‘Better Call Saul’ Executive Producer Melissa Bernstein Discusses Kim’s “Dark Side” and Breaks Down Goodman-Hamlin Title Fight

[This story contains spoilers for Better Call Saul.]

Better Call Saul executive producer Melissa Bernstein has had a decorated career as a producer, shepherding some of this generation’s most critically acclaimed dramas including Breaking Bad, Halt and Catch Fire and Rectify. In 2020, Bernstein took on a whole new challenge and directed one of the most explosive episodes in the Breaking Bad canon, season five’s “JMM.”

Well, on Monday, she returned to the director’s chair in order to send Lalo to Germany and also stage a boxing match between off-and-on rivals Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) and Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian). For the sequence involving fisticuffs, Bernstein admits that there was some worry about Odenkirk since he had just spent two years training to become a John Wick-level assassin in Universal Pictures’ Nobody. 

“Because Bob had done so much training for Nobody, we were afraid his training would keep coming through and that he’d have to fight his every instinct to be this really coordinated, really lethal person. But he was great,” Bernstein tells The Hollywood Reporter.

In a recent conversation with THR, Bernstein also discussed Kim’s (Rhea Seehorn) dwindling morality and her “shameful” behavior in regard to her former paralegal, Viola (Keiko Agena).

Since Breaking Bad, you’ve been regarded as the de facto showrunner if Vince Gilligan or Peter Gould aren’t on set. Did your urge to direct come from all those days on set where you observed and absorbed the process?

Yeah, that’s a true statement. I’ve had the privilege of watching so many talented directors take on Saul, Breaking Bad and the other shows I’ve been lucky enough to produce. So I think it did make me want to give that job a try. It’s an intimidating position to be in, but I did feel like I had benefited from all of those cumulative experiences. I also know the show very, very well from a story and character standpoint, and I was eager to give it a try to make myself a better producer, too. Actually being in those shoes is useful to being a producer.

The writer-director pairings behind each standout episode are often reteamed the following season. For example, you and Alison Tatlock made a phenomenal episode [“JMM”] together last season, and now you’ve reunited for this most recent episode, “Black and Blue.” Of course, you also helped hire Alison on Halt and Catch Fire before eventually bringing her over to Saul. So how much strategy or calculation is actually involved in these pairings?

Thank you for the very kind words about the Tatstein-Bernlock collaboration. (Laughs.) Yeah, there is absolutely some [strategy]. We want to keep our senior writers in the writers’ room as long as we can, so that often means putting their directing assignments later on. We have to be strategic about giving their episodes enough space so they can fulfill their on-set duties and their upcoming script duties. We also had two of our actors direct this season [Rhea Seehorn and Giancarlo Esposito], and we tried to find episodes where they weren’t as heavily involved as others and could focus. There’s the writer-director pairings, but there’s also the editor pairings. So I think there’s a lot of calculus that goes into it. Luckily, on our show, there isn’t a camp who can’t work with another camp, so it’s not like we have to avoid things. But we always try to make choices that are to the show and the individual episode’s advantage.

Was the teaser a bona fide acrylic embedment process? 

It’s not exact, but it’s very much based on fact. We based the visuals and the writing on a video tutorial to see how it would work, and then we looked at how to create all of those different stages for camera, with our department heads, Mark Hansen [props] and Werner Hahnlein [special effects]. So we tried to create our best, most cinematic version of that because we couldn’t be true to every single stage of the process, just the basic idea of the process.

Who’s the artist behind that gorgeous needle drop?

Ooh! It’s Pink Martini & The Von Trapps’ “In Stiller Nacht.”

Is the oner at Los Pollos Hermanos supposed to be an extension of what Rhea Seehorn did in the previous episode at Fring’s house? Both shots put us in Gus’ paranoid shoes.

I don’t think it was an intentional extension of Rhea’s choice, specifically, but we’re absolutely trying to put the audience in Gus’ head. It’s an uncomfortable moment for that character, a character that we often see in control. As we were shifting gears between Gus’ office and the public-facing kitchen space of his restaurant, I wanted us to feel like we were cruising with him in this place where he’s the boss and everyone looks up to him and everybody worries about what he thinks of them.

If I recall correctly, the real location for Saul Goodman’s office became a sports bar in the years since Breaking Bad. So did you redress that real exterior and then use a different location for the interior?

Over the years, it did become a couple of bars in that strip mall, but when we went back there, the space was available again. So we did shoot that portion in that specific office space, which was really exciting for us. We did have to make some changes to the exterior because the bar created this elaborate outside patio. So our locations team and our construction team had to conspire with Jim Powers, our line producer, and figure out how to get rid of that with the property owner. So we were very lucky that we were able to get everybody on board with our desire to make that space what it once was, but the compromise was that we had to shoot quickly, which meant we had to shoot out of order. So Rhea and I shot our [office] work in an expedited fashion, and perhaps there’s work to come that may also have been expedited if it were set in that location.

The Goodman-Hamlin title fight. What was the process behind it?

We haven’t done scenes like this before, so there wasn’t really a playbook for it. Sometimes, there’s a playbook already for something like the teaser because of our meth-making montages. But here, we hadn’t done anything quite like this, and it was a really fun challenge. So I talked to Peter and Alison about creating an act structure for the fight and seeing if we could all agree to the same kind of journey for the fight.

