Vince Gilligan, The Creator of Pluribus, On His Wacky & Dystopian New Show On Apple TV
The name Vince Gilligan is no stranger to the term “breakthrough television”. He is, after all, the director and writer of some of the best X-Files episodes in the 90s, as well as his crime drama shows Breaking Bad and its prequel/sequel Better Call Saul. The man’s work and his team’s efforts are of a pioneering level; he made us remember iconic characters, terms, and creations like The Lone Gunmen, Heisenberg, Los Pollos Hermanos, HHM, Saul Goodman, The Chicago Sunroof, and the Salamanca family. He and his crew also taught us the lesson of hubris, humility, and letting your ego go unchecked through his shows, which to this day haven’t been matched in scope, pathos, delivery, and emotional payoff.
What’s next for the esteemed director? Well, he has a new 9-episode show called Pluribus coming out, and it deals with the most miserable woman on Earth trying to fix a post-apocalypse filled with “happy” zombies who work as a hivemind. Unique and sci-fi laden? Yes. Still taking place in New Mexico? Yes.
We had an interview with Vince Gilligan regarding those queries.
Pluribus’ Inspiration
Vince Gilligan: I was, it’s hard to say where the ideas come from. I never know exactly. I just wait for them to appear, but about eight or nine years ago I was pondering a character, a particular character. At the time it was a male character, a guy, but I was thinking about a character who inexplicably for some reason, the world loved. Everybody loved this guy, everybody in the world, everybody was willing to bend over backwards for this guy.
They, no matter what he did, they could never be mad at him. They could only wish for good things for him and they would do anything he asked. And I don’t know what it was about that that intrigued me, but I thought about it for weeks and months and I started to slowly flesh out, you know, why that might be the case.
And it very quickly, as you would imagine, became a science fiction idea, but it wasn’t intended to be necessarily from the beginning. But about the same time, roughly almost a decade ago, I was working for the first time with the wonderful actor Rhea Seehorn (who plays Carol in the show). And she had just started on Better Call Saul, and Peter Gould and I, Peter, the co-creator of the show and our writers, we all loved her.
The whole crew loved her. Everybody would move Heaven and Earth for her. And she’s such a wonderful person and she’s so good in terms of her acting talent that I said to myself, why don’t I take this idea and make it about a woman instead of a man? And so, I wrote Pluribus.
We didn’t even have a title for the next couple of years, but what became Pluribus, I wrote for Rhea. And that’s when the idea happened. I don’t know where exactly it came from, but that was what I was thinking.
On Balancing Pluribus’ Comedic & Serious Tone
VG: I love the comedy in this show. It is all very much intentional and it is all you know, I think I realized years and years ago, working on The X-Files for seven years, which we shot in your beautiful country for the first six years.
We shot on the west coast of Canada, great times. I was always impressed by The X-Files that a show so dark and serious and scary could also have moments of humor. I didn’t realize until I worked on The X-Files and saw writers like Darren Morgan creating funny X-File episodes that the genre could be so elastic.
And that was a revelation to me. And it dawned on me, I love writing drama. I started off 30 years ago as a kind of a comedy guy, really. But I realised I love writing drama. But then I thought, oh man, maybe I can do both at the same time.
I love how elastic Pluribus is now. And it really is all credit to Rhea and the other actors, Carolina and Carlos Manuel and Samba. These actors all understand comedic timing. And it’s sort of like jumping rope.
If you don’t get the timing, you mess up the rope jumping and you trip, and you fall on your face. These guys all get it. They all have mad skills in terms of comedy. And this show, when it can be really dark and serious, and then 10 seconds later it throws in a joke. That makes me so happy; I can’t even tell you. And that’s one of the things that gives me the most pleasure with this show.
On Carol & How She Would Work In A Post-Apocalyptic World
VG: She is a character who really would rather be home having a drink. She’d rather be home with her loved ones, but everything changes in the first episode. And it’s such a kick in the gut when what happens to her.
But I think the challenge for Carol is that she does not want to be doing this. She does not want to be a hero. She does not want to save the world.
But she feels that this job is thrust upon her, especially when she realises no one else seems to want to take on that job. So that to me is the challenge of having a character as a hero who, in her own words, I think she herself would say, I’m not really equipped to do this job. That makes it even tougher, saving the world when you don’t have any science background, any medical or genetic background in a situation like this.
How in the are you going to figure this thing out? And to me, that’s the challenge, but also where a lot of the humour comes from.
On Making It In New Mexico, Alburqurque Like With Breaking Bad & Better Call Saul
VG: Good question. I was nervous about making it in New Mexico, and making it in Albuquerque.
I kind of thought we probably shouldn’t do that because it’ll confuse people or it’ll make promises to them that the show will have something to do with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. It really doesn’t. The simple answer as to why we’re shooting in Albuquerque is because that’s where my crew is. And I’ve worked with them now for almost 20 years. Some of them, not all of them, but I’ve worked with many of them for 10 years, five years, 15, some almost 20. And I love them, but they all live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I can’t bring them elsewhere.
So if I want to continue working with them, I have to go to them. So that’s why New Mexico and I guess we could have tried to make Albuquerque, New Mexico look like another city, but that would take so much extra effort and money and time that I thought, oh, the hell with it. I’ll just, you know, this one’s in Albuquerque as well.
Honestly, Pluribus could be set anywhere in the world. But again, I really wanted to work with my crew from Breaking Bad and from Better Call Saul. And so it was not a financial reason in this case. It was a twofold selfish reason on my part.
