Kiefer Sutherland

0:05Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which some of the world's leading creative people choose the influences and experiences that have most inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is the actor and musician Kiefer Sutherland, the son of Canadian actors Donald Sutherland and Shirley Douglas. He first made his mark in the 1980s and 90s with films including Stand By Me, The Lost Boys, Flatliners and A Few Good Men. His television portrayal of federal agent Jack Bauer in the crime series 24 became his signature role and earned him major awards including an Emmy and a Golden Globe.

0:43He later starred in the political drama series Designated Survivor playing an American president. Alongside his acting, Kiefer Sutherland has also pursued a career as a singer-songwriter, releasing a series of country rock albums and performing live tours. Kiefer Sutherland, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you very much for having me. And welcome back to the city of your birth. Yes. How much do you identify as a Londoner? You know, a large part. I mean, we are where we came from. And I remember when I was about 17 years old, I was coming through the UK and into Europe to do press for a film that I had done called The Bay Boy.

1:24And there was a long, long line for people that weren't from the UK. At the passport. At Heathrow. And so there was a gentleman from customs going through people's passports and he got to mine. And he said, oh, son, you're in the wrong line. You belong over here. Because it had said that I was born in London, England. So even my passport was Canadian, he had moved me to the other line. And I felt, well, A, I was relieved that I went to the shorter line. But I really felt so welcome. And he acknowledged that I was British. And so within months, I had my British passport. And over the years, I have felt really cared for here.

2:03So you do have a British passport? Yes, yeah. And what a lovely passport control officer there. It could have gone the other way. Yeah, huge impact on my life. But it's a very funny thing with 24 because 24's success really hinged on its success in the UK. Because in America, it was successful, but it wasn't kind of banging out of the box. And yet in the UK, it was so successful that it had become understood that we were going to do a second season. And also to finish the first season because I think we were only picked up for 13 episodes. and halfway through the first season it then became incredibly successful in the u.s but had it not been for the kind of out-of-the-box success that we had in the uk 24 wouldn't have maybe survived and so i've always felt some kind of affinity to the fact that the uk has saved me in a number of waves over the years and that people have been really supportive of me here

3:07on this cultural life keifer sutherland my guests choose the most creative influences and experiences and we start with your parents yeah who were both canadian-born actors shirley douglas and donald sutherland um where did they meet i believe that they met here in london my mother went to rada and my father went to lambda and there was never a version of us all sitting around the dinner table talking about when they met that never happened but i believe it was here and i grew up with my mom my mother and father divorced when i was about four and i have a twin sister named rachel and i have an older brother named tom and we all lived in Los Angeles together, left England when I was three.

3:57So I didn't see my dad on a regular basis, primarily because of his work schedule. And he was finding great success. And then eventually, my mother, political activist against the Vietnam War and equality for women and a number of equal rights issues and had kind of gotten into some trouble with the US and... Was it supporting the Black Panthers? The Black Panther Party as well. And she ran the breakfast program through the AME Church in Los Angeles. And it was time for us to go. Well, just tell me about your political pedigree. From what I understand, your mother was the daughter of a very famous...

4:35Of Tommy Douglas, who was the premier of Saskatchewan for 17 years and then federal leader of the opposition for the NDP, the New Democratic Party. He is known for creating health care in Canada, which in the time that he was alive was probably the most successful health care system in the world. And so you say it was time to leave Los Angeles because it was getting too politically heavy for your mother to be there. Well, no, my mother had gone to jail on a number of charges that were eventually dropped, but we were being deported as far as I understood. And so we left for Canada, and that's where I grew up in Toronto.

