El Camino won’t slow down to explain things to the non-Breaking Bad audience

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Vince Gilligan's critically-acclaimed AMC series Breaking Bad concluded nearly six years ago, and if you haven't caught up with the series yet, then the upcoming EL CAMINO: A BREAKING BAD MOVIE probably isn't the best place to start. Vince Gilligan and Aaron Paul, who reprises his role of Jesse Pinkman, recently spoke with THR in their first interview about the movie, and Gilligan said that he initially attempted to "have his cake and eat it too" by making EL CAMINO accessible to those in the audience who haven't watched the original series, but he soon realized that it wasn't going to be possible.

If, after 12 years, you haven’t watched Breaking Bad, you’re probably not going to start now. If you do, I hope that this movie would still be engaging on some level, but there’s no doubt in my mind that you won’t get as much enjoyment out of it. We don’t slow down to explain things to a non-Breaking Bad audience. I thought early on in the writing of the script, ‘Maybe there’s a way to have my cake and eat it too. Maybe there’s a way to explain things to the audience.’ If there was a way to do that, it eluded me.

Vince Gilligan also revealed that he started thinking about the story of EL CAMINO before Breaking Bad had even come to an end. "I didn't really tell anybody about it, because I wasn't sure I would ever do anything with it," Gilligan said. "But I started thinking to myself, 'What happened to Jesse?' You see him driving away. And to my mind, he went off to a happy ending. But as the years progressed, I thought, 'What did that ending — let's just call it an ending, neither happy, nor sad — what did it look like?'" However, he didn't tell his inner circle about his plan to revisit the character of Jesse Pinkman for several years. At the time, he thought that the project could be a five-minute short film, but it wasn't too long before he realized that he had much more to say on the matter. I can't wait.

EL CAMINO: A BREAKING BAD MOVIE will hit Netflix on October 11th, 2019, but the film will also screen in select theaters across the United States.