AVC: The typical TV thing to do would be to devote a whole hour to backstory. Were you ever tempted to show more of Gus’ life?
VG: Well, Gus—and I suppose any man of mystery—is interesting for being mysterious. And there’s always this desire on the part of the viewer to want to know more about any given man of mystery. But the more layers of the onion you peel back, the less mystery remains, so there’s always this tension between wanting to reveal more and wanting to maintain mystery. So to that end, what we arrived at after much discussion was this idea: “What is it that saves Gus Fring’s life in this scene?” It’s the fact that Don Eladio, the cartel kingpin, knows who Gus is. He knows his true identity. And certainly the next question is, “What is Gus’ true identity? What’s his dark secret from his past?” We went around and around on that and ultimately decided, “Hey, in Pulp Fiction we never did find out what was in the briefcase that John Travolta and Sam Jackson were carrying. Why do we need to learn here who Gus really was in the past? Maybe it’s really interesting if we let the audience decide for themselves.”
AVC: How do you figure out when a certain amount of ambiguity is too much? You have to pin some things down.
VG: Too much or too little ambiguity, like most things, is in the eye of the beholder. It’s the old thing about pornography: “I don’t know how to define it, but I know it when I see it.” We just do a gut check, my writers and myself. And sometimes, it certainly goes without saying, it depends on the viewer. I’m sure very often we leave them with too much ambiguity. We seldom leave anyone with not enough ambiguity. But mystery is a good spice for our stew, as it were, and we do our best to spice it just right, and not over-salt. And we always talk in the writers’ room about “mysterious versus confusing.” Mystery is good; confusion is bad. Sometimes, if you squint, they can seem like one and the same, but they’re really not at all. Confusion usually derives from a lack of internal logic. It derives from characters who suddenly stop behaving in recognizable ways. And mystery is just a lack of illumination. So we think a lot about mystery versus confusion, and we always strive for the former, not the latter.