Philippe Bas had promised it during the broadcast of the Devil’s Leap on TF1 in June 2021: if the TV movie “found its audience”, it would have a sequel. Bank! The very good score (6.1 million viewers) achieved by the first part of this action fiction convinced the channel to start work Devil’s Leap 2: Trail of the Wolves, broadcast this Monday at 9:10 p.m. Paul Vilar, the character embodied by the actor, must this time free teenagers taken hostage during an immersion in the great outdoors. A synopsis conducive to a chase in the wilderness, as we rarely see on French television. An “audacity” that Philippe Bas salutes with 20 minuteswhile announcing that two other parts are already on the way…
This return of Devil’s Leap after its public success, is it a particular source of pride for you?
It is a great pleasure ! I am very grateful to TF1 because the management found it difficult to agree to finance this format, which is not so common on French television. They usually favor very good series, a bit thrillers, sometimes with tougher themes… Devil’s Leap, it is an entertainment of adventure and action. I salute the channel that had the audacity to embark on this program. They trusted us and were right because the first issue brought together 6.1 million viewers, it’s crazy…
You declared at the exit of the first part that you “would like us to continue to see the ambitious small screen”. That’s to say ?
There are so many platforms, so many proposals, that the demands of the public are great. Today, viewers want to see beautiful films, that’s normal. And television still has cards to play! With the director, Julien Seri, our ambition was to do something entertaining but of high quality. We wanted to tell a sort of modern western. For him, it was a real requirement because he is a real filmmaker. He has already made several feature films, including one in the United States. Even though it’s a TV movie, The wolf trail is the best we can do. I have at heart to have a project combining adventure and action in a realization of a high quality. For this second part, we wanted to bring once again very beautiful landscapes and this form of grandeur typical of American action cinema.
Devil’s Leapit is also a wonderful postcard of France…
We realized this with the first part. It was a promise that we wanted to keep and cultivate. The story allows us to highlight these landscapes which are fully-fledged actors in the film. The mountain has this physiognomy that is both powerful and oppressive, which fits the story well. For this sequel, I wanted us to have more warmth with long focal lengths like in American films… I wanted us to change the universe but continue to give the viewer something of the order of a postcard that serves the story. We shot everything within a radius of 90 kilometers around Aix-en-Provence in places such as the Bruoux mines or the Provençal Colorado. These are places I had never been to and which are a bit crazy. Every day we left from a small Provençal village and five minutes by car later, we felt like we were on the planet Mars.
In terms of stunts, this second installment raises the bar even higher. Was it intentional on your part?
It’s true. I did things that a sports actor can do… For the first episode, we shot in twenty-six days, it’s colossal for a TV movie but it was necessary because we were shooting on the side of a cliff with a device complex. For The wolf trail, we only had twenty-three days. On the other hand, we had about fifty backgrounds and twenty-five additional characters… It was an even more difficult challenge to take up. Only two parachute jumps were made by a double, simply because it would have taken ten additional days for me to do them. We always have to fight against time a bit during filming…
Did this create additional pressure during filming?
It was tiring but it’s a fatigue that we didn’t feel so much because we were all very enthusiastic. I don’t think you have to work hard to do a good job. Even if it’s sometimes difficult, I like to bring positive energy during filming to put everyone in the best conditions. I put my ego aside so my playmates want to follow me. That’s how it works, when you put all your heart, everything you have, it transfers to other actors.
You have just celebrated your 49th birthday. Do you feel that at the physical level, you will not always be able to perform all these acrobatics?
I’m lucky because I do a lot of sports all year round. For the moment it holds and I still bet on ten years of stunts…
Should we deduce that this suggests ten years of Devil’s Leap coming ?
At least five (laughter). And then we will adapt. Either way, the character will age with me if the audience is on board. We have already started work on an episode 3 and an episode 4 for next year, which we will continue to work on if this second episode is a success. We would like to be able to register this fiction as a kind of collection to make two a year.
Action fiction is often quite expected. There are always men, rather muscular, coming to the aid of women… Do you think it is necessary to break with this type of scenario?
Yes. This is already what we tried to do with the character of Sarah Mortensen [qui joue la sergente Gabrielle Martinot revenant d’une mission au Yémen]. We wanted to bring in a strong female character. As we are already working on two additional films, we are trying to write characters who can tell an adventure story but also other characters who will come together to bring diversity. We always wanted to do different things with different characters. So in the end, we don’t need to make an effort to bring figures who break the codes, young people from the not so young, women…
You played Commander Thomas Rocher for eight years in the series Profiling. Do you miss this character?
Profiling brought me so many things even if the series ended in a somewhat surprising way. We thought we would continue and there was the Covid episode at the same time so it was a bit brutal. But I was so lucky to do this series that I have no regrets, it brought me so much… I was very lucky that this adventure lasted so long. The last episode ended with the police station burning, and the death of Jean-Michel Martial’s character… Looking back, I tell myself that it couldn’t have ended better. What excites me the most is for the public. It bothers me because there was a wait but on a personal level, I was able to bounce back.