5:11my mother then gets back to Toronto and starts working as an actor again. You know, we're a little older, so she doesn't have the burden of two babies. So she now has her career up and running, and my father has his. I grew up in the theater with my mom. So my mom would be doing a play at the Royal Alex, and my sister and I would finish school, and we would take the subway to the theater, we would finish our homework, she would do her performance, and then we'd go eat. and so I was around the people of backstage of that community so the other actors and actresses I was around the production designer the costume designer the you know through the rehearsal process I understood the process from you know just workshopping the play in rehearsals and then getting to the theater and doing proper staging rehearsals and then doing the performances all of this my sister and I were very aware of by the time we were 10 or 11 years old so there was just an incredible education that had been made available to us about how to work in the theater, et cetera, to the degree that my mother would put me on one side of the theater in the previews and my sister on the other.

6:23And we would cue the audience to clap. Like she would tell us this line in the second scene. You were plunts. Yeah. And we would just sit there and clap and everybody else would start to clap. So I knew at a very early age that these were the kinds of people that I wanted to be around. So it's so to see that you think from an early age, you thought this is the life for me. And I want to follow in my, at that point, your mother's footsteps. Yeah. And she had done Virginia Woolf. And this was the clincher. This was the moment she was working at the National Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Yeah. And she was playing Martha and she was doing it at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, Canada.

6:57And I'd gone up to see the performance and I was maybe about 12 now. And somewhere in the first act, she stopped being my mom. She didn't even look like my mom anymore. Something had happened to me as a viewer where she understood that character so well and her performance of that character was so special that she just became something different as if by magic before my eyes. And I remember at the end of the play, one of the ushers found me sitting in the theater by myself. Theater had long been emptied. And the usher came up and said, Kiefer, your mom's waiting. And I kind of almost in a trance said, I'm so sorry, I'll be right there.

7:41And it was a big kind of euphoric moment for me because I thought, oh my God, that's incredibly powerful. If you can actually create a character where someone so connected to you, like a son or a daughter, doesn't even recognize you in the context of that performance, that's when I decided that I wanted to kind of go down the path of working as an actor because I knew what to aim for now that was going to be what I was going to aim for was to create a character that was so different from myself and yet so believable and honest that you wouldn't recognize me anymore and so when I first saw Stand By Me for instance and I still very much saw myself I was appalled and I thought oh my gosh it's over and of course I was wrong it was a hugely successful film and that's when I just kind of stopped looking at watching myself I want to talk about Stand By Me in more detail but just getting back to that moment of realisation did you tell your mother did you say look something happened to me and it's really interesting that process of transformation that you're talking about she becomes somebody on stage but the key phrase you said is something happened to me so it's about the perception it's the way that you received it yeah and it was just she had hit something in the way she was performing that allowed me to let go of my image and understanding of her and allowed that to happen and so that took me down one path and then at the same time every other christmas i go down to see my dad he was in la yeah he in los angeles and he was doing a film with marcia mason and Jason Robards and Matthew Broderick called Max Dugan Returns.

9:24And now I had already started working, and I was working in the theater in Canada. And he said, do you want to come with me and work on this film? And you can do a couple days, and they'll pay you. What were you, 15, 16? You'll have a line or two. Oh, no, I was like 13 or 14. Oh, right. And I said, sure. And I went with him, and I did. I had two lines in the movie. Anyways, about a week later, I got a check. And it was for more than I was going to make the entire play that I was doing up in Canada for seven weeks. And I was like, well, I've got to look into this film thing. What's interesting is some of your father, Donald Sutherland's, greatest roles, you think of Clute or Mash or Kelly's Heroes, the Dirty Dozen, don't look now, of course.

10:16John, do you hear what I say? It was Christine. My daughter is dead, Laura. She does not come peeping with messages back from behind the grave. Yes. Christine is dead. Yes. She is dead. Yes. Dead, dead, dead, dead. They were all made when you were younger than that, probably when you were very young. When I wasn't allowed... I didn't see any of those films until VHS. Until you saw them on video? Until I was 18 years old. Wow. And I felt really guilty because I didn't know how prolific my father was as an actor. I didn't know how diverse my father was as an actor. And I didn't know to the degree with which now I believe how talented my father was.