I love my crew that I’ve worked with for many, many years now. I wanted to continue working with them. And also, it’s such a nice thing when you have, you know, there’s an old expression, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I love working with the people that I’ve been working with for years.
And I also have a shorthand with them. I don’t have to explain to them in great detail the things that I want.
If I’m talking to, for instance, Jennifer Bryan, my amazing costume designer, and she’ll say, what do you want this character to look like? And I’ll say, what was that thing you put this character in back on Better Call Saul in season two? She says, oh, yeah, yeah, I know that one. It saves an awful lot of time working with people you know and love that you don’t have to explain everything in infinite detail. Selfishly, that’s yet another reason that I decided to set the show in Albuquerque.
On Pluribus Being On Apple TV
VG: I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I’ve had a front row seat at a great many changes to the television industry over the last 20, no, over the last 30 years (Breaking Bad on AMC, Better Call Saul on Netflix). No, it’s, gosh, I’ve been doing this a long time. Wow.
I realized I moved out to California. Oh my goodness, today is October 13th. I think October 13th, 1995 was my first day in the writer’s room on the X-Files. It’s my 30th anniversary, and we’re working in television today. Isn’t that the darnedest thing?
I’ve seen a lot of changes. I feel lucky to have been a part of them. The main thing that hasn’t changed is that I think people like good, engaging stories, and not just in the United States, all around the world. Because people are people all around the world and we have more in common than we have differences. I think the medium has changed a bit.
It used to be put out over, you used to get it on an antenna attached to your TV and then it came through a cable box and then it came through a streaming service. Now it comes through a streaming service. Who knows what comes next? Maybe they’ll beam it right into our brains directly. I hope not. That sounds dangerous.
But it’s still basic human storytelling where people want to know about other people like them or other people very different from them. And so that’s what I like. I like the consistency of stories that are still about people, even in a world where they say computers and AI are going to start telling us stories. Maybe, maybe not.
I hope not. But I think stories about people made by people are the most interesting thing in the world. And that’s one of the most important things we have as human beings is the stories we tell each other.
And I feel lucky to get to tell stories to people all around the world, almost like with Pluribus. I get to share, almost like, you know, the way the people in Pluribus share with each other telepathically. I can’t do that, but I get to share my stories and that makes me feel very, very honoured.
On The Concept Of Happiness
“Has the show made me define happiness differently?” That’s a good question. I don’t think it’s made me define happiness differently.
I think it has made me question whether happiness is all that it’s cracked up to be. Whether happiness is as important as we think that it is. I, my whole life, I’ve never been a particularly happy person. So I think about happiness a lot because I desire it.
But I’m starting to think, you know, maybe it’s not that important because unhappy people make things happen. They invent things. They make the world go around. And that’s important too. It’s important that we have buildings to live in and we have clothes to wear and we have food. We grow food for each other, and we have civilization. Otherwise, we’d still be in caves if everybody were happy. We wouldn’t have accomplished much.
SoI think about that. I want the audience to tell me what the show is about. I have very simple desires for the audience. I hope they like the show. I hope they find it entertaining.
And I hope they say, I like that episode. I’m going to watch again next week. That’s really my desire when it comes to that. Those are the same desires I pretty much always had. But as to what they take away from the show, what they think about it, I want them to tell me what it means. I realize that it’s my job and the writers I work with and the directors and the actors and the crew people, we make a show, but then we give it out to the world.
And then anyone who chooses to watch it in the world, that’s, I kind of want to learn from them what, what the show means. I, I think I tried with Breaking Bad to too often to say, I think, you know, we have a podcast about Breaking Bad and I’d ask, “what does this scene mean?” Here’s what I think it means. I think I was full of hot air.
I mean, it’s okay to have an opinion about your own show, but I realized it was just kind of boring telling people what to think about it. I’m trying real hard not to do that with this new show. I want people to tell me, not me tell them.
On Making Pluribus Stand Out From His Past Shows
The plot and the characters are a good start for making it different. But I always ask the question, how can we visually differentiate this show from the show before it? And Peter Gould and I asked the same question with Better Call Saul: “How do we make it different from Breaking Bad?” The first thing we decided with Better Call Saul is we won’t use the handheld camera that we used on Breaking Bad.
And then now with this show, one of the first decisions we made that I got to make as the director of the first episode was I decided, can we shoot in a different aspect ratio? When we shot X-Files, we started with 4:3. And then during the run of the X-Files, we got to go to 16:9 and that was great. And then Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, were both 16:9.
With Pluribus, we get to go even wider. We get to go two, three, nine to one, which is classic widescreen. So that was something we wanted to do. We wanted to do to visually differentiate this show. And also working with my excellent cinematographers, Marshall Adams and Paul Donaghy; both these guys are great. We got together, put our heads together and decided how should the colours look on this show. And we came up with an idea to make the show look a little bit like old-fashioned Kodachrome film, even though we shoot on digital.
Nonetheless, we can colour time the show. There’s an excellent colourist that we work with named Dave Cole. He just did all the Dune movies. He’s the first two anyway, I think. Definitely the second one. He does all these big movies. We’re lucky to have him. And he has helped our cinematographers make the show look kind of “Kodachrome-y“. And I get to work with these artists and they make me look good. And I’m very excited when they help me figure out ways to differentiate the look of the show.
Leave a Comment