Saul Goodman Goes to the Movies: An Interview With 'Saul Goodman v. Jimmy McGill' Author Alan Sepinwall

The veteran TV critic discusses the cinematic influences, obvious and otherwise, that helped shape 'Better Call Saul.'

If there’s a TV on in Jimmy McGill’s apartment, it’s most likely playing a classic film. The Albuquerque lawyer at the center of Better Call Saul consumes a steady diet of old movies in his downtime, sometimes with his girlfriend Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), sometimes alone. His habit informs the series around him. For Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk), movies serve as a source of inspiration as he inches toward his transformation into Saul Goodman, the sleazy lawyer viewers first met on Breaking Bad. That also allowed creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould to pack their Better Call Saul prequel (and, thanks to a framing device, sequel) with references to the movies they love.

Cinephilia plays such a prominent role in Better Call Saul that Rolling Stone TV critic Alan Sepinwall’s new book Saul Goodman v. Jimmy McGill: The Complete Critical Companion to Better Call Saul features running asides under the heading “Jimmy Loves Movies.” To get a better understanding of the relationship between the series and the movies that inspired both its protagonist and creators, The Reveal chatted with Sepinwall about its most memorable references and the way film shaped Jimmy’s view of the world.

When I first watched Better Call Saul, I noticed the classic films playing in the background and the way Kim and Jimmy bond over them, but I never really thought about what a deep part of Jimmy’s character they are until your book. When did that first occur to you?

Well, I mean it starts with the very first appearance of Saul Goodman on Breaking Bad. He figures out who Walter White is. He goes to see him at the school and he says, “I'm going to be your Tom Hagen.” And then he has to kind of explain the power structure of the Godfather movies to Walt to get him to understand. So right there he's presented as a guy who translates everything through things he picked up in popular culture, particularly movies.

That's a running background part of the character on Breaking Bad. Then, in the very first episode of Better Call Saul, when Jimmy goes to the Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill offices to confront Howard [Hamlin] (Patrick Fabian) about giving Chuck [McGill] (Michael McKean) his buyout from the law firm, he does the "primal forces of nature” speech from Network. And nobody gets it. Then, in the second episode, there's this big montage of him trying to do a better job of being a lawyer after he almost gets killed in the desert by Tuco [Salamanca] (Raymond Cruz). As they're playing it, the episode keeps cutting to Jimmy in the bathroom looking at himself in the mirror going, “It's showtime!” He's doing Roy Schneider in All That Jazz.

So they really front-loaded it in both the introduction of the character on Breaking Bad and in the early episodes here and it just goes on. And often, as you say, there are movies playing in the background, some of which reflect on what's happening, some of which don't. I've never actually seen Ice Station Zebra, but I'm guessing it does not have a ton of parallels to the story of either show. It's just one that [one of the creators] really likes. And so Jimmy names his holding company after it.

How do you see this love of film playing out in Jimmy's character? Walter White sees the world through science. Are movies how Jimmy interprets the world?

Definitely. And that's the cause of a lot of his problems, too. He wants to do things the way that he saw them in a movie. So, for instance, in the second season when he's got that job at Davis & Main—which he claims is the kind of job he's always dreamed of since he decided to become a lawyer—and he hates it, he immediately starts doing all of these showy things and corner-cutting, thinking, “All right, well no one will care because I will get results and this is the way it works in these movies I watch.” For instance, he goes and films this super dramatic commercial with the dolly zoom that they create with the chair lifter on, and everyone's mad at him but he doesn't understand why they're mad at him. This is not the way this is supposed to go.

Can you think of an instance where that works for Jimmy?

He becomes a really good director of these commercials. If anything, that is when he seems to be happiest in all of the show. If he had somehow been able to make a go of that, it feels like he would've been… He did not want to be a corporate lawyer, but he might've really enjoyed being a commercial film director or some sort of filmmaker. And if he could have made money at that, then maybe all the other bad stuff doesn't happen.

It did not occur to me until reading your book that the time jump during which Jimmy fully becomes the Saul Goodman we know from Breaking Bad pays homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey. That’s not really the sort of movie you’d expect it to reference, is it?

No, not at all. But it’s this very harsh cut from one time to another time and from one sort of one reality to another. But you also see how this one brutally violent moment leads to this other thing. So Jimmy and Kim have this terrible fight and she leaves him and we don't need to see anything else. We just go straight from that to Saul Goodman waking up in bed with a sex worker. In 2001, the prehistoric man, whatever they're supposed to be, learns how to kill, learns how to use a weapon, and then it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump from that to, all right, well now we can build rockets that can go to the moon. It's quite elegant in its simplicity.

Network provides the first major point of reference. Do you see that film playing into the rest of the series thematically?

I guess you could see Chuck as William Holden, and I guess Jimmy would be Peter Finch. But he could be a couple of different characters. Maybe Jimmy’s Faye Dunaway, taking this sacred, respectable thing and using it for flash and eventually to cause lots of trouble because he enjoys that. What's funny is you look at when he does the Ned Beatty speech in the first episode and it's a joke and he's just disappointed that nobody gets the reference. Then finally you get to late in season five and Howard goes up to him in the courthouse and confronts Jimmy about throwing the bowling balls at his car and Jimmy has this complete meltdown and starts screaming, "You can't conceive of what I'm capable of! Lightning bolts shoot from my fingertips.” At that point, he has just gone full Howard Beale. He is ranting and raving and doesn't even quite know what it is that he's saying. He's just mad as hell and he's not going to take this anymore.

Another direct reference is to the long tracking shot that opens Touch of Evil via the second-season episode “Fifi.” It takes a certain amount of audaciousness to pay homage to that scene, much less on a television scale, and yet it's quite successful.

That's the thing about the show: I am often reluctant to say something is “cinematic” on television. They’re two different mediums and there's a lot of visually impressive and adventurous stuff on TV. But the stuff the guys did on this show and, to an extent, on Breaking Bad, really does feel cinematic. It's assembled together in a very meticulous and impressive way where sometimes you don't even realize until after it's done just how impressive it was. That’s, I think, part of the point. You don't necessarily want to call attention to the fact that it's a tracking shot and that they're crossing the border and it's an homage to Touch of Evil in the middle of it.

Then at a certain point, very late in the process, you realize, oh, there hasn't been a cut. We've just been following the truck all the way and we're going around. They do it very well. It’s not just like a shot-for-shot copy of that. I believe in that case director Larysa Kondracki suggested it. They knew that they wanted to do a border crossing thing, and as soon as she made the suggestion, Tom Schnauz, the writer, said everyone was very excited and on board because they're all huge film buffs and were constantly talking about different stylistic or thematic references.

I'm going to lightning round a few references. One is Sunset Boulevard in the episode “Amarillo.”

That's one of the funniest. In the book, I joke that it almost feels like that episode was reverse-engineered from the point at which they get the old lady to descend the stairs in her chair lifter and say, “I'm ready for my closeup, Mr. McGill.” It's like someone had that joke and then they had to figure out, “Well, how are we going to get there? Oh, maybe Jimmy will have to make a commercial and his name is ‘McGill’ and it sounds like ‘DeMille.’” It's this hilarious parody that then sets them up for this whole run of Jimmy making commercials and Jimmy getting into trouble over it.

Much of the time, the things that are great on Better Call Saul were kind of discovered by accident. Other than the meticulous filmmaking, it was really written in the most sort of ass-backwards way you could possibly imagine. They really… Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan both would talk about how they could basically see two feet in front of them at any given moment in terms of story. And so they would do things and then realize after, oh, that's a good idea, let's go with that. And yet at the same time, the episodes look really good and they're very visually inventive and they have all of these homages within them.

It's almost a Jimmy McGill-like approach to making a television show. “We’ll try this and see what happens.”

Exactly. Chuck McGill would not make a television show this way, and it probably would not be nearly as interesting, even if you could argue, okay, the process makes more sense.

Another reference, The Dirty Dozen in the episode, “Nippy."

So now Jimmy’s Gene Takovic from Cinnabon and he has to get this guy who has identified him as Saul Goodman off his back. And so he figures, all right, I'm going to trick him. We will do a robbery at the department store at the mall where I work, and we're going to go through it and we're going to rehearse it over and over and over again. And, as they're doing it, he starts teaching this would-be criminal, and his dimwitted buddy, a series of instructions in the form of numbers and rhymes. And as soon as it started, I go, oh, this is the bit in The Dirty Dozen where they're talking through the entire plan. Jimmy obviously watched The Dirty Dozen as many times as I did, and is just using that as his template to get these idiots ready for what they have to do.

His Girl Friday in the episode “Bad Choice Road.”

It's on in the background. You don't actually see it. You can just hear the dialogue, and I know the movie well enough to recognize it. So here's a film about an incredibly smart and talented woman who knows that the newspaper business is bad for her and knows that her relationship with Cary Grant is bad for her and has a chance to get out. Be with a nice guy, Ralph Bellamy. Go off and do her thing. But she ultimately cannot resist the news business or Cary Grant because she's really good at it and it's fun. And that's like Kim with Jimmy. She could be one of the great lawyers and she just can't resist Jimmy McGill. But, also, she especially can't resist the grift. She becomes addicted to it. So he has pulled her into this world that she never expected to be in, and then she just doesn't want to get out.

That's part of the brilliance of Rhea Seehorn’s performance too. She makes you understand the appeal. You’re not just yelling at her to get out.

It’s one of the genius things about Better Call Saul. One of the lessons they learned from Breaking Bad is that too many Breaking Bad fans hated Skyler White (Anna Gunn) because even though Skyler's position was correct, she was trying to stop Walter White from dealing drugs. Skyler White was trying to stop the show from happening. With Kim they figured out, no, she's turned on by the thing that we love most about Jimmy or Saul. And so she's going to not only be okay with it, she's going to encourage and enable and participate in it. And so as a result, even though it's ultimately her downfall, people loved her for it.

There are other direct references, but I kind of want to get a little bit big picture. There's a movie called… I don't know if you know it, Midnight Run?

It was a funny thing. I’ve since moved it elsewhere, but I used to have a Midnight Run poster up on my wall behind me. So I'm talking to Peter Gould specifically about the development of the show and what a hard time he and Vince Gilligan had in figuring out what the show even was going to be. All they knew is we want to make a show about Saul Goodman. They had no idea of premise, tone, structure, anything. And as they're sort of working through different ideas, they start just talking about character dynamics. And Gould says, “I see you've got that Midnight Run poster there. That's funny because one of the things we landed on early on is Jimmy and Mike's [Ehrmantraut] (Jonathan Banks) relationship is going to be a lot like Charles Grodin and Robert De Niro in that movie. You've got the really fast-talking annoying guy, and you've got the super capable guy who is immediately impatient and annoyed with him.”

And then, as they're in the conversation about that, they start discussing, well, maybe what if we do an episode where the two of them are handcuffed to each other in the desert and they have to travel together to get out and survive. And it took them almost five seasons to do that, and they didn't do the handcuffs in the end, but you can really see, especially if you are a Midnight Run obsessive like me, yes, that is almost entirely their dynamic. Jimmy and Mike work well together, but they kind of can't stand each other and they're so temperamentally opposed to one another that it's a wonder that they interact as well as they do.

Another big picture question: Is there a movie that Better Call Saul, taken as a whole, resembles?

Maybe it is The Godfather. You've got this guy who sort of comes from crime, although he's the one who put himself into a world of crime and he has this chance to get out and sort of do the right thing. And he keeps saying, I want to go legitimate, I want to do this. Then circumstances, to a degree, but also his own nature keep pulling him back in every time he thinks he's out. So he can't stop himself from doing it, and eventually it chases everyone away and he is alone for a very long time. I mean, Jimmy pulls out of it. So in that way, it is not The Godfather at all. He doesn't have the Michael Corleone ending. He sort of decides to accept justice for his sins. But there's definitely a lot of that in there. And if that's the one, it's interesting because that's the very first thing he ever talks about with Walt.

Alan Sepinwall is Rolling Stone’s chief TV critic. His other books include Breaking Bad 101, TV (The Book) with Matt Zoller Seitz, The Sopranos Sessions with Matt Zoller Seitz, and The Revolution Was Televised: How The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Lost, and Other Groundbreaking Dramas Changed TV Forever. He also publishes the newsletter What’s Alan Watching?