Breaking Bad Nearly Featured A Daring Helicopter Raid At A Railyard [Exclusive]
There are few hours of television more heart-poundingly tense than the "Breaking Bad" train robbery episode "Dead Freight." When I saw it for the first time, a relative came home to find me excitedly pacing around the living room, trying to shake off the massive adrenaline rush that came from watching Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) pull off a seamless methylamine heist, only to have the moment undercut by rogue associate Todd's (Jesse Plemons) last-minute decision to murder a child who witnessed the crime. "Dead Freight" was thrilling a decade ago and it's still thrilling today. Somehow, though, I don't think it would've worked as well if it had involved a helicopter and a big vacuum hose.
Series creator Vince Gilligan spoke about the episode on the "Breaking Bad Insider" podcast after it aired, and was one of several people involved in the series who just sat down with /Film's Devin Meenan to look back at the final season a decade later. As Meenan's in-depth oral history reminds us, there was originally a much wackier plan in place for the train heist episode – one that seems like it would've been more laughable than pulse-pounding.
'Like a giant mosquito'
"We had an idea we threw around for a while that we were gonna have a big Sikorsky skycrane helicopter, the kind the firefighters use," Gilligan shared on the companion podcast, adding that the plan was for the copter to feature "a giant elephant's trunk sort of nozzle that hangs down underneath." The plan, according to the filmmaker, was for one person involved in the heist to open the lid of a tanker kept in a rail yard so the other could suck up the rare meth-making ingredient through the tube "like a giant mosquito."
The idea sounds laughable (in fact, you can hear another participant laughing in the background of the podcast), but Gilligan says executive producer Michelle MacLaren was kind enough to take it seriously when he presented it. "It is a credit to Michelle and to this amazing crew that when I pitched that to her, that she didn't just laugh and say, 'Are you out of your freaking mind?'"
Personally, this visual reminds me less of a prestige crime drama and more of Noo-Noo the vacuum sucking up custard in "Teletubbies," so I'm not sure I would've been as level-headed about it as MacLaren. Then again, "Breaking Bad" had already made plenty of risky moves that paid off before this one; it's possible that a helicopter heist would've been just as gratifying as the version of "Dead Freight" we ended up with.
Dead Freight was a challenge to film
"We spent an afternoon looking into that," Gilligan shared on the "Breaking Bad Insider" podcast, but it wasn't meant to be. As Meenan's oral history points out, the team instead ended up opting for an SFR 07 locomotive, which they shot on the Santa Fe Southern Railway near where the famous "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" train robbery scene was filmed.
Episode writer-director George Mastras spoke with /Film for the retrospective, and described a 10-day shoot (episodes typically took seven to eight days) that included four full days devoted to the train sequences alone. MacLaren provided second unit footage for the episode, while Gilligan and his team tried to find the safest way to shoot around an 800-foot train in a blackout area, where it would be hard to call for help if anything went wrong. As for one of the episode's most exhilarating shots, in which Paul's Jesse lays perfectly still, breathing heavily while the train moves over him, the team used a classic filmmaking solution to keep the actor safe: double exposure. Two separate shots of the scene were digitally combined in postproduction to make it look like the actor was really under a moving train.
You can find read more behind-the-scenes stories from the fifth season of "Breaking Bad" in /Film's new oral history of the show's epic sendoff.