‘Sons of Anarchy’ season 7: Kurt Sutter on vision, strategy, next project
From the outside perspective, you would think that working on the final season of the show would be a mindgame for your brain. You’re used to creating content a certain way, and then suddenly you are faced with the inevitability of that ending.
Luckily, Kurt Sutter seems to have come up with an alternate way of doing things for the finale season of “Sons of Anarchy.” In his latest “WTFSutter” video on his YouTube channel, he explains the strategy this time of treating this in the writing process as though it is any other season of the show, with the only difference being that there is a different sort of closure established when you are penning the 13th episode (a.k.a. the series finale). This is not a spoiler-heavy video, but he does talk about the philosophies that come with ending a show, and the importance of leaving some threads reasonably open-ended. His general feeling is that you don’t want to leave the audience with what he believes to be a “completely shut door,” and you want to allow the audience “the dignity of their own imagination” to figure out where the story could go following the finale.
When it comes to Sutter’s potential follow-up to “Sons of Anarchy” in “The Bastard Executioner,” he mentions following his trip to the UK that the pilot will likely film in Wales, which is familiar to some of us location-watchers as where “Doctor Who” regularly films the majority of its episodes. There is plenty of lush, interesting scenery there, and it has not been completely overrun by film and TV projects to the point where the grounds are saturated and completely recognizable. If picked up, it will likely air around the same time of year that “Sons of Anarchy” does. Given the history of success here with Sutter in between “Sons of Anarchy” and his work on Shawn Ryan’s “The Shield,” it’s hard to imagine something keeping the project from a pickup.
This is our second “Sons of Anarchy” story of the weekend, and it follows up the appearance from Mark Boone Junior and Kim Coates at the Calgary Expo this weekend. If you want to get scoop on everything we cover at CarterMatt via email, then sign up today for our official newsletter.
Photo: FX