10:58And so as a son, I felt like I had been a bad son, that I didn't know all of this. And I had called him up to tell him that. And he said, well, of course you couldn't have seen that. You were a boy. You were a child. And so that became the kind of the moment of our adult relationship. And when you first saw those films on this VHS, was it a sudden, a newfound appreciation of what he had been doing all that time? Huge, huge. I think in three days I watched Don't Look Now, Bertolucci's 1900, Fellini's Casanova, Louis There's a Crowd Downstairs, which became Start the Revolution Without Me, Clute.

11:38I'm trying to think of the Schlesinger film that he made as well. Day of the Locust. Day of the Locust is the one, yes. And the thing that took me the most was the variety. Not only in genre of film, but the variety of character. And some of them just where he played awful characters. But his willingness to go into that as an actor I found kind of fearless and really powerful. And then when I saw him in Start the Revolution Without Me with Gene Wilder and the humor that he had and the whimsy that he had. Like just in contrast to something like Clute, in contrast to Don't Look Now. But the fearlessness as an actor to do some of the things he was doing, I was so impressed with.

12:22And literally in a three-day period, he taught me through his work what I then now wanted to aim for as an actor in film. Did you seek his advice? Not really. I didn't really need to because I saw it. so if you take a look at the early films that i did so the first film in america that i did was a film called at close range with sean penn and chris walken and in that movie my hair is black the next film you see me in is stand by me where my hair is some kind of weird peroxide orange color yeah because we couldn't get the black out and and the film literally the i shot a week apart right and so that was the look of that film the next film was going to be the lost boys which the hair was white because i still couldn't get all the other crap out of my hair but i was following my father that the look had to be different from film to film to film but also the physicality of the character had to be different but versatility was something that i was really focused on and And that was all because of watching my father's films for three days.

13:34Knowing that people were saying Kiefer Sutherland, the son of Donald Sutherland. See, and that's the thing. They weren't. Right. And that was really weird. And I'll tell you, I got really lucky. My dad has three younger sons with his wife, Francine Rosset, of 50 years, who I love. and he decided he was going to take a moment and kind of be a stay-at-home dad with his boys. And they moved to France. So he was out of the limelight. Created a five-year window for me to do my thing. It was never conscious. It just happened. But only in hindsight did I realize why I got such kind of free reign and why that hadn't happened.

14:18Yeah, I mean, I think people acknowledged it, But certainly in the young people that were watching films like Lost Boys and Young Guns and that kind of thing, Donald Sutherland might not have even been on their radar. Obviously, my father started working again five years later. And then I had at least rooted a bit within the industry that people acknowledged kind of almost like, oh, my God, yeah, and your father, Donald Sutherland, da, da, da. And I was like, I don't know how y 'all missed it for five years. But yeah, yeah.

14:57Your next choice for this cultural life is the 1971 crime thriller The French Connection, directed by William Friedkin, starring Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider. Aye, Popeye's here! Put your hands on your heads! Get off the bar and get on the wall! What's my name? Popeye Doyle. If he doesn't like you, he'll take you apart. And it's all perfectly legal, because Doyle fights dirty. You want to take a ride there, fat man? And plays rough. Anybody want a milkshake? Doyle is bad news, but he's a good cop. I presume you didn't see this when it first came out because you would have only been five years old.

15:31Again, the education through VHS was big. But what was the impact when you first saw it? Well, as I had described, my mother gave me a trajectory about what to do with a character and wanting to be an actor. My father gave me a goal of what to try and accomplish as a film actor. William Friedkin gave me what I thought at that time was the perfect film, and this is the kind of movie that you really want to make, and this is why. And the few times that I kind of put myself in that world to try and chase it down were horrible and not successful. But then I realized it doesn't have to be a buddy cop movie.

