'Better Call Saul' And 'Breaking Bad' Inspired By 'The Godfather,' Tom Ford Westerns

(Photo : Getty Images/Frederick M. Brown) L-R) Peter Gould, Bob Odenkirk, Vince Gilligan at the premiere of 'Better Call Saul' Season 2 on February 2, 2016 in Culver City, California.

"The Godfather" inspired "Better Call Saul."

"I don't know where to begin with 'The Godfather' except to say that's a movie I could watch pretty much every night for the rest of my life," Vince Gilligan, creator of "Better Call Saul" and "Breaking Bad," told Variety.

"Every time it's on AMC, I tune in, which is crazy because I have all the Blu-rays," Gilligan continued. "When I say 'The Godfather,' I'm talking about one and two. No offense to the third one, but I'm pretending it never happened. One and two, it's a crash course in storytelling. There's so much to be learned. It teaches you confidence in stillness and quietude."

He explained, "The cutting pattern and the composition of 'The Godfather' is so different than what typically is in vogue nowadays, where there's hypercaffeinated cutting that doesn't necessarily accomplish everything in story tones. Coppola had the confidence to hang back wide and not cut until it was damn well time to cut. 'The Godfather' teaches you restraint. We try to emulate that on 'Breaking Bad' and 'Better Call Saul.' We like to stay wide and keep the cutting patterns slow."

Also an inspiration for "Saul" were John Ford and Sergio Leone, directors of "The Searchers" and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," respectively.

"One of the things we both love about those movies is the characters have such recognizable silhouettes," Peter Gould, co-creator of "Saul" and "Breaking Bad," told Variety. "They are immediately distinguishable from each other and maybe even sometimes a little bigger than life. We reference the iconic cowboy quite a bit, but then there's this other kind of character you see in Westerns which is the tenderfoot from the East, the flimflam man or the snake-oil salesman. Jimmy McGill comes out to the West very much in the tradition of the guys with a covered wagon and a patent medicine show and the fast talker. He is the city slicker in this landscape full of cowboys."