“Sons of Anarchy” creator Kurt Sutter can be an intimidating personality, but in person he’s a teddy bear.
Well, not a teddy bear but a respectful, attentive person. If you were expecting the wild card persona he created online, you’ve believed the hype. Or maybe I’m just so awesome that I got him to open up! We got to see the season premiere of “Sons of Anarchy” Season 6 to prepare for this one on one interview at the Television Critics Association press tour. Since we discussed specifics about the episode we’ve held this interview with Sutter until you’ve had a chance to see the season premiere.
CraveOnline: Are you executing the master plan that began when Jax found the manifesto in the first place?
Kurt Sutter: No, that’s interesting though. I think we will ultimately this season start to lay track to that coming all the way full circle. I think the questions Jax has about his dad, I think the questions he has about whether or not he can execute what his father planned or wanted to do in terms of getting out of guns and going legit, can that really happen? I think all that influences him this season so I feel like that ghost is always on his shoulder and dictating in terms of the choices that he makes.
I felt like Clay going to prison and the things that happened in the season premiere thematically spoke towards the manifesto.
Yeah, I think so. I knew I wanted to do this story for a while now and just knew that once I did that story, we really had to be in the home stretch because it was really such a potent thing, and it is. It’s really the catalyst that moves us forward into the third act of the piece, of the series. I don’t think you can have something as poignant and tragic as that happen without it having that kind of lasting ramifications on people emotionally.
I think it’s worth talking about the school shooting. You said in the panel you were thinking of that storyline as much as three years ago, before it re-became such national news. How different did it get in the last year when you decided to do that story?
You know, it didn’t get that much different because the truth is it’s a pretty simple story, meaning that I knew ultimately what I wanted to happen and the impact of it. Obviously as the series developed and the characters that I have now and the relationships have changed, I then have to figure out how the show wears that all in terms of when it happens, who does it impact? Who are the players involved with it all? But the act itself really didn’t change much. I knew that I didn’t want it to feel gratuitous in terms of violence. I knew I never wanted to see dead bodies of children. I feel it’s much more potent to know that it’s happening and to hear the screams.
The sound makes it worse.
It really does because then it really leaves it up to your imagination and we do that a lot on this show. I really try to play it off the faces of our characters and I thought the way Paris [Barclay] shot that, it was really beautiful and tragic. Then seeing the aftermath and we’ll watch it play out. Look, I know that it’s obviously a controversial thing and it’ll push some buttons, and I had discussions with the network about it.
I guess I just felt like it was such an organic story to tell for this show in that it’s what these guys do for a living. I almost feel it would be a disservice not to tell that story in some capacity, because it’s what these guys do for a living and we have a father who’s desperately trying to raise these sons and not have them be impacted by the violence that he is ultimately responsible for. I feel like thematically it was a story that really had to be told and we’ll see the ramifications that play out on our lead characters.
Will the torture pornographers be a season-long arc, or was that just for the season premiere?
It’s not a season-long arc, but that’ll come back and play out with Peter Weller’s character and Kim Coates character as well. It’ll ultimately lead to them getting back into rebooting Cara Cara, the whole porn business as a legitimate business. So it’ll feed a lot of that. It’ll linger throughout the season.