16:08It doesn't have to be a thriller. It has to be kind of the intention of how you're going to tell the story. And there was something so edgy about both Roy Schreider's performance and Gene Hackman's performance. And almost dirty, if you will. There was a roughness to that. And that had a huge impact on how I approached playing Jack Bauer. And then I ended up having the great fortune of doing the Kane Mutiny with him as a director in the last film that he had made. and working with him as a director was one of the most amazing experiences that I've ever had and my desire to please him made me explore things that maybe I would not have normally he shaped you know choices for me without knowing me without me knowing him from an early age of maybe 18 or 19 and then when I finally get the opportunity to work with him I think I managed to do one of my finest performances of my life just because I wanted him to like me.

17:11The Kane Mutiny Court Marshall was his last film as well. It was released posthumously. It died before he could see it at the Venice Film Festival. Yeah, it was just tragic. Just getting back to the influence of The French Connection, it's a really brutal film, and it's about a no-nonsense, deeply flawed cop, Popeye Doyle, played by Gene Hackman, chasing down this South of France narcotics ring. Did it influence directly then that portrayal of Jack Bauer in 24, who is another no-nonsense enforcement agent who will literally stop at nothing to get the bad guys? Hugely impacted that. I'm Federal Agent Jack Bauer, and today is the longest day of my life.

17:59I mean, Jack Bauer, in one sense, is a little different. He has no chance of winning, and I think one of the attributes of that character that I admired the most was that he knows he's not going to win, right? You're facing insurmountable odds, but you're still going to do it. I think Gene Hackman actually believed he was going to win. But it's just the brutality of that film is what I found so refreshingly honest about it. Why do you have to follow the rules to catch the bad guy? Why don't we just catch the bad guy? This is a great argument. You know, it's a great argument in life. And then you get into kind of larger arguments about, well, what is society?

18:34And what are we actually trying to protect? And do the rules really matter if we get to the end goal? And of course they do. Now, those were all issues, ethical dilemmas, that were being played out in 24. Yes, absolutely. And so, you know, there was a moment in 24, which I thought was just a big moment that Joel Surnow had written where I have to actually kill my own commanding officer or the terrorist or whoever is going to do whatever. And it's the only kind of time I think Joel Surnow ever thanked me for an ad lib. But I said, forgive me, God, right before I pulled the trigger. And this idea that you know you're doing something really wrong and this dilemma of for the greater good.

19:21What is worth the greater good? My interest in something like 24, which I loved making for the nine years that I got to make, was absolutely fuelled by what I found so fascinating about the French Connection. It changed your life, I guess, 24. Yes. Because it made you one of the biggest stars, certainly one of the biggest stars of television, at the start of that whole new industry of long-form series. I mean, how did life change in a personal way? it didn't you know it didn't change that much for me because i'm still working 14 hours a day five days a week doing it so you're quite isolated and you're in kind of the bubble of making 24 and i was for a decade certainly you make money people say hello to you on the street they know who you are more people called me jack than ever called me keifer and there was something really wonderful about making stuff that you know television is interesting in the context like you just keep making it, right?

20:15And so if people are enjoying it, then you know that you're just going to keep making something that people are enjoying. And so there's something very nice about that, you know, because I've spent a number of years making stuff that no one even saw. And trust me, the other is much better. I was also old enough, you know, when did Stand By Me, Lost Boys, Flatliners, Young Guns 1, Young Guns 2, A Few Good Men, all of those films were a number one films. And it was just how I started. How lucky can you be? And then, of course, the moment comes when the next projects don't go like that. You have to kind of grow up quickly and kind of realize that this is a little harder.

20:54And so by the time 24 comes around, I'm in my early 30s. And I am grateful to have had that opportunity. I am grateful that people are enjoying it. And I I am grateful to the people that are making it. You know, so that whole 10 years was kind of, it was made by people who really liked each other, who really respected each other. Yeah, and relationships that have lasted to this day.

