"I don't audition much, because people don't really call me for anything," says actor Julie Delpy with a laugh. The statement is hard to believe. Sharp intelligence and edgy humor permeate Delpy's performances, the most impressive of which are in roles she has written for herself. Her screenwriting landed her an Academy Award nomination, for co-writing (with her co-star Ethan Hawke and director Richard Linklater) 2004's Before Sunset, the follow-up to 1995's Before Sunrise. The sequel also featured songs from her self-written and self-produced album.
As an actor she has worked with some of the past century's legendary directors: Jean-Luc Godard, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Agnieszka Holland. Yet, Delpy insists, "My agent hasn't found me a job for a long time. But I don't really care so much, because I'm already shooting my next film as a director."
Most moviegoers know Delpy for her breakthrough role as the charmingly witty Celine opposite Hawke in Before Sunrise, but few realize that her career as a writer-director began that year with the debut of her first short film, Blah Blah Blah, which screened at the Sundance and Telluride film festivals. Delpy, who studied film at New York University, directed and co-wrote her second film, 2002's Looking for Jimmy (set in Los Angeles, where Delpy lives), and a 2004 short called J'ai peur, j'ai mal, je meurs. Due out this month is 2 Days in Paris, which Delpy wrote and directed — a project that wouldn't have materialized were it not for her nearly 20 years of challenging the industry to see her as more than an actor. The film is earning her comparisons to Woody Allen.
"It took me so long to get money and make a movie. I wrote my first screenplay when I was 17, and I dragged, like, screenplay after screenplay from production company to production company and was told to go fuck myself," Delpy recalls. As a woman and as an actor, Delpy has struggled to make financiers take her talents as a filmmaker seriously — despite that she began soaking in filmmaking techniques as an actor at age 14, on the set of Godard's Détective, and while working with Holland on 1990's Europa Europa and with Kieslowski, in whose White she played the lead.
For years Delpy danced between mainstream and independent roles in American and French films. She took on the role of the title character in Roger Avary's first feature, 1994's Killing Zoe, because the director impressed her with his vision. She played typical ingénues in 1993's The Three Musketeers and in An American Werewolf in Paris four years later. She parlayed her signature role in Before Sunrise into a cameo as the character Celine in the 2001 animated feature Waking Life. She has had small but poignant parts in other independent films, such as But I'm a Cheerleader, Investigating Sex, and Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers. This year she appeared in Lasse Hallström's The Hoax, playing real-life Baroness Nina van Pallandt, the pivotal character who betrays author Clifford Irving (Richard Gere). But despite her acting achievements, Delpy's attempts, as a filmmaker, to land financing were generally unsuccessful.
"If you're a woman, it's 10 times — if not 100 times — as hard as a man [in this business]. Plus, being an actress, people wouldn't take me seriously," Delpy says. "Even for 2 Days in Paris, people gave me money, but they gave me half a million euros. It's not like they gave me millions. And they were scared to lose their money. They had no trust in me whatsoever. There's something about women [being perceived as] not being fully competent in achieving things."
But Delpy proved her competence, shooting 2 Days in a month. The film follows New Yorkers Marion (Delpy) and Jack (Adam Goldberg), as their relationship unravels due to the strains of staying with Marion's non-English-speaking parents; running into her various ex-lovers; and facing some of the most unpleasant realities of French culture on a visit to Paris. The speedy production schedule called for raw, unaffected performances from Delpy and Goldberg and Delpy's real-life parents — actors Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet — who play her parents in the film.
Consisting primarily of first takes — a move that was inspired by Godard, whom Delpy saw give actors sparse rehearsal time before shooting, to prevent their analyses of the scenes from interfering with their performances — 2 Days feels undeniably organic. "There's two ways of making something feel totally natural: Either you just do it on the first take and it's great and totally natural, or you rehearse it so much that it becomes natural again," Delpy says. Linklater used the latter technique while shooting Before Sunset, which Delpy rehearsed arduously with Hawke. Few know that Delpy wrote the first draft of the monologue-heavy Sunset in about five days. Even fewer know she might not have finished it if she had listened to her then-agent.
After Delpy's agent at the time caught wind of her involvement in the sequel, he informed her that the agency had held a meeting regarding her work on the project and decided that she was wasting her time writing and not focusing enough on her acting career. The agent insisted that the film would never get made and that if it did, it would do nothing for her career. Then he dropped her as a client. "What's stupid is that I was writing myself a part — a good part. It's not like I wasn't focusing on my acting," Delpy says. The film then earned an Oscar nomination for adapted screenplay. Notes Delpy, "It did more for my career than any other film."
Though Delpy wrote the majority of 2 Days in Paris prior to shooting Before Sunset, she had already molded the story as the antithesis of a typical Parisian romance. "I wanted it to be crude," Delpy says of the film, which is inspired largely by her past relationships with men, especially the jealous ones. She wanted to show the fighting that goes on and the terrible things people dare to say to one another when they're in love. "It's not because people are saying horrible things to one another that they don't love one another. I'd rather have someone call me a cunt that cares for me than someone not caring for me," Delpy says. "What matters is if love is there or not. I feel that's more important."
Once shooting was complete, she edited and scored the film. She says the decision to wear so many hats on the project wasn't born out of a desire to have total creative control: "I never thought about it so much; I just did it. If you don't know you have limitations, then you can go further." Delpy says artists get too consumed with focusing on what they perceive as their boundaries. She chooses to push past them. Delpy had never edited or scored a film, but she knew how to tell a story and play music. And she was determined not to put constraints on her talent. "For example, I had never played piano until, like, three years ago, and I composed all the music for the film on a piano, because I said to myself, 'You know what? I don't care if I don't know how to play the piano; I'm just going to write it on the piano,'" she says. "So, in a way, when you don't limit yourself, you open doors to things that you had no idea you could do, and it's not that complicated."