Vince Gilligan has to be a huge film buff.

I read somewhere he based a lot of the lighting, especially season 5, on the godfather...how it made a lot of use of dark lighting. And I think it mentioned him trying to make every season darker than the one that preceded it. The godfather was apparently a major influence on season 5 though.

And i also remember reading that he viewed breaking bad as a modern day western, so that definitely was a huge influence.

I agree, he definitely knew his stuff. I'm sure there are tons of movies ive yet to see that ill probably be like 'thats where VG got that from' lol

That's nothing. How about Heat, Chinatown, Pulp Fiction, The Departed, Falling Down, Scarface, and many many others.

Gilligan:

"Film noir is a big influence: the classic noirs — I could watch The Maltese Falcon once a month, probably — as well as the Coen brothers contemporary ones as well."

"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. Every time it's on AMC, I tune in, which is crazy because I have all the Blu-rays. 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. 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.

"Kubrick’s one of my all-time favorites. The other great quote, that I use all the time from him, was somebody asked him, 'What about the space station, and using the Blue Danube throughout that sequence? Just genius! Why did you do it that way?' And Kubrick thought about it, and said, 'Showmanship.' It was my favorite answer of all time."

The French Connection, though I very much doubt it would qualify as ‘action’ with the young moviegoers of today. The chase scene in that film is as breathless and exciting as anything I’m seeing in 2015. And it’s real- no CGI!”

“I was thinking of William Friedkin and the way he shot The French Connection, that news gathering handheld [style]... not the caffeinated shit but the old Korean War combat photographers, the old newsreel guys who didn’t have the ability to carry a camera with them, so they held it as still as they humanly could and yet it still breathed. But I was thinking of Friedkin. I was thinking of Sergio Leone a lot...

"The French Connection... was definitely an influence for me on the pilot of Breaking Bad. It's another movie I could watch once a week for the rest of my life. It came out in 1971 but still, to my eyes, looks as fresh and original as anything being currently made. It does not ever feel dated, and I can't even figure out why that is, because it's very much a very specific time and place. What I took from it on Breaking Bad in the pilot was the stable handheld look... there's a newsreel-type feel to the photography. They shot it holding the cameras as steadily as they humanly could. There's always a bit of breathing, there's always a bit of life to these shots, not this kind of "let's whip the camera around like we're having a seizure" shit. There's restraint."

"Another influence was Bernardo Bertolucci, particularly his 1970 political assassination movie The Conformist. Gilligan said he particularly loved the way that movie tends to catch characters when they are alone in corners, a choice that increases the film’s sense of paranoia."

"It’s interesting that The Caine Mutiny came to us. It is indeed one of my favorite movies, and I’ve loved it ever since my dad introduced me to it when I was 8 or 10 years old. It was available to us because it is a Sony property, and when it became available to us, essentially for a song, I thought to myself, my God this is what he should be watching."

Your mother is a huge film buff.

I wonder if I'm alone in thinking that the opening scenes of episode 1 were an homage to the opening scenes of "2001 A Space Odyssey". The shots of distant scenery and also the pants flying up in the air.

(the pants in the air is similar to the bone flying up in 2001)

If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed. If you do...you are misinformed---Mark Twain