Q&A with Joel Surnow, Robert Cochran
and Howard Gordon
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| 24 SEASON 3 Q&A with Joel Surnow, Robert Cochran and Howard Gordon |
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Continued from page 1 Are there any plans for 24 THE MOVIE and do you think it would work? SURNOW: We do. I think obviously you’d have to call it TWO (laughter) because it wouldn’t be a 24-hour movie. But it's something that we’ve talked about. COCHRAN: Yeah, you’d have to cover the exact amount of time as the movie. You wouldn’t do 24 hours in that movie. SURNOW: It may be a TWO movie. Yeah, two hours of real time. But there’s nothing planned. 24 causes more problems than other TV shows. In TV from spring to autumn it's just one day. So how do you solve these problems? COCHRAN: Well, that was one thing that actually kept us in L.A., because there was a lot of talk when we were first doing the show, should we go somewhere like Toronto or Vancouver? And you really can’t, for that reason. You have to show in a temperate area that at least looks on screen like the temperature’s relatively constant all year. Which limits you pretty much to L.A. and San Diego, at least in this country. And that was a strength because the weather changes too rapidly in a lot of other places. So does it happen that you have to have a delay of three days because it's raining all the time? SURNOW: No, we usually bring things indoors. COCHRAN: Yeah, we can work around that as long as it’s just rain, usually. Do you have any consulting work in order to know things about biological weapons? GORDON: Bob’s assistant is our… COCHRAN: My assistant calls CDC, or she calls the FBI or the CIA or whomever. We don’t honestly do an enormous amount of research. We want to keep it seeming realistic, but we’re more interested in the drama than in the accuracy of the tale. But in order to keep it from going too far off the rails, we do make two or three calls per episode, on what would really happen here, how does this work. And we try to keep it… GORDON: We create the illusion of reality. COCHRAN: Yeah, yeah. Try to keep it from going off not the highway of reality entirely. Is the commercial pressure from the network growing or can you still do the creative things in the TV format? SURNOW: Well, I think the commercial considerations have more to do not with what we can do within the show, but how much scripted programming they can afford. It seems that a big consideration right now is reality. They seem to be doing so well, so much better than scripted programming. I think there’s more of an impact of that as opposed to, you know, be more sensationalistic to get bigger ratings. I think they know that your show is going to get the ratings it gets, based on whatever it is. And there’s very little you can do once you’ve aired, short of recasting somebody who would be so popular that it would change your ratings. The ratings really don’t change much after the second or third episode. So you really can’t make any adjustments. But I think the considerations have to do with what kind of shows they’re putting on in the first place. Does the budget get bigger as the series gets popular? And if so, how much bigger it gets on every show? GORDON: Well, you know, I think that the budgets go up according to people’s contracts. Probably five percent to ten percent. But we haven’t done anything along the lines, it hasn’t been exponential or anything like that, and we’ve kept a really efficient organization. We shoot two episodes at a time, so one director. I think it's the only television show that does that. We’ll shoot two episodes at a time, so we can save money on a location. If we’re here for two episodes, we can shoot this room. And it winds up saving us probably you know, five percent of our budget. And we’re very much in line with any hour of television. Frankly, I think it looks a lot more expensive and a lot richer than a lot of other shows. Would you allow the actor to touch up the character or absolutely not? GORDON: Everyone has a very intimate understanding of their character and in some ways much more than we do, in terms of the details of how’d they react, how’d they feel, what they’ve carried with them up to this moment because it really is a moment. And so the actors absolutely have a lot to say about… Kiefer Sutherland at the SAG Award did a nice speech for the writer… GORDON: He’s been remarkably gracious. Does he only absorb the character and that’s it or if he’s… GORDON: It's a wonderful collaboration. That’s part of what Bob was talking about before. He really did create the way this character, you know, moves through the day. When you wrote the character of Jack Bauer did you have Kiefer Sutherland in mind? SURNOW: We didn’t really know who it was. We were casting a lot of people and then we heard Kiefer Sutherland’s name and thought, that’s Jack Bauer. That’s sort of how it worked. CSI has moved from Vegas to Miami and now New York. Would you consider moving 24 SURNOW: As long as we don’t have to move. (laughter) Because you could take the show all the places in the world without moving from L.A. COCHRAN: We would have the problem that the gentleman alluded to earlier if we try to set it… The weather? COCHRAN: …yeah, someplace too different from this and it would be difficult to keep it in one day. SURNOW: We have talked about taking one of the stories—even for six episodes or so, and maybe setting it in some remote place. SURNOW: We try to keep the look fairly generic in that it's not an L.A. looking show. You don’t see the beach, you don’t see Beverly Hills. We don’t really try to hit landmarks. We try to keep it feeling like it could be any city that this is happening in and I think that’s part of the effectiveness. Are there still some people watching the speed that the beard grows and the way the clothes look after a few hours? COCHRAN: (laughs) I’m sure there are on the Internet people that delight in pointing out what they consider to be slips, yeah. Sure. But the other people on payroll for that… GORDON: Oh everybody. COCHRAN: Yeah everybody. GORDON: I mean, everybody on the show really pitches in on the continuity, from the script supervisor to—everyone really is very attentive to that. We’re the least attentive to it, frankly. When you were creating Jack Bauer what were some of the things you thought about in how we can make our hero unique? SURNOW: What we did, I think, that made it unique, is we gave him a family in crisis at the same time we gave him a crisis. And that’s sort of what we hadn’t seen before. I mean, you’ve seen glimmers of it in movies, but usually it's James Bond in action doing stuff and it doesn’t resonate into his personal life at all. We wanted his personal life to almost overwhelm everything that he did. And like I