'El Camino' Details: Vince Gilligan Calls The Movie A "Closed-Ended Story", Here's Where It Will Play In Theaters
Last November, we exclusively told you that Vince Gilligan's Breaking Bad movie would feature the return of Aaron Paul and be about what happens to Jesse Pinkman after the series finale. Since then, Gilligan has done a masterful job of keeping the plot details vague and not giving anything away, but a new report has some El Camino details, including that it's a "closed-ended story" and that it features more than 10 characters from Breaking Bad.
Plus: Netflix is giving the movie a limited theatrical release, and you can find out if it'll play in a city near you below.
The Hollywood Reporter spoke with Gilligan and Paul for a detailed piece about the making of the movie, which filmed in secret and features ten returning characters from the Emmy-winning drama series. We already knew about Charles Baker's Skinny Pete, who was the subject of the film's first teaser trailer, but THR also reports that Matt Jones's Badger, Jesse's other druggie buddy, is also coming back.
The rest of the returning characters have not been named yet, but the options are plentiful – including those who didn't survive the end of the series. The Fleetwood Bounder RV where Jesse cooked meth with his former high school teacher Walter White was reportedly seen in New Mexico while the movie was secretly filming, so there's a possibility we're going to get a flashback featuring Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston.
The official description of the film from Netflix simply reads, "In the wake of his dramatic escape from captivity, Jesse must come to terms with his past in order to forge some kind of future." We weren't sure how much time has elapsed between the series finale and the beginning of the movie, but this THR piece says the film "picks up the story moments later." On top of that, the report says that "most of the 50-day shoot happened in the same Albuquerque locations where Breaking Bad is set," and there are some out of state locations as well. So it sounds like even if Jesse traveled to the other side of the world after escaping from that Nazi camp, he may get pulled back to where it all started.
Gilligan explained that the movie was designed specifically with the Breaking Bad audience in mind:
"If, after 12 years, you haven't watched Breaking Bad, you're probably not going to start now. If you do, I hope that this movie would still be engaging on some level, but there's no doubt in my mind that you won't get as much enjoyment out of it. We don't slow down to explain things to a non-Breaking Bad audience. I thought early on in the writing of the script, 'Maybe there's a way to have my cake and eat it too. Maybe there's a way to explain things to the audience.' If there was a way to do that, it eluded me."
"Part of what excited me about doing this was it was a movie, a closed-ended story of about two hours," he said, implying that this could be a definitive end to Jesse Pinkman's story.
As for Paul, he initially wondered if returning to the role that made him famous was a good idea, but trusted that Gilligan had a good enough reason to tell this story:
"I really loved Jesse. I knew him better than anyone, but it was a big weight off of my shoulders to hang up the cleats and walk away. I thought it was goodbye, and I was OK with that...I'm like everybody else on the planet — I think Vince and the rest of the writers really nailed the landing with the ending of Breaking Bad, and why mess with that? But it's Vince we're talking about. I would follow Vince into a fire. That's how much I trust the man. I would do anything that he asked me to."
El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie debuts on Netflix on October 11, 2019, but it'll also be playing in theaters in the following cities (via Mashable):
Albuquerque
Ann Arbor
Asheville
Atlanta
Athens
Austin
Bakersfield
Baltimore
Boston
Chapel Hill
Chicago
Cleveland
Columbus, OH
Concord, NH
Dallas
Denver
Des Moines
El Paso
Eugene
Fort Collins
Fresno
Houston
Ithaca
Indianapolis
Kansas City
Las Vegas
Lexington
Los Angeles
Lubbock
Miami
Milwaukee
Minneapolis
Missoula
Monterey
New Braunfels
New Orleans
New York
Norfolk
Omaha
Palm Desert
Phoenix
Portland
Portsmouth
Raleigh
Richmond
Salem
Salt Lake City
San Antonio
San Francisco
San Jose
Santa Barbara
Santa Fe
Santa Rosa
Sebastopol
Seattle
Spokane
Springfield, MO
St. Louis
Tucson
Tulsa
Washington, DC
You can buys tickets at ElCaminoBreakingBadMovie.com.