El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie Is Only Two-Thirds Of The Original Cut
Jesse Pinkman's post-Breaking Bad journey was almost a heck of a lot longer.
In a recent sitdown with Collider, Aaron Paul — the star of El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie — revealed that the finished film had been pared down from a cut that ran a whopping three hours. Be advised that minor spoilers for El Camino follow.
Paul's jaw-dropping revelation came in response to a simple question about whether there were any scenes deleted from El Camino, as virtually every movie ever made has a scene or two which end up on the cutting room floor. The actor readily offered up the insight that, yes, the flick did have a number of scenes cut — scenes that comprised a significant portion of its run time.
"You know what, about 30% of the movie was cut," Paul said matter-of-factly, prompting the interviewer's jaw to actually hit the floor. "The original cut was about three hours."
Paul went on to describe how, when he saw El Camino for the first time, he had an understandably mixed reaction. "When I first saw it, I was like, 'Ah! This is so beautiful, but... where's the other part of the movie?!' You know? And [writer/director Vince Gilligan was] like, "I don't wanna bore people.' I go, 'Vince! People want more! Like, more is more in this situation... with that said, I think what we have is great."
Paul then fielded a question about the nature of the cut scenes, and specifically, if there were any actual storylines that didn't make it into the final cut of El Camino. Surprisingly, the answer was no: "It was just kind of shoe leather, just kind of scenes along the way," the actor said. "Some scenes were condensed. There was a pretty serious thing that was cut, that was actually the very first thing that Vince wrote when he was writing this film... It wasn't the first part of the movie, it was just the first thing that he wrote, but he decided to cut it. And I won't tell you what that was, but... we actually didn't even end up shooting it, it was just cut from the script."
Will we ever see an extended cut of El Camino?
The fact that there exists a good solid hour of scenes from El Camino that we didn't get to see raises an obvious question: will Gilligan ever put together a Director's Cut? Well, according to Paul, the real question is whether we'll ever get to see it, because it absolutely already exists.
"There's another cut out there, so maybe, you know, I can convince him to release it," Paul said. "There's a lot of stuff that landed on film... and a cut that I actually never even saw, the initial cut, the three-hour long cut. But, you know..." The actor then rapped on the arm of his chair and addressed the camera directly, saying, "Come on, Vince."
Yes, Vince, we have to agree... come on.We're certainly not going to complain that you saw fit to give us two additional hours of Breaking Bad six years after the end of the series, and in our opinion, El Camino deserves all of the critical accolades and love from the fandom that it's getting. But if you're asking us if we would have preferred to have 50% more extra Breaking Bad, we're going to have to go ahead and say "Yes, of course." Actually, if this were an in-person conversation, we would have shouted those words loudly enough to make you back slowly away, with your hands raised defensively in front of you.
Thanks to a separate interview Paul has done while making the El Camino promotional rounds, we actually have an idea as to the substance of a small portion of the cut footage in question: a lead-in to the closing flashback, in which Jesse remembers a long-ago conversation with his late girlfriend Jane (Krysten Ritter).
"It's so funny," the actor recalled during a chat with Entertainment Weekly. On the day [the scene was shot], Vince realized — he's setting up a shot, [and] he's like, 'There are so many damn shots of you in a car! We gotta get you out of your car.' So it starts with us driving, and then the car breaks down and then it cuts to me on the phone with AAA, [with Jesse] trying to pretend like he knows why the car broke down to have a chance at maybe slightly impressing Jane. And then it cuts to him just walking over and sitting down next to Jane, and he's telling her what he feels about her, and they had this back-and-forth. And then it cuts into what was left [in the final cut]."
This would have been a nice little character touch, a callback to the early days of Breaking Bad when Jesse's biggest concern was trying to impress a girl he liked. We're sure there are plenty more moments like this in all of that footage cut from El Camino — and we're thinking that if Netflix has any interest in, say doubling their viewership numbers for the movie, they may want to get on the horn to Gilligan about making that extended cut available, because it's safe to say that every last Breaking Bad fan would be on board.