Nicolas, we sent you very moved to receive this award …

Nicolas Druart: Ah it’s even hard to believe! It was announced to me a week ago at the Toulouse Polars du Sud festival and I can’t get over it. The fact of being received at the Capitol in addition to receive my award with Olivier Marchal, it’s hard to describe! And when I think back to the winners of previous editions like Bernard Minier, Céline Denjean, Olivier Norek, it’s incredible for me!

Writing is not your primary profession …

ND: I am a nurse and on availability so I take care of my little girl so I have the opportunity to write a lot. And Toulouse, where I have been based for 10 years, inspires me a lot. To write, I need to have a setting that I know, that I can go and locate and, without a building going into too much detail, a building in Toulouse inspired me and I created a story around it for the plot of my next novel.

Olivier, how did you come to be the sponsor of this edition of the Prix de l’Embouchure?

Olivier Marchal: By the merest chance ! Pascal Passamonti and Christophe Bertrand, the organizers of the prize, called me and I said yes! I was going to give the prize last year and it turns out that something happened that concerned us all… And this year I was scouting for my next film in the region and in Toulouse so we combined the two !

Is reading thrillers like Nicolas’ nurturing?

OM: Anyway that’s what I say to young people who want to write thrillers, “You know what? You invite two or three cops to dinner at noon, you leave them at 6 p.m. and you have 200 stories to tell! »I am obviously inspired by what I lived (Olivier Marchal was a police officer from 1980 to 1994, editor’s note), I read a lot of thrillers and other things, I find an incredible force, an incredible lyricism in literature policewoman and afterwards obviously as soon as I have friends who tell their stories I transform them and I inspire myself. The thriller universe is modern tragedy, it is only there that we can go far, very far.

Nicolas is what you do to write …

ND: Yes, I am weaving more and more of the network, whether it is in the middle of the gendarmerie for “The Enclave” and within the police for the next one. I ran into some great people who help me a lot.

Olivier, will your next film be shot in the Occitanie Region and in Toulouse?

OM: Filming begins in Marseille at the beginning of November and then prepares in Perpignan, Narbonne, Carcassonne, Toulouse in December and in the Parisian suburbs at the end of January. It tells of a criminal investigation in Paris which will collide with a go fast (1) which starts in Spain. The two investigations therefore join together with the Paris Crim cops and the Toulouse PJ to investigate.

What will happen in Toulouse?

We are going to shoot at Place du Capitole, we have found a setting for the STPJ in Toulouse in a great building with adorable lawyers and real estate agents who leave all their premises available to us. We are going to shoot in the surroundings, in Ariège and elsewhere so I am eating for miles! (laughs) And the casting is super sexy since there will be on the set Sofia Essaïdi, Nicolas Cazalé, Assaad Bouab, my daughter Zoe to whom I gave a small role who will play a little cop so I’m very happy and very proud, Alberto Ammann who plays the leader of the Colombian cartel Pacho Herrera in “Narcos: Mexico”, Kool Shen, Simon Abkarian, Nassim Si Ahmed who is a great actor and Kenza Fortas who played in “Bac Nord”.