And then I brought that idea to Al Goto, our stunt coordinator, and with Peter’s blessing, I brought Luis Moncada, who plays one of the [Salamanca] Cousins, on board as a fight coordinator. So I talked to Al and Luis about how I saw the fight, and then I got their feedback on what kind of actions would be involved in that. And then they did video recordings, first with doubles, and once we felt like we were on good footing, we brought the actors [Bob Odenkirk and Patrick Fabian] into the process to see what ideas they had and what didn’t work for them. And then Al and Luis started training with them.

There was a small fear that these athletic guys wouldn’t want to look silly or unathletic, and of course, those were unfounded fears because they were totally in it to represent their characters to the fullest extent and to play the story to the fullest extent. Because Bob had done so much training for Nobody, we were afraid his training would keep coming through and that he’d have to fight his every instinct to be this really coordinated, really lethal person. But he was great. We did the choreography in stages, we showed them tape and then they practiced. Part of that process, too, was making sure it was safe, and making sure that people knew when to expect a fist to fly.

Jonathan Banks is a boxing enthusiast; he’s even pitched boxing-related story points in the past. Did he express any of his faux outrage over Bob and Patrick getting a boxing scene?

(Laughs.) That’s so funny, but I don’t think he did. Knowing Jonathan, it is surprising that he didn’t shake his fist at me for that reason, but I did have to call him to say, “Hey, is there any way you would be willing to scrunch your whole body up into the trunk of a car and have that car drive you into a garage?” So I was very delighted and appreciative that he was willing to do that for me.

To achieve that shot, you fastened a camera to the garage door, right?

Yes, we did! It was a very tight space, and we also wanted to show that we hadn’t done some kind of a Texas swap. Mike really does have to bear the indignity of riding in the trunk. My husband is a camera operator, and he helped me engineer that. And then we brought that to [DP] Marshall Adams, and at first, he was like, “What?” But then he was like, “This is great!” and he made it all happen.

When Kim says, “You know what’s coming next,” is she anticipating Hamlin to start tracking them with a PI? She probably knows Hamlin’s playbook at this point. 

I don’t think she knows the specifics there, but yes, she’s speaking about Hamlin and that he’s on to them. I think they understand that’s a possibility with Hamlin, but the plot that they’ve created here is really undermining Hamlin’s credibility regardless. I also think she’s speaking more globally: “If you’re going to make an omelet, you’re going to have to break some eggs, and the egg-breaking is not going to be pretty. We have to buckle up and prepare for some unpleasantness to come our way.”

So it sounds like they were expecting Hamlin to catch on in the midst of it all.

Yes, I think that’s true. They’re accounting for a lot of different scenarios, and that’s one of them, for sure. 

I feel bad for Viola (Keiko Agena) since she praised Kim at a time when Kim was just pumping her for information about a judge. Was the get-together completely artificial in Kim’s mind?

Well, I think there is some genuine affinity tied into the scene, but that’s what makes it so dastardly. If she didn’t care for Viola, then it would just be very clear cut, but this is a very dark side of Kim. We’ve seen her navigate some unsavory personalities and glean information when it’s advantageous to her and Jimmy, but to do that to a character that we all like as an audience, somebody who is professing how much she admires Kim, is very, very low. And to do what she’s doing and to do it in such a friendly, disarming way is pretty shameful. That’s becoming more and more clear as these guys get deeper into the scam. Innocent people are going to get hurt or be taken advantage of, and that’s a very difficult line for any actor to try to work through and play. So we definitely talked a lot about the reality of the situation. Jimmy and her need this information, and this is the easiest, cleanest way to get it. But it’s pretty ugly.

Was recreating Gus’ unfinished super lab a more laborious set build than most?

It is an extremely complicated set to put together. It’s something we had to work around, and that’s a scene that I shot several weeks later because the set wasn’t going to be ready. Even though we knew it was coming in 605, we weren’t going to be able to find enough stage space and the team wasn’t going to have enough time to put it up properly.

Breaking Bad visited Germany in season five’s “Madrigal,” but you were tasked with showing much more of Germany in this episode. So how did you create Lalo’s (Tony Dalton) European vacation?

We had to find a bar setting and an interior and an exterior for Margarethe’s house that felt like they were outside of our Albuquerque, New Mexico world. We knew visual effects would be some part of it, but our hope is always that we can start with the practical and then embroider on the practical to make it something special and new. So we started looking after 602, and part of it was driving around the city just to see what stuck out until we found a really unusual house. And the modern interior was perfect. Even the size and scale of the appliances felt part of the European aesthetic. And then our production design and set decoration team made it even more specific.

And then we had to find the set within the set, Werner’s study, so that it felt of a piece with the house and of a piece with Werner Ziegler [Rainer Bock], this unusual engineer. So a lot of specific thought went into every single item that populated that set. Andrea Sooch, who plays Margarethe, speaks German so she brought an authenticity to the episode with the European feel that she has, and that young couple in the bar were also true German speakers.

That entire sequence gave me flashbacks to Todd Alquist’s (Jesse Plemons) unannounced visit to Andrea Cantillo’s (Emily Rios) house on Breaking Bad, so thank you for sparing Margarethe Ziegler.

See, when Alison and I are in charge here, everything’s fine! It was a flirty romance. That’s all. (Laughs.)

Interview edited for length and clarity.

Better Call Saul is currently airing on AMC.