Everything You Need To Know About The Eye-Popping Opening Sequence In This Week’s ‘Better Call Saul’

This week’s Better Call Saul, “FiFi,” kept the heat on between Jimmy and Chuck, while Mike began to devise a plan for taking out Tio.

More than anything, though, the episode was all about that impressive opening sequence.

Regalo Helado

The opening border-crossing sequences was an oner — one long, uninterrupted shot. Watch it again and note how incredibly impressive that was.

A. Larysa Kondracki directed the uninterrupted four-and-a-half minute sequence. She pitched it, and the idea was that the oner would better suggest that the Regalo Helado had been completely searched, top to bottom.

B. Technically, there is one edit, in the oner, and on the Insider podcast, Vince Gilligan wouldn’t reveal where. If you look closely, however, there’s a moment before the truck’s door is opened where one of the border crossing officers walks right in front of the camera. That’s the cut.

The two shots that made up the oner were filmed at different times of the day (props to the color correction for matching them up, daylight-wise).

C. The production team had to design the entire border crossing (it was meant to look like the Saint Teresa Border Crossing). It was built out on the same airport used for the FiFi airplane sequence with Fudge.

D. Much of the border crossing was digitally created, though you wouldn’t know it. This is what it looked like before the digital additions.

E. The camera was on a crane — a Chapman Titan, a 20-foot high created in the 1950s that won an Academy Scientific & Engineering award. (The same type of crane was used in the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar!)

F. They did use a lot of real trucks, but beyond the blue semi tractor-trailer on the right, everything else was digitally created.

G. The opening sequence was inspired and influenced by the opening in the 1958 Orson Welles film, Touch of Evil, which also used a Chapman Titan crane and also took place at a border crossing.

H. A lot of times, the music supervisor will find a nice piece of pre-existing music for a particular scene, but this scene was so long that they worried any pre-existing music would get repetitive, so they had Dave Porter write and record a long, six-minute piece just for this scene.

The Doghouse

Elsewhere in the episode, we saw the return of the Doghouse, a popular eating establishment in both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Note the address:

We’d see that same 1216 again, later in the episode. (Hat Tip: Redditor BetterCallHank)

Mesa Verde

Ariel Levine, a writer’s assistant on the show, was responsible for putting together all those documents that Jimmy futzed with. They are impressively written and read like actual legal docs. You can read them all here (the link downloads a PDF file). Levine spent a weekend in a law library coming up with those.

FiFi

That B-29 is real, its actual name is FiFi, and it is the world’s last operating B-29, which dates back to World War II.

Fudge

A quick and interesting sidenote on Robert Grossman, who played Fudge. He auditioned to be in an early episode. He tried out to play one of the senior citizens on the bus that Jimmy stopped in the season’s second episode. He didn’t fit within that world, but they liked him so much that they basically created this entire scam around Grossman.

Nail Hose

So, what’s the nail hose that Mike created for? In all likelihood, he’ll use it next week at the border crossing to blow a hole in the tires of one of those Regalo Helado trucks in order to get revenge on Tio (and put him in prison). In fact, the title of next week’s episode is “Nailed,” and clearly, the drugs are in the tires (see, also, the mountain of replacement tires outside of the garage the truck went into).

Hat Tip: Better Call Saul Insider Podcast