Then there was the matter of the conditions-once again, this was filmed in the actual desert, and it was windy. “I tried different frosting and I couldn’t get that hard shadow, which I wanted Michael to walk through like this.” “That’s why we got the hard shadow,” Donachie says. They ultimately opted against frosting, going with clear glass, to execute this exact shot with the slit of light. “I remember Denise showing us a half dozen different kinds of glass to go in that slit window with different levels of frosting,” Gilligan says. (Plus: “It’s not quite as interesting.”) So the team built a window, high and short enough so he couldn’t escape, and wide enough to give the scene some brightness. Down to the choice of lighting-there’s a lamp on the nightstand, which would make illuminating the scene simple enough, but “would he have them on since he’s hiding?” Donachie posits. It’s that commitment to the real thing that gives this shot such a distinctively seedy, claustrophobic feel. There was really no way we could have shot inside the real room, so Denise Pizzini and Steve Brown, our production designer and our construction coordinator, built this room roughly based on the real rooms at the real motel.”
#MAIL CALL SEASON 1 WINDOWS#
“This is a pretty small room, but in the real motel, the room was half this size, and it had literally no windows on the back wall. “This location, this motel-obviously when you watch this episode, you see a real exterior motel,” Gilligan says of the location. Michael Mando’s Nacho hides out at a rundown motel in Mexico while on the run from the Salamanca gang, having just ratted Lalo out and (he thinks) facilitated his death.
He’s rehearsing their pending scheme to trick Howard’s associate, Cliff Main ( Ed Begley Jr.), into being suspicious of their main target. But in this case, as the camera zooms out, “It turns into this comedic frame,” Gilligan says: We see that Jimmy is actually at home, in the morning, with Kim eating breakfast cereal in the foreground. He’s spinning some kind of bleak, elaborate story. Gilligan had the idea to play with audience perceptions of Jimmy changing into the man we come to know in Breaking Bad. We have no idea where he is or who he’s talking to. Here, we see Jimmy in a shadowy tight frame, saying, “I was a hard worker…” surrounded by an out-of-focus white backdrop. It’s deliberately evocative of The Godfather’s first scene, which starts with the line “I believe in America” before revealing a tight close-up of undertaker Amerigo Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto) that very slowly zooms out. “Steal from the best.” It’s a line Gilligan tosses out a few times while discussing Better Call Saul, first with this opening shot from the episode, post-cold open.
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