Kiefer Sutherland has discussed how different his experience was of filming 24 as a twelve-episode mini-run as opposed to a full-length season.
The show returns tonight (May 5) for 'Live Another Day', and in an interview with Variety the Jack Bauer actor said the story is now much more "condensed".
"It's a two-fold thing," he said. "For the writers, to be very candid with you, if we ever ran into a hiccup in the season it was usually around episode 13 or 14 when we had to make that shift to get to the last eight episodes. That was always the rough spot for us.
"We don't have that situation now. The story can be more condensed, more focussed and each episode more energised."
Kiefer Sutherland (WENN)
He added: "The writers are given a lot of latitude that they never had before. For Jon [Cassar, director] and I, it was really funny — after the first couple of episodes I told him 'This is almost done.' And he went, 'No, no, it's not.' And I went 'Trust me, it's almost done.'"
Asked if the change affected his personal performance, he explained: "We were so trained in the past that we wouldn't even start counting where we were until after episode 13 or 14. Now, when we finished episodes seven and eight, (Cassar) looked at me and said 'Oh my god, we're almost done.'
"Somehow it's been easier to focus when we could really see the light at the end of the tunnel from the get-go. We were really acutely aware of everything that was happening from scene to scene. … It also made us try to figure out how on earth we did eight full seasons of 24 episodes!"
He continued: "Everything else I'm watching are shows that make 10-13 episodes a year. I remember when friends of mine on other shows would talk about their schedule, I would say 'You're not allowed to talk to me about that.' It has made me have even more profound respect for Howard and the writers who just did such a prolific amount of work and did such an amazing job with it."
This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.
