Spoilers ahead for Better Call Saul season 6
Better Call Saul hired a real dance troupe for season 6's opening flashforward scene. After a long hiatus due to the pandemic and star Bob Odenkirk's on-set heart attack, the Breaking Bad prequel series finally returned to AMC earlier this week for its sixth and final season with a two-episode premiere. Picking up immediately where season 5's finale left off, Nacho flees the scene where the failed assassination attempt against Lalo occurred, as the menacing Cartel member begins to plot his revenge against Gus Fring.
Outside the Cartel storylines, Jimmy and Kim move forward with their plan to sabotage Howard Hamlin. Before the season premiere gets into all these storylines, it begins with a flashforward scene, which is business as usual for Better Call Saul. Instead of opening with a black-and-white sequence set in the future Gene Takavic timeline as each past season has, the season 6 premiere breaks this tradition and takes viewers on a Saul Goodman house tour set shortly after he disappears to Omaha in Breaking Bad. The scene sees movers seize Saul's property and haul it out to dumpsters and moving trucks.
In an interview with IndieWire, episode 1's cinematographer, Marshall Adams, shared some details about how the opening scene was created. One of the most notable takeaways from the conversation was that the episode's director Michael Morris and assistant director Rich Sickler had the idea to hire a real dance troupe to play the movers for the scene, which they rehearsed for an entire day before shooting. Read what Adams shared below:
[Director] Michael [Morris] and our first AD Rich Sickler had this idea about using a dance troupe for that sequence. So those are all members of a single dance troupe and they basically were keeping time. We rehearsed for an entire Sunday, getting all of those shots exactly right before the whole crew came in on Monday, and we started actually doing it on Monday and Tuesday. They were laid out to the beat, to the moment, just exactly how Michael wanted them.
Even though it features no dialogue or known characters, season 6's opening flashforward conveys a lot of emotion as it plays out with a certain melancholic and balletic quality. This was certainly not accidental considering that they tapped actual dancers to play the moving crew. This kind of visual storytelling, creative cinematography, and precise planning has been a hallmark of this universe since it began with Breaking Bad and has continued with Better Call Saul and even the spinoff film El Camino. Many of these projects have even maintained much of the same crew, with Adams working on all three of them.
Since season 6's two-episode premiere aired this past Monday, this opening flashforward has been one of the most discussed aspects of either episode. It's chock-full of details and references to past seasons of Better Call Saul, such as the tequila stopper from the season 2 premiere. Saul's home might even contain some hints regarding Kim's eventual fate in Better Call Saul.
Source: IndieWire