When ‘Breaking Bad’ was running on Netflix I was always a huge fan. I loved the lead characters, the plot, the darkness, the light, and the vehicles. Yet guess what, I never watched a single bloody episode! ‘WTF’ as you scratch your head in bewilderment. ‘You phoney, you fake! You bloody profiteering charlatan!’ Ok let me explain, bitch!
So, Vince Gilligan’s masterpiece ran from 2008 through until 2013 and my life was intense to put it politely. Trust me, I’m not asking you to grab your resin block and shine up your bow for me, there’s no sob story. The reality was I pretty much worked every hour possible and outside of that I was trying to put out fires, so TV took a back seat. It’s always been on my radar to take on and with how things have been over the past year or so I have really been able to relax and get stuck into some great TV.
I have been asked over the past few years if I intended to take it on and create a piece that showcased ‘Breaking Bad’ in my signature style. It was actually from creating ‘Petrolheads’ that gave me the inspiration of how I could bring this to life as that scene featured a number of vehicles gathered in a remote part of the desert and had a link to how Walter and Jesse would head out into the wilderness to ‘cook’! So that is where the concept started, and I am so pleased with how this piece has turned out.
In terms of the series and my ‘Petrolheads’ concept, there should be no clear link but if you look closely, you’ll see that the two scenes could be a mere turn of the head between them and I love that. Taking centre stage is the iconic ‘Bounder’ RV with its’ billowing blue crystal cloud rising upwards. What I love about the RV is it seemed to behave in line with the character’s luck at the time. It would choose not to start just at the time when it just bloody needed to and be a saviour on other occasions. Having owned a BMW M3 that I put over 160,000 miles on and been humiliated by the thing as well as saved, it just struck a chord.
The scene shows such a cracking range of vehicles and there is so much detail to seek out, some blatant whilst other references are harder to decipher. I was instantly hooked on this beast of a story, from when the theme music started it got me. It’s such a brilliant example of how a character can change through tragedy and turmoil, where that inner demon is woken. To do so much bad for so much good is so powerful, a classic example of how everyone has a dark side but not everyone can control it.
“I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really… I was alive.”
