Up next for Kiefer Sutherland is the 7th season of 24 and a special prequel that will air before the season officially begins. But the big question that every 24 fan really wants to know is will there be a season 8? "I think if Brett Favre has taught us anything, it’s to never even enter into that," joked Sutherland. "I love making the show. Season 8 would have to be extraordinary and we would have to hit a whole different way of telling the story for us to go further. But anything is possible. The African prequel did a lot. It reinforced everything for us that we were doing in Season 7 to that point, which was episode 15. There was a small handful of us, only 16 of us, that went to Africa to do that and there was something liberating about it. We were away from this machine that we were responsible for creating for the last eight years. All of a sudden we were free, and we all got energized by that."
"We worked 15-16 hours a day, six days a week, for the three weeks we were there. We made the equivalent of a film in three weeks. And I think it looks extraordinary. So we saw its potential, yeah. To be able to tell a finite story in two hours, as opposed to 24, which is the equivalent of 12 films, it became a very exciting prospect. For the writing, it was the most liberating. For Howard Gordon to be able to write two hours alone without having to worry about how it was going to connect to everything else, because he’d already had the connection shot - it just feeds into Season 7 - he could close that off easy. I think he forgot how good a writer he was. He was like, 'This one was really easy!'"
The prequel covers two hours in real time, just like the show. "And then the two-hour feature, which would be even more liberating for them, would probably be a two-hour representation of a 24-hour day. But this one was not. This was a real-time, two-hour, straight-up deal," said Sutherland.
