If it's real-time, we must be talking to Kiefer Sutherland.

Interestingly, the subject is not 24, the actor's critically acclaimed one-hour-in-the-life thriller TV series, but Phone Booth, the critically acclaimed 80-minutes-in-the-life of a sniper-hostage movie, in which Kiefer is the phone-voice of evil.

"Apparently, I am Mr. Real-time," Sutherland says, of the Joel Schumacher movie which he filmed in 2001 just prior to the start of his Fox series.

When we spoke during the Toronto International Film Festival, everyone involved -- including Schumacher and actors Colin Farrell and Forest Whitaker -- were anticipating the opening of something very different. Phone Booth was a movie made for less than $10 million, set almost entirely on a street corner in New York, and seen predominantly from the vantage-point of a slick, unscrupulous publicist (Farrell) who finds himself trapped in a phone booth in the sights of a hidden sniper.

Then real life intervened. The Beltway Sniper case rendered a movie about a sniper "inappropriate" in the minds of many, and Phone Booth went on a six-month hiatus. Schumacher didn't take the decision well, telling the Hollywood Reporter his movie and the Washington area shooting were "such different cases ... There are many serial killers that haven't been caught. Should they not release Red Dragon?"

You couldn't blame him for feeling put-upon. Phone Booth was a project that had bounced between directors (Armageddon's Michael Bay had it earlier) and actors (Will Smith was once attached). And Sutherland's participation was itself born of production troubles. Ex-ER actor Ron Eldard was the original voice of the sniper, and he acted opposite Farrell throughout. Subsequently, Schumacher decided to drop Eldard in favour of Sutherland (with whom he'd worked before on A Time To Kill, Flatliners and The Lost Boys).

Schumacher wouldn't comment publicly on the change, but the rumour is that Eldard's delivery made the movie almost seriocomic, as opposed to Sutherland's sinister tones.

For his part, Sutherland claimed not to even know who he'd replaced. "I don't know who was actually hired to do it," he insisted at the time. "I didn't listen to their voice or anything. It was just a blank canvas."

For that matter, he didn't even meet Farrell until they hooked up at the Toronto Film Fest.

"The movie was already shot, and I considered my part to be a fantastic opportunity. I told Joel absolutely I'd do it. I didn't need to look at it. Joel's one of the most fantastic directors I've ever worked with."

Though his character makes one murky appearance near the end of the film, he's primarily a disembodied voice. "It was actually a fantastic opportunity to be able to deliver a performance without any physical limitations. If the audience wants me to be 6-foot-7 and 280 pounds, I can be. I can be 5-foot-2 and 100 pounds. It's like reading a book and using your imagination."

In Phone Booth, Farrell plays Stu Shepard, a fast-talking publicity "fixer" who's hiding an affair from his wife (Radha Mitchell) by having his girlfriend (Katie Holmes) place calls to him at a phone booth. Unfortunately, Stu is under surveillance by The Caller, an avenging angel out to assassinate the morally corrupt. To prove his point, he shoots a bystander, a murder for which Stu is an instant suspect. Enter NYPD captain Ramey (Whitaker), who's ready to take Stu down as a rogue gunman before it dawns on him that something else might be in play.

"This was such ballsy work," Sutherland says. "I told Colin if someone had offered me his part, I'm not sure if I would've taken it. It's virtually a one-man show for three quarters of the picture, and limited by space, you're basically rooted by your feet. A lot of times you find that a fantastic way to generate energy and emotion is to move -- and he couldn't. There was nothing to get the engine moving. He had to sit there locked in that phone booth and cultivate these incredible, honest emotions, a very scary performance."

As for The Caller, Sutherland reached back, not to a movie villain, but a conflicted personality -- Gene Hackman's character in Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation. "It's one of my favourite films, and to me, growing up, that's the kind of guy you'd be scared of -- they have all the information, they know all the dirty little secrets, and they blend in the crowd. That (techno geek look) was what I was after, and it was nice to look different than I do on 24."

I mention to him that The Caller seems easily amused, given that he's always laughing over the phone at Stu. "It's a great way to articulate your control over someone, if they're in a dire situation and you can find it amusing. You're in a much more powerful position, obviously. Most of the conversations Joel and I had were in this vein, how to focus the character to emphasize his absolute control over Stuart."

Of course, his prep work is undermined if people hear his voice and think "Kiefer Sutherland." "My voice is not exactly as distinctive as Jack Nicholson's," he says. "I voiced a Sam Adams (beer) ad, and people knew it. I think what I got the most was 'Was that you or your dad (Donald Sutherland)? I know your dad does the Volvo ads.' I think, certainly, 24 is high profile, so all of a sudden my voice is recognizable."

A part-time Torontonian (he maintains a house here), Sutherland plans to continue on 24 as long as the ratings gods allow. And as long as they do, Phone Booth will be the last movie on Kiefer Sutherland's filmography. (He'd filmed another previously, Paradise Found, in which he plays the painter Paul Gauguin. That one has yet to be released).

"On 24, we take longer to film each episode than other shows, we do 24 episodes instead of 22. You end up with a shortened hiatus, and seven weeks just isn't long enough to do a movie." As promised, the second season of 24 has turned out to be "broader in scope and broader in theme," with somewhat less time focused on CTU agent Jack Bauer, and more on other agents and his oft-imperiled daughter (fellow Canuck Elisha Cuthbert).

"I'm just glad the writers have more options. I was actually amazed that last year they didn't write themselves into a corner they couldn't get out of."


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