21:24Your next choice for this cultural life, Kiefer, is the film director, Rob Reiner, who you first worked with on one of your earliest movies, Stand By Me. yeah um how did you get the part i went through an auditioning process and i remember i don't know if it was the casting director or some but somebody did not want me to do it and they had said you know i was six and a half feet tall and and ray gideon and bruce evans i've been lifelong friends who wrote the screen adaptation of the body which was the stephen king novella that that was based based on you know said oh he should come in and he set up an audition with rob reiner and and i did the reading and it was it was a fascinating time for me because i was very confident about my ability but i was just kind of not landing stuff and i realized this had to do with the audition process and so once i separated the two you're not required in the audition to do the film performance that you're going to do on set right you're required to do a number of things one of which is you need to make sure that the producers know that you're not going to be insane and you're going to ruin their eight million dollars or 15 million dollars or whatever you're not alive then you have to convince the director that you're pliable right that you're directable and so i thought well to show any director that then i'm just going to say look, if you don't mind, you know, can I do it the way I've prepared it?

22:52But then I'd really like you to give me some direction. And then I would like to do it again for you to see the impact of that. It was a very kind of precocious kind of thing to ask for. Anyways, I did. And Rob, you know, I can still see his smile. He's like, and so I did it. And then he said, okay, we'll try this and this. And then I just remember thinking, we'll just lean into that right whatever that is just lean into that forget about everything else and i did and he said good well i'd like you to do the film no director has ever hired me before or since in the audition room it is the story of the young boys who head off on an adventure and they find a dead body and you play an older youth um a teenage bully called ace i mean a really nasty piece of work in a way.

23:43Yes, terrible. He's the town bully. Yeah, but often there's a sort of redeeming quality to some of those characters, many of the sort of bad characters that you've played, but with him, he's just nasty, isn't he? No, he's just awful. You guys have two choices. You either leave quietly, we take the body. Or you stay, you beat the shit out of you. We take the body. What are you going to do, shoot us all? always just you the story of these four boys going through everything that they've gone through and being able to stand up to this bully at the end and the strength of the four of them together will always be stronger than that evil thing out there that's the moral of the story and I've seen actors try and kind of split the wire right and just well he doesn't have to be that bad like he can say the thing like that but then just kind of I'm sorry And I was like, no, you can't.

24:43You need to hit that hammer over the head. And I think that really comes from watching my father's films and me believing very strongly that what he did was right with those characters. And so Ace Merrill was absolutely that. He was going to be that from the beginning to the bitter end. And he was just going to be an awful human being. Did it set the tone for some of the roles that you were offered over the subsequent years, do you think? Well, it certainly did from the industry's position, yeah, because I think at times, and this is going to be as polite as possible, at times studio executives don't have very much imagination.

25:19And so they'll just kind of keep doing what they have seen someone else do that works. And so, yeah, and I played a lot of those characters. Sometimes I didn't want to in A Time to Kill with Joel Schumacher, who I'd done Flatliners with, who I'd done Lost Boys with. you know I played the head of a local chapter KKK in in Mississippi didn't want to play the character but Joel had asked me he'd never asked me for a favor and he did and I wasn't going to turn him down so I did it and again didn't try and lean out of that especially that kind of character leaned right into that I think down the line between that and eye for an eye was Sally Field I think that cost me some jobs over the years but I really wanted to work with John Schlesinger because he had worked with my dad in Day of the Locust.

26:07And I loved working with John. And a few years after Stand By Me, you were working again with Rob Reiner on his courtroom drama. Yeah. A Few Good Men, a really big ensemble cast, Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise, Demi Moore. I mean, what are your memories of the way that Rob Reiner directed that film? There's so many moving parts. Rob was such a consistent human being. First of all, he was one of the kindest people I'd ever met. And for me, I know I'm fair to say this about the other kind of remaining cast members from Stand By Me. Rob to us at that time was very kind of like a father figure. He was just so parental with the kids that he got everything out of them that he could because he took the time and was very caring about the way that he worked with them.