said, we created conflict in that world, as well as the work place. It was that, coupled with the way Kiefer brought himself into the role that created Jack Bauer. How much do you believe the success of the show owes to the current climate of fear, post 9/11? And how much do you feed off that as writers? COCHRAN: You know, that’s a good question. I don't know the answer to it. I know that THE AGENCY came on at the same time we did and didn’t have the same impact. So I don’t think it's automatic that if you do a show about terrorism in this political climate you’re going to get a positive reaction to it. On the other hand, there’s little question that people are more aware of the kind of issues that we raise on our show than they otherwise would be. So, I really don’t know. There’s some people who thought it would be a big turnoff, for a show to come on which shoved in the audience’s face, as it were, the concerns that they were facing in real life. But that didn’t turn out to be the case either. So in the end, I don't really know the answer to that question, if it helped us or not. Do you have a number of options you are juggling with for Season Three? GORDON: Were there a number of options we were… I mean, apart from virus like was there something else? GORDON: What else would there be? Yeah. GORDON: If there was, I don’t remember what it was because it was—and again the virus really became less monolithic than the nuclear bomb. It's a much more involved story in Season Three. We took a different turn—but no one has seen this, so I’m talking out of turn. We’ve seen some of it. GORDON: Some of it, yeah. I mean, again, we knew that the nuclear bomb was the ace in the hole. You really can’t top that in terms of impact or in terms of intensity. So we really approached the third season differently. And so the virus became… SURNOW: It was about lethal people in Season Three. We didn’t have a face to the bomb. We have a face to the villains from Episode One. The Salazars are in a sense, the bomb, more than the virus, for the first part of this season. GORDON: We felt at the end of Season Two that the one disappointment on our parts, was that our villains, weren’t as richly drawn as we might have liked them to be. One of the things we set out to do in Season Three was to, right from the start, have antagonists who felt worthy of Jack and to understand them a little bit more. Elisha Cuthbert has spoken in recent interviews about her desire to quit the show at end of next season to pursue movies. If Kim’s allowed to walk does Jack Bauer still have anything left to fight for? What was behind your decision to transform Kim from a bimbo to a brainiac? SURNOW: Jack Bauer will have something to fight for whatever we decide he wants to fight for. If we want to bring a brother in, or a new love interest, or an adopted kid, I mean, there are any number of things that Jack Bauer could conceivably be fighting for in his personal life that we haven’t explored yet but that are certainly out there. There’s no shortage of those things. The answer to your second question is that we felt we liked Elisha a lot more than we liked Kim Bauer. She’s a wonderful actress but Kim Bauer as a character really gave us very little in terms of storyline. So it was all self-generating. It was never involved in the main plot. COCHRAN: In year two, especially. SURNOW: In year two especially. We figured, you know, we have this wonderful actress and she’s is the one actor that speaks to a younger audience and I think that teens really seem to like her a lot, and tune in for her. And we didn’t lose that. We thought, let’s try and get her involved in the central storyline by bringing her to CTU. I mean, it's a little bit of a stretch three years later, that she’s now a systems analyst for CTU, but not so much so that people watching TV— who are sophisticated enough to know that this isn’t the real world—can get past the groaner aspect and go with it. Which I think we did. I think we accomplished by the second or third episode that Kim’s just in the mix of things and… GORDON: Even in the first episode of this year, I think it was a remarkable moment when you turn around, and you see Kim’s working there. I do think we all were worried that would seem like a pretty steep change. But I think she sold it from the minute she turned around and faced the camera. She played it beautifully. Plus, the idea that each season is this compression of time in one day. Between seasons, you know, it's not just a year later like it is on every other show, you think it's just kind of the next week. It's the same as last week. Whereas here, people pay attention to how time has elapsed, and what happened in that time. So they’re watching the foreground as much as they are the background. Where is Jack’s greatest conflict, as you see it? COCHRAN: I think right now this character doesn’t see any other way for himself. He’s still consumed by guilt at the death of his wife. Blames himself for that rightly or wrongly, so I think that’s an interesting place for a character to be, particularly one who does care deeply. On the one hand he blames himself and he’s guilt ridden, but on the other hand he still does care deeply about his daughter. In year two he was capable of developing some feelings, although they were tentative because it was just one day for Kate. That’s another source of tension, I think for the character, a guy who’s in some ways cut off from people but there’s a part of him that really wants to reach out. Kiefer plays that kind of thing beautifully. Would you bring back Kate? COCHRAN: It's possible. We don’t have any plans to. What seemed like a passionate love affair and then I was very surprised? SURNOW: She got a movie offer. Really? SURNOW: Yeah. (laughter) And she took it. Isn’t that frustrating for you as writers? COCHRAN: A little bit, yeah. We had planned to go somewhat in the direction that you indicated—to explore what their relationship had been, and how sincere he’d been, and some of the things he’d said to her and so forth, and then we couldn’t. SURNOW: They had a great chemistry too. ROBERT COCHRAN: Yeah. Thank you all very much. Question & Answer Text Copyright of Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment Q&A with Kiefer Sutherland (as Jack Bauer) Q&A with Dennis Haysbert (as President of the United States of America) Q&A with Carlos Bernard (as Tony Almeida) Q&A with James Badge Dale (as Chase Edmunds) Q&A with Reiko Aylesworth (as Michelle Dessler / Almeida) Biography: Kiefer Sutherland Biography: Dennis Haysbert Biography: Elisha Cuthbert Biography: Carlos Bernard Biography: James Badge Dale Biography: Reiko Aylesworth Biographies: Joel Surnow, Robert Cochran, Howard Gordon and Brian Grazer Back to PHASE9 - 24 microsite |
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