Bauer, ‘24,’ relocate to D.C.

WASHINGTON

Early one cold November morning, actress Annie Wersching leads Kiefer Sutherland to an “armored” sport utility vehicle with dark windows parked outside the U.S. Department of Agriculture building.

After director Brad Turner yells “Cut,” onlookers snap photographs of the star. Mr. Sutherland sees a participant in a charity run for lupus on the Mall and comments, “Why is that guy wearing shorts? It’s cold.”

Where Mr. Sutherland normally works, people wear shorts year-round.

Welcome to Washington, Jack Bauer.

A little more than a year ago, the Emmy-winning actor and the crew of his popular Fox TV series, “24,” came to the nation’s capital to film segments of the show’s seventh season. The completion of that season was delayed a year by the Writers Guild of America strike, but the season finally makes its debut in a two-night premiere beginning Sunday (8 p.m., Fox5-WTTG).

Jack Bauer actually returned to the screen in November in the Fox TV movie “24: Redemption,” a series prequel that was set in Africa. Now, the series’ new season begins with the intrepid agent for the fictional federal Counter-Terrorist Unit (CTU) forced to return to Washington to face a Senate investigation into his conduct.

“He’s called to face charges of abuse of power and torturing certain individuals in an unlawful manner,” Mr. Sutherland says. “For the first time, he’s put in a position to have to confront a lot of the things that he’s done.”

However, Bauer is pulled from the hearings by FBI agent Renee Walker (Miss Wersching) to help with a more pressing matter - the reappearance of Bauer’s thought-to-be-dead fellow agent, Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard), who apparently is no longer one of the good guys.

After six years of making “24” mainly in Los Angeles, it seemed to be time to take the show to the home of oft-seen presidents in the series. “We wondered if that was starting to bother people,” says Mr. Turner, the director, with a laugh.

Filming in the District isn’t new for fed-themed action series, but it was a welcome change for the “24” team. “It was kind of like going on a field trip,” Mr. Bernard says.

Shooting here lends the show a sense of realism impossible to produce by simply intercutting stock “plate” shots of Washington with scenes shot in Hollywood. “To have the Washington Monument in the background of a drive-up - and in a simple, incidental way - just tells you you’re in Washington,” explains cinematographer Rodney Charters. “That’s a pretty hard thing to fake.”

Mr. Turner and his crew searched the season’s early scripts for opportunities to make use of recognizable Washington locales. “It was a matter of finding moments to get scenes on the street and do it naturally so that it’s seamless,” the director says.

Adds Mr. Sutherland: “If you can take advantage of getting iconic places like the Capitol or the Lincoln Memorial in a shot, you try and do that. It’s like a postcard for us.”

Doing so isn’t a simple matter of setting up a camera and taking pictures, particularly in a security-sensitive city such as Washington. “There are 17 different jurisdictions to deal with, some with their own police forces,” says Jon Pare, the show’s production manager. “Sometimes, when you leave a curb and step into a street, you’ve just crossed a jurisdiction.”

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