4 Lessons from Better Call Saul Creator Peter Gould
Do a lot of work, make a lot of mistakes, and learn from them.
“What problem does becoming Saul Goodman solve?”
This was the conversation between Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan as they wrapped up Breaking Bad.
“We started asking ourselves… what was this guy’s background, where’s he from, how do you become Saul Goodman?,” says Gould.
Here are four lessons from my chat with Peter Gould.
1. You have to solve the unsolvable.
“In a lot of writing, you set a problem for yourself that seems unsolvable, then you have to figure out what you’re going to do with it. Saul is now Jimmy and he’s not Saul-ish, maybe he’s a little Saul, but what’s his journey going to be? But, not Mike. We had Mike working in a parking lot booth, but how does he end up being the right-hand-man for the biggest drug kingpin in Albuquerque? That was an interesting, dramatic problem,” adds Gould.
2. Understand your creative influences.
According to Vince Gilligan, after they finished writing Breaking Bad, he noticed an array of influence from John Wayne’s 1956 Western, The Searchers. For Better Call Saul, Gould says they didn’t bring up comparisons in the room, but in hindsight, he was thinking about The Third Man, a mystery from 1949.
“I was thinking about all of the endings in movies where there’s a romance, a little touch of ambiguity of where it’s going to go. Some of my favorite endings of movies from the 1970s. The Graduate. The Candidate. Where it’s satisfying, but there’s a little of an open-endedness to it. That’s special to me and we were reaching for that.”
3. Find your tribe of battle buddies.
As for writers trying to break in today, Gould encourages, “I’m not great with advice, but I would say try to find people who love the same thing that you love. Watch movies with them. Share your writing with them. We’re in a special time, in a lot of ways, because you can make something on your own that other people can watch.”
4. Understand that mistakes are necessary.
“Do a lot of work, make a lot of mistakes, and learn from them. That’s maybe the most difficult thing, to learn from the pain, be tenacious to make a living, but also be tenacious to get good at this stuff, to have your work come anywhere near what your hopes for the work are. And, finally, take pleasure in doing it because that’s ultimately — the doing of it — what has to be the biggest pleasure, not the stuff that you might imagine comes with doing it.”
Watch our exclusive training on Peter Gould, which includes clips from my interview with the prolific screenwriter:
