Without Fear

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This week was The Whispered Mentions of 2018 Edition – here’s a sample:

“Listened to Bryan Cranston on the latest Nerdist and he mentioned two major things that stuck with me and made me think about story planning and creativity.

He mentioned that old chestnut that Aaron Paul’s Jesse Pinkman was only supposed to last a few episodes, he was Walter White’s plausible “in” to the world of meth. But then Paul slayed it in the role, and he got to stay.

And, that’s pretty cool, force of will, chemistry, and talent got me half a decade’s work, rather than just a few weeks.

But I got to thinking about what they did to the overall plan of the show for Vince Gilligan. Because the show is about Walter White breaking bad, but it’s also about Jesse Pinkman becoming unbreakable. That dual narrative is the entire heart of the show, and it clearly wasn’t there from the very start. Which is crazy, and kinda awesome.

And the other thing Cranston said was he worked with some professors to get into Walter’s head on that level, but he didn’t want to study cancer because he wanted to discover it with Walt, which is an insane idea, but is actually something I think rings true. I find I have to script a little to discover the characters and the world first, and it’s why characters start to break away from their plot outline because you’re now discovering the plot beats as they discover them, and seeing it as you better know them after inhabiting some page real estate with them.

Creating worlds and filling them with populations is some kind of wild alchemy, and I’ll always be wary of it.”

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