Vince Gilligan revealed that the iconic machine gun scene from Breaking Bad was not planned and called it one of his 'dumbest' ideas.
Breaking Bad is an iconic series in every way. The show has some of the most critically acclaimed episodes, and every detail in the show is put there intentionally. There are several reasons why the series is so highly rated, ranging from the impeccable performances to an excellently written story, and a premise that has its audience hooked.
While every plot in the show ended up paying off in some way or another, it would seem that not all of them were planned. During an interview, Vince Gilligan, the creator of the series, revealed that one storyline was not thought through when they introduced it in the final season.
Vince Gilligan once gave an interview with Variety, where he talked about many of his ongoing projects and his most iconic work of all time, Breaking Bad. Speaking about the latter, he revealed key details of the final season and one of the most iconic foreshadowings of all time with a single machine gun. It would seem that the firearm ended up giving the creators of the show a lot of trouble for one reason.
“The biggest single fear we had was what to do with that damn machine gun. At the beginning of the final run of 16 episodes, we had Walt buy a machine gun in the trunk of a Cadillac. That was the thing I remember freaking us out the most because we did that, I committed to that.”
At the beginning of the season, Walter White goes and buys an M60 machine gun, and not much is seen of it afterwards; until the last episode of the series.
While the gun holds a lot of significance in the final episode, Gilligan revealed that they had no idea about what they were going to do with the gun. The firearm was just added to the plot for the sake of it.
“One of the dumbest things I’ve ever done in my career was committing to the idea of Walter White buying a machine gun when we did not know what he was going to do with it. We had no clue.
There were literally months on end when I was completely freaked out.”
The creators thought that they could do something with it eventually. However, inspiration was not coming to them about what could be done. Gilligan revealed that this addition was one of the dumbest decisions he had ever taken, and it ate away at him throughout the making of the final season.
Although the machine gun brought Vince Gilligan a lot of stress, it ended up being one of the most well-executed moments of foreshadowing in the entire series. During the final season of Breaking Bad, fans could make some predictions here and there to try and understand how the series would end.
After all that Walter White had done, one thing was evident when they were going into the final; He was not going to be coming out of it unscathed. However, the way that the series executed and foreshadowed his passing was truly excellent. Using the machine gun as the main object for his demise, Walter dies after accidentally killing himself from the gun while killing Jack Welker and his gang.
“We’d be in the writers room’ for a full day, and I’d be slowly banging my head against the wall — not enough to hurt myself but just enough to jar the ideas loose.
And everybody was kind of worried about me. Once we figured out this machine gun, that was when the dam broke and things started slowly to click together.”
Knowing that one of the best-executed moments of foreshadowing was an accident, makes the entire scene have so much more meaning. Gilligan went on to reveal in the interview that they had been trying to figure out what to do with the gun for months.
However, once they got it, they knew that they had struck gold.
