Vince Gilligan found the very first idea for Breaking Bad, and recounts the awful pitch meeting he had with Sony.
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Gilligan was on a South by Southwest Film & TV Festival panel on March 14, titled Albuquerque Aftermath: From Breaking Bad to Pluribus. There, he spoke about his Sony pitch and revealed the first 9-word sentence that led to Breaking Bad.
“I found this old notepad in my office a few years back, and it was the very first idea for this,” he said. “And who knows where ideas come from? But it said: ‘Good guy does something bad to save his family.'”
Unfortunately, Vince Gilligan has little memories of the conception of Breaking Bad, but the notebook reveals that the show was written around this abstract plot idea.
After writing up the beginning of Breaking Bad, Gilligan went on to pitch the idea to Sony. Apparently, a top-executive who no longer works at Sony simply told Gilligan, “That’s the single worst idea I’ve ever heard.”
“To his credit, he’s a good man, and he acknowledged [his mistake later].”
Vince Gilligan Believes No One Deserves Credits For Ideas
Gilligan doesn’t remember where he got the idea for Breaking Bad from, but to him, it doesn’t matter. I mean, anyone can have an idea, it’s what you do with it, after all.
“The best thing to do is very quickly learn to not pay attention to whose ideas are whose,” he later said at the panel.
“I’m not keeping score in my head. The moments I’m the most proud in [my] shows, I don’t remember who [suggested the idea]. The best idea wins,” he continued.
“There’s a lot of ways to do this job, and we could be dictatorial, and that maybe works for some, but at the end of the day, I’m so proud of the work. We’re not curing cancer in our respective TV shows. There’s no reason for people not to enjoy coming to work. Once they get there, they’re going to work hard. But there’s no reason they have to make it tough on each other.”