iF: This season started with big events happening as opposed to threats being avoided, where will it go from here?

JON CASSAR: That’s what makes it interesting for us this year. You’re not just waiting for the one big threat. America is already in trouble. It’s already become a little bit controversial. It’s probably more realistic than what we’ve done before as far as being in the heat of the battle. It’s a different way for us to go, and we’re in six years, so we’re looking for new ways to go.

CASSAR: They’re ever-changing storylines, it always is on our show. We’ve realized now, our audience has a really short attention span, so we can’t stay on one thing too long. And our writers have a shorter attention span than our audience. It’s going to change, it’s going to flip, it’s going to turn.

CASSAR: We’ll play it on a couple more times for sure. It’s not going to go away.

CASSAR: I think Jack’s journey this year is a little bit different, because it’s about him getting back in the game. We’ve touched on that before, but not as much as this year. Really, it’s about whether he can do it and him going back and forth finding glimpses of the old Jack Bauer, but really trying to fight that two years off and the fact he doesn’t have the motivation to do that anymore. That’s going to be his biggest struggle.

CASSAR: We never do it to shock the audience. We don’t do it to make them angry, even though they get angry. We do it because when you kill a character on television, there’s more at stake if it’s a character you know. It’s getting away from the red shirts from STAR TREK – the guy you take down on the planet just so you kill him. No one really cares, because you just met the guy. And in our case when we killed Curtis [Roger Cross], that’s the first gun shot Jack took in two years. It’s the very first time he pulls the trigger this year when he kills Curtis. It’s about Jack. It rarely is about anyone else. When we kill off a main character, it’s about Jack, nothing else. It’s how it motivates Jack. That was the turning point. That was the point he said, "that’s it, I’m done, I’m not doing this anymore." It wasn’t about killing Curtis so we could shock the audience. It's not about killing Edgar [from last season] so we can shock the audience. We killed Edgar, because we wanted to show that CTU was under a realistic threat and the threat they were constantly trying to protect, they got caught in themselves and they had to pay the price. And if a couple of guys died at CTU, which they did, you didn’t care about them, but you cared that Edgar died, because you knew him. That’s how you bring it home, it brings out how serious these threats are, because it’s people you know.

CASSAR: We needed a huge turning point to get Jack in. Curtis was a turning point for Jack saying, "I’m done." And the nuclear bomb was for Jack to go, "This is ridiculous, I can’t let this happen. Everything I’ve gone through, I’ve got to put my personal stuff aside and stop this."

CASSAR: We’ve already transferred one person back and forth, a couple of people, but I think the President is probably going to stay in Washington for all of it. He has up until now. We’re up to Episode 18 now.

CASSAR: We make the show for us first, we’re very critical of each other, as far as the writers, producers and directors. And it’s about making ourselves happy and putting a show together, we think is good and we go, "here it is folks, hope you enjoy it." That’s the key to our show. The road we’re taking is good. We think it’s good. There’s some really good shows coming up.

CASSAR: Kim Raver is being talked about and her character gets mentioned. I can’t say how, because it will ruin the surprise. Her character gets mentioned in the ‘teens [episodes].

CASSAR: It’s a win-win situation. It’s obviously a Toyota commercial, because of the beautiful truck they escape in. We’re okay with that, up to a point, because they give us the money to do it. If they didn’t, that wouldn’t exist. As you saw, that was a pretty big production. It was three days of shooting and it costs a lot of money.

CASSAR: We shoot that right away. We have to get it real quick for the DVD. We shoot that usually within the first couple of weeks.

CASSAR: It won’t happen in the hiatus this year. It is in the script stage right now, there is a script. It’s the world of movies, where you’re rewriting and rewriting, hell some movies take five years before they come out. Hopefully it won’t take that long, but it is going to be stuck in that world of movie writing as opposed TV writing which is "rewrite it, three weeks later we’re shooting it" and it doesn’t happen like that in the movie world.

CASSAR: The movie is going to be its own beast. It’s not going to have any connection to the show at all. It will be sort of probably be in between a couple of seasons with really no connection. The way it’s written now, there’s no connection, but that might change.

CASSAR: It will probably have that, but it probably won’t be real time. I think the idea is to do an hour of it that sets it up where you can go around the world and set up a story in normal film time, and probably the last hour will be in real time – something like that.

CASSAR: They’ve talked to me about directing, there’s no deal in place, and I really don’t want to say until there is one.

CASSAR: Of course it does. It’s really more about Kiefer than anyone else. It’s about Kiefer being comfortable. And as he puts it, we’ve done about 25 movies together, I’ve directed 47 episodes now. To him, it feels like I’ve directed 25 movies.

CASSAR: I haven’t heard that officially, but at this point we feel it’s coming back.

CASSAR: In our heads, on the creative side, there is an end point, but I can’t see Fox ever wanting this to go away. It’s been really good for them. Somewhere in the middle of that, we’re going to have to find an end point. Personally, 24/7 sounds good to me. I like the idea of a seventh year, a whole week – that sounds good, because the next thing is a month, but I don’t know if we can go that far. [laughs]