He arrived in Marseille with his cameras to shoot Pax Massilia and is preparing to settle down in a mix of professional and personal life. For 20 minutesOlivier Marchal looks back on his new series available on December 6 on Netflix and on a city where police and traffickers wage a nervous war daily, in fiction as in reality.
You have worked, played and filmed several times in Marseille. What do you find cinematographically in this city?
It’s a mixture of noises, colors, cries, smells… It was said of a painter who was one of Ernest Hemingway’s best friends and whose name escapes me, that his painting smelled of perspiration and sounded like a great burst of laughter. For me, Marseille is that. A city that sweats, lives, sings, laughs. Obviously, I’m doing crime fiction. So there is the inherent violence and darkness, but the setting of the city makes everything magnified. And I like to magnify violence.
When I was a cop in the 1980s, it was 40-45 year old guys who were shooting each other. Dying at 16 for coke, I find it terrible. That’s all there is to drug trafficking anyway. There is no more money in the banks, in the vans. Plus, the guy who robbed a van took twenty bucks, a drug dealer took seven or eight. See, in the end, the guy prefers sex to riding coal. And anyway there’s nothing left to rob, so there you go.
Is a war on drugs winnable? Drugs are everywhere today, among the rich, among the poor, in all neighborhoods, is it fucked up?
Who hasn’t taken one? Everyone takes it, it’s everywhere, they’re throwing it out to you now like a pack of cigarettes. In my time it was 2,000 francs per gram – the equivalent of 400-450 euros. There you hit him for 40 balls. It’s easy, everyone celebrates with it. I don’t know if it’s winnable. Above all, it creates an incredible parallel economy. I have a drug buddy who busted a big deal. And at one point there were complaints because the rent was no longer being paid. There was no more money coming in, it’s as simple as that. So, I wasn’t the last, I acted like an idiot like everyone else. There you go, alcohol, drugs, and everything. Afterwards there is the awareness of the states of decerebration, and especially of these fucking descents. We’re doing the moral roller coaster and that’s all we need to talk about. The fight will come from there: discouraging people from taking it.
In “Pax Massilia”, a new network sets up with a new product, crack, which we still have very little of in Marseille, creates a mess and the deaths pile up. Does Marseille need to find a godfather in Zampa, in Campanella to find peace?
(laughter) We would like the old guys to come back. There’s still the Sea Breeze, but hey, they’ve calmed down. As in all families, you need a dad, an uncle. The big mistake was to eliminate community policing which made it possible to have big brother cops. Why don’t we go to the suburbs and talk to the kids? We are condescended to, we have the blue-white-red card, but we come from a background like you. Except that we had the codes that you don’t have because your brother is in prison, or the mother is dead, that the kids are left in the neighborhoods that have been despised by part of the administration. A Consolation [une cité de Marseille] – where we filmed for a week – frankly, you see the state, you say to yourself: “How are the kids doing? » So, many people get away with trafficking because they have to eat.
Your characters are a bit gray, always, your films are black, is this a bit of a reflection of what you are, of what you think?
I am a happy pessimist. At the same time, I am very melancholic and especially this time makes me despair. Lack of desire and curiosity, especially among kids. We were bored. Boredom made me go to my father’s library, who was not an intellectual, but there I discovered Thomson, Chandler, San Antonio… I wanted to be like Jack London, to have the life of Hemingway. Today there is a lack of culture, even in our artistic circles. The coming generation doesn’t even know who Lino Ventura, Jean Gabin, Marlon Brando are… People today want to be known, famous, and don’t do cinema or music to adopt the lifestyle. . I don’t want to say that it was better before, but I still think so very strongly. It was much better before.
Your cops are still great cops but they have problems with the administration, their hierarchy. We see it again in “Pax Massilia”, they have the IGPN on their backs. Should cops be less controlled? And is a good cop necessarily a bit of a thug?
It’s the famous saying “a cop is a thug gone bad”. Me, my cops today would all be in prison. I think it is necessary to control, that the role of the IGPN is very important. But, and this is the other saying that I put at the start of the series: “A wolf raised by dogs remains a wolf”. A wolf must be a wolf and when dealing with wolves we must behave like wolves, not like dogs. Techniques must be adapted to the opponent, for me. I am not for violence. We didn’t join cops to be violent but to serve and protect. It’s always like that. Afterwards, we always press the button, the pustule that is there. But hey, everything is fine anyway. Because when we see everything that happened in France, there were still no blunders and excessive excesses, despite all the situations which degenerated.
If you had been neither a cop, nor a filmmaker, nor an actor, could you have been a thug?
Me no (smile). I have a fascination with handsome thugs, but I leave their lives to them. Ending up on the sidewalk or in prison, I’m too afraid of that. I love freedom too much. I don’t know, I would have tended a bar. Bartender, there you go! I would have loved that (laugh).