26:56And I didn't see any difference when he was working with the adults, right? It was the same guy. And he was very gentle. But then you're working with people like Tom Cruise, who has his, how he does his stuff and his agenda and his way. And then Jack Nicholson, right? Who absolutely has his thing and his way. And one of my favorite stories about the film, and this goes back to the honesty of someone like Rob Reiner. Jack Nicholson, they've covered Tom's stuff with the big Jack Nicholson speech that he gives from the courthouse. You can't handle the truth. And they've done Tom's stuff. And now they've redone all the cameras.

27:37And it was understood that Jack would just kind of hold on until his coverage was out. And Tom did a fantastic job with everything he had. You mean Jack Nicholson was holding back? Yeah. He wasn't at full throttle? No. And then they're going to flip the cameras and everything else. And this is one of the only times I've ever seen this where actors who had a day off came into work anyway. And I was one of them. You came into work. Yeah, I came into work just to see it. And J.T. Walsh came into work just to see it. Bruce Willis, who wasn't even in the movie, came in to see it. And it was fantastic.

28:10And then the cameras are flipped and Jack Nicholson starts the speech. And he starts it from one end to the other. They haven't split it up. Whatever, 20 pages, whatever it is. They're just going to do it all in one pass. And they do it. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to.

28:48Did you order the code red? I did the job. did you order the code right you're goddamn right i did and they call cut and you could hear pin drop it was dead silent and people just started clapping like it was a play and then they were told to be quiet and rob reiner walked up to jack and said wow um i don't know what to say i'm i'm good. I'm good. Unless you want to do it again. And Jack said, well, we're here. And so he did it again. And it even had a little more power. And then Rob, to his credit, stood up and said, we're done for the day. And that's that. And everybody was done. And it was like half day.

29:33And most producers and directors that I know will then start scrambling and find other stuff to shoot because time is your enemy. But Rob was smart enough to reward everybody for their professionalism and you just saw something that's going to be iconic you know and we got what we needed today and we're good and that was really who rob was just an incredibly generous generous person and and i never had to but i know for a fact that if i did need to call him and say i need help with a b or c he would be there in a second he sounds like such a paternal yeah incredibly incredibly and it's funny i don't know much about his relationship with his dad except that they spent a lot of time together but i certainly also know that because we had talked about it the finding your own path you know i can only imagine the shadow that carl reiner would cast right uh because of course his father was already in the business so he was learning from his and one of the biggest most successful comedians of all time and so he did try and kind of help me navigate that rob reiner's tragic and unexpected death last year must have been a really terrible shock for you couldn't believe it it's just uh unimaginable i can't imagine what he and his wife went through and it's just just absolutely heartbreaking

31:11Your next choice for this cultural life is one of the great songwriting partnerships, Elton John and Bernie Taubel. Yeah. When did you first hear their music? I heard their music when I was very, very young. My brother, who was seven years older than me, was a huge music fan and kind of exposed me to a lot of music. And I think my love of music was really developed by him and my desire to spend time with my older brother. so I yeah I was listening to Elton John you know six or seven five or six seven years old they weren't hand-me-downs from a brother like he he was buying the new records in 71 72 73 so you're talking about Tumbleweed Connection Madman Across the Water the first Elton John album all of those I was five blocks down the street when Elton John in 1970 played at the Troubadour really yeah that's a landmark show I was five years old but I was down the street and so even as a five year old, I was aware of Elton John.

32:07And then in my kind of mid twenties, I met Bernie and then we became friendly and we became friendly because I had a small ranch in San Tiena, California, and he had one as well. And so we had this shared appreciation of the lifestyle of rodeos and cowboys and all of that. And his appreciation came from movies that he watched as a boy and as a kid and my appreciation came from being in montana and raising horses and kind of figuring out my way to the rodeo after being friends for a number of years i had to just say you know the song daniel had a unique impact on me because i referenced my brother a number of times and he was very much a father figure and I loved him so much.