Article & Journal Resources

December 14, 2007

Nothing daunts this all-rounder, writes Philippa Hawker.
''PARIS is a wonderful place," says Julie Delpy, "but it's not a postcard. There are bad sides to it, and if you're raised there, you know that it has edges, sharp ones. There's crime, there's murder …" and she starts to laugh, because in her new film, 2 Days in Paris, it's not the dark underbelly of the city of lights that she is bringing to the screen but something more mundane, awkward and funny.

In 2 Days in Paris, the sharp edges, after all, are things such as "taxi drivers, ex-boyfriends, all this stuff that happens, simple things that cause trouble", when a French woman (Delpy) and her American boyfriend take a quick trip to her hometown and discover that it's not the ideal setting for a relationship crisis to play out.
Especially not if — like Jack, played with deadpan neurotic relish by Adam Goldberg — you're an insular New Yorker who doesn't speak French and fears everything unfamiliar. (Although there's a certain type of American abroad that he is all too familiar with, and on whom he exercises a quick and dirty form of revenge.)
But Paris highlights the differences between the pair, in Delpy's movie. "It's her city, not his, that's the big difference. It's her environment, but he's totally lost, and he's not the kind of person who adapts easily."

Marion is a volatile figure, and — although she might keep some secrets from her boyfriend — she's not afraid to speak her mind, when it comes to behaviour she finds unacceptable or remarks that she thinks are off limits. It's a trait that Delpy says she was happy to write.

She's well aware, she says, that audiences are meant to find romantic comedy characters likeable, but she can't see why Marion can't be a likeable person with a temper, as long as it's exercised judiciously. It's a familiar trait, Delpy says; a lot of her friends have a short fuse. And, she adds, "I like to be with a woman who will snap at the right person at the right time".

2 Days in Paris is "a Julie Delpy film": she's the director, writer, female lead, co-producer and editor; she also composed and performed songs for it. Her character, Marion, is a photographer, rather than an actress, but she shares a few aspects of the actress' life, including her problems with eyesight and her family: Delpy asked her father and mother, actors Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet, to be Marion's mother and father in the movie, and they have happily taken up the chance to portray assertive, demanding, indulgent and laissez-faire parents who take a slightly dim view of their daughter's latest man.

Delpy admits it wasn't easy juggling all those responsibilities, although the hardest part of getting the film made was raising the money. "But the thing is, I realised that I'm better when I have too much to do than not enough. I was exhausted, there were lots of insane production issues, and someone close to me almost died two days before I started shooting … but none of that shows."

Delpy, 38, has had plenty of opportunities to find her way around a film set. She began her acting career early, making her stage debut at age five. At 14, she had a role in Jean-Luc Godard's Detective; she was in Leos Carax's Bad Blood, played her first lead in Bertrand Tavernier's Beatrice, was in Agnieszka Holland's Europa Europa, and played one of the principal female characters in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Colours trilogy, with a key role in the second film, Three Colours: White.

Working with these directors, she says, was "a fantastic life experience and professional experience", but she's not sure exactly what she took from any of them when it has come to making her own films.

"When I worked with Kieslowski," she says, "I noticed that he was very attached to details, and I spent a lot of time talking to him about filmmaking, about the details. But I'm like that anyway. I guess I realised, through him, that it's not a bad thing to be a little obsessive about getting everything right, everything the way you want it."

Comedy, she says, is all about details, about finding "the funny little things that will make people laugh", about an accumulation of bits and pieces that people mightn't even notice the first time they're watching the movie. It might be the fact that at the beginning of the film Marion is wearing a T-shirt with a gun on it that seems to be pointing directly at Jack, or fleeting movie references, such as a tip of the hat to Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia in the opening voice-over, or the fact that Marion's cat is named after Godard.

She also knows, she says, from bitter experience that it pays to be well prepared. And, although Marion can lose her temper in a good cause, it's not a good idea for a director, "even if people are driving you bonkers or being horrible. Always stay cool."
Delpy moved to the US in 1990, and has balanced American and European movie roles ever since, as well as getting her directing career off the ground. She played D'Artagnan's beloved in the 1993 Hollywood version of The Three Musketeeers, and in 1995 starred opposite Ethan Hawke in Before Sunrise, one of the best-loved of the independent movies of the '90s.

Hawke was an American travelling through Europe, Delpy a French girl on her way back home: the characters met on a train, and spent a night together in Vienna, before going their separate ways. It's a beguiling, intensely romantic film that feels like a contemporary movie and a throwback, and it was inevitable that the pair should meet again, in a 2004 sequel, Before Sunset, that's set in Paris.

Delpy is readying herself to start — soon, she hopes — on a new film that she has written and will direct and star in. The Countess is a period drama about a woman who, she cheerfully admits, is far from likeable and a long way from the occasionally prickly Marion. It is about Countess Elizabeth Bathory, the 16th-century Hungarian aristocrat whose exploits have passed into legend; she has been "turned into an almost mythical figure of a vampire and a monster".

It's a new step for her, as a director, Delpy says, "and I'm going to a place I've never gone to, even as an actress".