his advantage? That’s not as easy to call. “We try to talk about every layer there is to a scene,” Schnauz says. “What does Jimmy understand? What does he think is happening? Is he using real emotion?’ We definitely share our opinions about it, but whether that’s what he’s doing in the end, I don’t want to say. We know he has a lot of anger in his stomach about things that have happened and guilt about his own responsibility for his brother’s death. There’s so many things going on, and we talk about it all in the room before putting anything on the page.”
One reading of the scene is that Jimmy is indeed expressing his real emotions, only he doesn’t realize he’s doing it. That ties into an important lesson Schnauz learned in the Breaking Bad writers’ room. “You don’t want your characters to be too self-aware,” he says. “We were all sitting in the room talking about how Walt on some level liked the horrible things he was doing. Somebody pitched that, ‘Shouldn’t he say that out loud to himself?’ One of our other writers—Sam Caitlin—said once Walt admits that, the show is over. Having your character be in denial about things is very helpful and makes things very interesting about what their motivations are or might be.” Of course, Saul is not just Jimmy’s show, it’s also Mike’s, and though the two men haven’t interacted as much this season as in the past, Schnauz assures us their stories will come together in a very exciting way at the end of the series. “They’re very separate storylines at the moment, but they are similar in theme. It’s about two characters descending into a dark place.” Mike’s main season-four task is to supervise the creation of Gus’ meth superlab, which viewers know well from the days of Breaking Bad. Though it seems mundane, things turn for Mike after he befriends the German foreman Werner (Rainer Bock), who has a breakdown and stages an escape in an effort to reconnect with his wife. As Breaking Bad viewers know, you don’t cross Gus, who orders Mike to track down Werner so one of his henchmen can kill him. But Mike owns up to his mistake and kills Werner himself—the first of many dark deeds he will do in service of Gus Fring. “I think when we first started talking about the creation of the superlab, we didn’t know exactly how it was going to end for Mike, but we knew something important had to come out of it. It became a way for us to portray Mike getting deeper into Gus’ world and doing the things he does for Gus. For anybody who has seen Breaking Bad, the jump from where Mike is in season four to that show is a way off, so this felt like a major step we needed to see at some point.”
Given that this is such a dark episode, the writers thought they needed a lighter opening, one that ended up being quite emotional. We flash back to the day Jimmy first becomes a lawyer and he and his coworkers are celebrating with some karaoke. Chuck shows up, and Jimmy convinces him to come onstage and sing ABBA’s “The Winner Takes It All” as a duet. Jimmy drinks too much, and Chuck ends up making sure he gets home. It’s the rare sweet one moment between the brothers that we see onscreen throughout the series. “We knew we wanted Michael McKean back and wanted to give him something memorable to do in the finale,” Schnauz says. “We didn’t want to do a Chuck and Jimmy scene we’ve seen before of them screwing each other over. We wanted to find a moment where things were good for them. We’ve seen so much of Jimmy taking care of Chuck and we tried to think of a moment where Chuck would have done that for Jimmy. It all developed out of that.”
As for the show’s future, Schnauz was able to tease one possible thing moving forward. The writers have opened every season with a flash-forward, shot in stark black-and-white, to a time after Breaking Bad has taken place, where Saul is living in Omaha, having changed his identity to a man named Gene who works at a Cinnabon. The scenes are always short but they’re shot with a sense of foreboding. There is clearly a story the writers want to tell in that time period, and Schnauz teases that it’s something fans can probably count on very soon is an all-Gene episode. “That’s definitely something swirling around,” he says. “We always like to break the pattern in interesting ways. Again, we don’t want to pigeonhole into saying it definitely has to happen, but it’s something we’re interested in doing.” He and the writers are currently breaking season five, and it’s a safe bet there will at least be a sixth season. Really, there’s just so much more story to tell, but how long can it go? Suffice it to say he’s noncommittal. “At some point, we have to lock down and hit this bull’s-eye, but we’re moving the characters in a certain direction, and hopefully it will all make sense in the end.”
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