Quotes

Dialogue

Hiatt: Does it disturb you that people are still rooting for Walt? Cranston: We have a history with Walt. It’s like if you had an uncle you loved, and you found out he was a pedophile. He’s on trial now and you’re conflicted. “I knew the guy, and he never touched me!” Yet he may have done this horrible thing. You don’t know how to feel. That’s Walter White. That’s the hook or the bait for the audience: Walt’s humanity, his humiliation as he was scrubbing cars at the car wash, trying to make extra money for his special-needs son; or his passion in the classroom, his desperation to see an interested pair of eyes.

Dialogue

Hiatt: If you had cancer and only a few years left to live, what would you do? Cranston: What I’ve learned from living in Walt’s shoes is that you truly don’t know. A lot of people have asked that hypothetical question at dinner parties. “What would you do if you had a year left? What would you do if you had a million dollars?” Well, Walter is living that. It’s not hypothetical for him, and what he’s realized is that it’s day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute sometimes. He made a decision to do something bold, and now the chickens have come home to roost. <br> Here’s the bigger question from Walter’s perspective: Is it ever worth it to compromise your morality and your ethics to try to become someone else for financial gain. That’s the crux of character. To me, character in a person is judged by the decisions that are made under pressure. Walt failed that test. I understand why he did it; temptation, humiliation, the lack of financial security – all those elements were carefully d

Dialogue

Hiatt: Vince Gilligan says he’s lost all sympathy for Walt. Does he ever think about the misery he’s caused, not only by murder, but by making pounds and pounds of crystal meth? Cranston: I mean he’s a bright man, so if he slowed down and had time to reflect, he’d probably talk himself out of what he’s doing. And he doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want to know who’s being damaged. “I’m going to follow through with this. I started it. There’s no reason I can’t finish this.” But even he knows he’s not doing it for his family. This is who he is.

Dialogue

SNIERSON: The series has been decorated with so much praise, it’s easy to forget the odds stacked against a show about a terminally ill middle-aged man cooking meth… How aware were you that what you were attempting to do — having your protagonist dramatically change — was radical for TV? GILLIGAN: Being a student of television, I realized that in most shows, the characters maintained their characteristics throughout the life of the series. I was very desirous of creating a show where the main character changed. I didn’t think of it in terms of being groundbreaking; I mainly worried that because it was a different take on the structure of a show, it would make it harder to get made…. The meth thing was the elephant in the parlor. I remember thinking, “This thing’s never going to fly because the main character cooks meth and we’re supposed to root for him to some degree. We’re going to get all kinds of static from folks who think this is a bad message to be putting out to the world.” The