Directing’s No Jail for This Actor : Television: ‘I have had a wonderful time doing it,’ says Kiefer Sutherland, who took the helm of Showtime’s ‘Last Light,’ in which he stars as a condemned prisoner.

At 26, actor Kiefer Sutherland hadn’t planned to direct the hard-hitting prison drama in which he’s starring. But when the original director dropped out, Sutherland stepped in and approached his first directing assignment with the outward aplomb of a veteran, even though he had only 20 days for shooting.

The film, “Last Light,” co-stars Forest Whitaker (“The Crying Game”), who also has recently tried his hand at directing.

It will premiere Sunday at 9 p.m. on Showtime.

“It just seemed odd to have someone else come in at that point,” said Sutherland, whose Stillwater production company is co-executive producer of the film. “So I asked Forest if he would mind (if I direct) and he said, ‘No.’ That was enough incentive for me to want to do this. I have had a wonderful time doing it. If the film turns out well, then I would do it again. If the film doesn’t do well, then I won’t.”

Sutherland, the star of “The Lost Boys” and “Flatliners,” is the son of actor Donald Sutherland. In “Last Light,” he plays Denver Bayliss, a condemned murderer who was brought up in the penal system as a juvenile delinquent and never got out. Whitaker stars as Fred Whitmore, a Death Row prison guard who ends up befriending Bayliss.

Earlier this year, during the last week of production, Sutherland was shooting a scene between Whitaker and himself on a Culver City sound stage. The grimy, realistic Death Row set was originally constructed for the 1979 Clint Eastwood movie “Escape From Alcatraz.” (“Last Light” was also filmed on location at Soledad prison in Northern California.)

Sutherland intently studied the scene on video playback with director of photography Ric Waite. Everybody seemed pleased with the scene, in which Whitmore tells Bayliss when he will be executed. Sutherland conferred with Waite and decided to do one more take.

Whitaker, who appeared with Sutherland in the 1992 feature “Article 99,” was impressed with his friend’s maturity behind the camera. “This is like a monumental task because his character is very intense,” said Whitaker, who directed his first film, “Strapped,” for HBO.

“That alone keeps him on the edge, and to do this film in the short period of time we are doing it, it’s amazing,” Whitaker said. “I think he trusts me and we trust each other. As a director, he’s really easy and smooth. We’re actually ahead of schedule now, which is totally unbelievable. I was always positive about working with him. But the ease with which it is going, I have been really fascinated by it.”

“He’s a natural,” writer/executive producer Robert Eisele said of Sutherland. “First of all, he’s deeply intelligent and that helps. He’s learned an awful lot being in the movies. This is a guy who is observing everything. He’s truly the director of this.”

Sutherland, interviewed while a makeup man prepares him for the execution scene, observed that “some days it really feels good and easy, and sometimes it doesn’t.”

“It fluctuates,” he continued. “The material is real solid and the actors I have are real solid. I’ve had a tremendous amount of help from the crew and Mary McLaglen, the producer. I’ve got great people around me who have helped, so a lot of the pressures and burdens have been relieved.”

Before production began, Sutherland watched numerous documentaries on Death Row inmates. “In all of the documentaries that I’ve watched, in the last four or five days of their lives, they’ve an incredible calm to them,” he said. “They go through such a system of humiliation when they’re killed that they are really dead (inside). Their heads are shaved in front of the rest of the prisoners on Death Row. They’re isolated. They’re constantly surrounded by guards. You just lose your spirit. It’s designed that way so that they can walk calmly to their death.”

Sutherland didn’t want to meet with any inmates. “I’ve spent a lot of time up at Soledad and a lot of prisons around the country and watching how that system works,” he explained. “Why would a Death Row inmate ever talk to me straight?”

The main reason why Sutherland was eager to do “Last Light” is that he has a problem with capital punishment.

“The state is killing someone in everybody else’s name,” Sutherland said. “I don’t buy that. I don’t support that. I resent the fact that it’s not put to a majority vote. I think it’s embarrassing that we are the only Western civilization in the world left that implements the death penalty. I think it really sets a tonality for how we as a country look at ourselves and how other countries look at us.”

Sutherland maintains that if the government took the money it spends to execute a prisoner and used it to invest in a foster care program “that actually worked for children between the ages of 3 and 5, then we would get somewhere in the reduction of crime. I’m just so tired of just hearing people say that the death penalty is a deterrent. It’s not curbed the crime wave ever. I just think it’s absolutely ridiculous as a concept.”

Besides, he added, “no one is ever deadly sure if they have actually gotten the right man. You have to assume that all the policemen who have arrested these people, who are under pressure to arrest a criminal for a heinous crime, are telling the truth in their interrogations and reports. You have to assume so many things.”

People who support the death penalty, Sutherland said, “believe in the concept more than they believe in a reality of getting to see someone go through the process. That’s what I think is interesting about this film. At no point do we ever make this guy look good, or nice, or make you feel sorry for him. You only feel sorry for him if you feel sorry for the situation. If you feel sorry for the situation, then you don’t fully believe in the death penalty.”