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 36 interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Auteuil vs Depardieu. Two heavyweight screen legends go head to head in an epic, hard-hitting story of cops, criminals and corruption. Director Olivier Marchal is well aware of the “French Heat” tags applied to 36, his Daniel Auteuil / Gerard Depardieu policier, though, as the genial, rumpled 48-year old filmmaker chuckles self-deprecatingly, “I’m no Michael Mann, non?”Indeed not. Mann, for all his fascination with law and disorder, never worked as a cop. Marchal was a long-time flic before gradually moving into the world of TV and film, whose personal experience informs 36. The story is based on the true case of Marchal’s former friend and colleague, Dominique Loiseau, famously framed and imprisoned in the mid-80s.  “I owed it to him to tell his story,” says Marchal. “And through coincidence and mutual friends we got together and were able to make the film. Bizarrely, with the release of the film, the whole news event made more noise than when the actual events happened in the first place.” 36 actually merges two real-life cases - that of Loiseau, here named Vrinks (Auteuil), and a rival Anti-Gang Squad boss whose rash behaviour on a gang bust cost lives. In the film, this trigger-happy cop, Klein (Depardieu), and Vrinks spar not only professionally but also over a woman. As Marchal modestly describes it, his main intention was not to pretend to bring more realism to his policier but rather to make “an urban Western.” “The only thing where I’d say that I have brought something more is the emotion and pain that a policeman can endure through doing this job,” he allows. “My aim was to show all these cops like lost souls, abandoned by life, destined to solitude. To be a cop is like a slow agony - at 50 they’re all alcoholic paranoiacs really marked by what they’ve seen and done. It’s a slow death, really.”  Small wonder then, that Marchal chose to leave while he still could – he cites working on a particularly terrible double-murder and sexual torture case as finally driving him out – although measuring cinema against police work doesn’t make sense. “You can’t compare filmmaking to being in the middle of the night on an emergency call,” he says flatly. Fair enough. If you spot the heat around the corner and make a mistake, it’s only on a film set that you call “cut” and go again.
Leigh Singer
36, on selected release 02 June 06.
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