I asked Sutherland if he remembers the beginning of the show, how much smaller the stakes were then, and if it was possible to get back to something like that. During that first day, Jack was fighting bureaucracy and hiding an affair; eight seasons later, he’s tractor-flipping his enemies and breaking the necks of others between his legs. Not everyone was a fan of those final seasons where the action had been ratcheted up so high that most of it was implausible. Sutherland laughed, because he’s been working out for the past five months to avoid coming back as “Old Jack Bauer.” “As one gets older, you start to panic about these things,” he said. But to the point, he said, he does remember those early seasons quite fondly.
“Remember that episode in the first season when Jack was held up in that little construction shack because he can’t get outside? The whole episode, he’s in there. It was awesome,” he recalled. “Later on, Howard and I used to sit and drink and go, ‘I remember when it was small, man. When we were doing the drama, the stuff that made people feel.’ We’d lament over that, and by the end of it, we’d be like, ‘So, we’re gonna blow up that family, right?’ ‘Yeah. Probably. I can’t think of anything else to do.’ It made me laugh.”
“But just because we’re starting out big this time, it doesn’t mean that it can’t descend into something really intimate and heavy,” Sutherland continued. “The desire, especially this time, is to get back to that very personal first season.”
Kiefer also talks about the movie being “locked where it is” for now – since 24 is a FOX license, he obviously cannot pitch it to other competing movie studios. It sounds like he’s simply waiting for an executive shakeup at 20th Century FOX. Check out the full interview over at Vulture.