Too Smart For The Americans

Sun Herald

Sunday December 23, 2007

Helen Barlow

French actress Julie Delpy is very much her own woman; funny and highly talented, writes Helen Barlow.

Julie Delpy is quite a character. In interviews she does not hold back on her attitudes to sex, politics or almost anything else. In fact the 39-year-old French beauty, who started acting at age 14 and is burnt in our memories as Ethan Hawke's prospective lover in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, can be positively ribald. No wonder the Americans didn't know what to do with her.

Delpy, who lives in Los Angeles and spends part of each year in her home town of Paris, says her smart and sometimes cutting sense of humour comes from her dad, Albert Delpy.

Delpy snr, along with Julie's mother, Marie Pillet, both appear in her latest film 2 Days In Paris, which also stars her former real-life lover Adam Goldberg as her on-screen beau.

It's a complicated scenario but one perhaps only Delpy could find amusing.

"Even moments in my life that have been painful like a real break-up, I can't help myself," she says in her sing-song French-Californian accent. "Suddenly I'm in the middle of it and the guy says a line to me and I go, 'Hey, nice line.' I've had horrible things to deal with in my life and family but humour is a way to make it bearable."

A talented writer, Delpy had been struggling to finance her period drama The Countess (numerous screenplays she has written over the years failed to be made) when friends suggested she draw on her success with Before Sunset and make a low-budget movie to get everyone's attention.

At the time of her Oscar win as co-writer of the film with Hawke and director Richard Linklater, it emerged that the trio had also written Before Sunrise - but both Hawke and Delpy had failed to be credited.

Now, as you watch 2 Days In Paris, you realise how much of the previous movies were Delpy's ideas. But given her film's current success and the fact that she has finally been able to finance The Countess as a result, she is not complaining. Delpy, who wrote, directed, produced, edited, composed the music and stars in 2 Days In Paris, has finally arrived - and very much on her own terms.

"It's more a comedy and not as much a romantic comedy as Before Sunset and Before Sunrise," she says. "The characters are ruder and less politically correct."

Delpy's performance as Marion, a nervy kind of woman returning to Paris after a holiday in Venice to introduce her parents to her neurotic New Yorker boyfriend Jack - who is so whiny he even disliked the city of gondolas - has been likened to Diane Keaton's pairing with Woody Allen.

For one thing Goldberg plays an Allen-esque hypochondriac and, while Goldberg admits that the character is "a thinly veiled version of himself", Delpy claims she is the biggest hypochondriac of them all. "I get a lot of scans. I know every organ of my body." Maybe it's Neuroses United.

In the movie Marion's father decides that Jack is one of the best blokes she's brought home but when Jack has to meet her numerous ex-boyfriends, the proverbial hits the fan.

"As Jack says, private property is the most important thing in his life; if you touch his shit he'll kill you. He's pretty much like a lot of men," Delpy notes. "He can be funny, intellectual, cynical, but something comes over him when he becomes jealous. Suddenly all logic goes out the window and this visceral ancestral fear men have takes over when he realises he's not the one in first."

The barbs that ensue between the couple, like almost everything in the film, are very funny - but they also ring incredibly true.

"Arguing is important," Delpy says. "It puts things back to where they should be, in a way. I've never seen a couple not arguing after a few years. It's not something bad; it means there's communication. So long as that's not all they do, and so long as arguing ends up with sex at the end, that's fine. No, I'm kidding. You argue until you find a common ground."

Underneath all the jokes the film is Delpy's view of what holds relationships together. "Finding someone you love is rare and giving up is easy," she says, suddenly becoming serious. "Other than having people close to you die, the most painful thing in life is when you look into your lover's eyes and the love is gone. To me it's total devastation."

Wherever Jack and Marion's relationship is headed when they return to New York, they have an interesting time around Paris, where Delpy cleverly fuels their dilemma with her skewed view of Paris. Filming guerilla-style, she ventures to Fete de la Musique, a national event where anyone can play music anywhere for the day. "I hired a lot of extras," she jokes. What upset the film's French financiers was her racist depiction of Parisian cab drivers, yet as always Delpy stuck to her guns.

"Cab drivers in Paris are very specific. It comes from one time when I was in Paris for two days and I went through hell. I had to basically jump out of four cabs because the drivers always start talking about politics and about what they think about everything.

"One told me he was listening to a program about battered wives on the radio because he'd had two wives and he'd beaten them both. The guy told me that!

"The difference is that, in life, I don't answer back like Marion does because they can be violent. She's a much tougher person than I am. I'm a wimp but she fights back and it's my dream one day to do that."

As in the film, Delpy has long maintained a studio above her parents' apartment in Paris and indeed they look after her cat. They had briefly appeared in Before Sunset and, Delpy says, "I would have been dead if I hadn't cast them. They're both wonderful actors and I've seen their work since I was born. I've never seen parts in the cinema that give them enough to do with their ability. They're very funny."

Even so, directing one's parents might stretch the nerves. "My mum was very disciplined and listened to me, while my dad was like a two-year-old, jumping around making jokes. My mum was nervous about saying she had an affair with Jim Morrison, which she never did, obviously, otherwise I would be his daughter." She pauses. "And that would be great. But no, my dad's great."

It was perhaps inevitable that Delpy would end up a creative eccentric. Her other formative experience was working with non-conformist French auteur Jean-Luc Godard on three films, including 1985's Detective. She was greatly influenced by his advice to forge her own path and she's done so ever since.

I first met Delpy at 1994's Berlin Film Festival, where she was receiving her first flush of international fame as the pale, ethereal beauty in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors: White. It was clear she was keen to work in English. The following summer, when I was invited to the Vienna set of Before Sunrise where she was appearing with Ethan Hawke - another actor with writing and directing talents - I jumped at the chance. On my arrival I learnt how she had been keeping everyone amused with her raunchy tales, toilet humour and general liveliness.

"Julie and I are more twisted than Ethan," Linklater told me. "My approach to relationships is like Julie's. I joke about things with her that I don't joke about with Ethan."

Continuing a certain friendliness, three years later I had arranged to meet Delpy in Paris to discuss her role in An American Werewolf In Paris. "Let's meet at Fouquet's," she said when we spoke on the phone. The swanky Champs Elysees restaurant where Nicolas Sarkozy held his presidential victory celebrations in May was far from anybody's idea of intimate.

Surely we could find a table in a quiet corner? Alas, no. When I arrived Delpy was already positioned in the middle of the room so it would hardly be an intimate tete-a-tete, as Delpy tends to speak loudly, as well as very fast.

"Should I know her?" an American man inquired when she went to a loo break.

"Yes, you should," I replied, "but you probably don't."

By the time Before Sunset premiered in Berlin in 2004, Delpy had done a brief stint on TV's ER, had directed her first experimental feature, Looking For Jimmy, and was spending most of the rest of her time singing with her band. "When you're an actor, if you find one good script a year it's like a miracle," she said. "When you find two, it's science fiction. I don't have that much work; I don't really have representation. So many people are screaming on the phone for jobs with their agents, calling directors and having sex with producers but I don't do that. I write, I play guitar and I paint. I'm happy I do all that."

At the time Hawke said he enjoyed "a lovely chemistry working with Julie" but he bemoaned her lack of work offers. "People are stupid in America; there aren't that many roles for French women and Julie's so French."

It is, of course, amazing what an Oscar can do. Even if it was far from easy, Delpy was finally given the chance to make her own movie. By that time her love life had become stable and she now lives in Los Angeles with her boyfriend of four years, German composer Marc Streitenfeld.

"When he was watching the film he said it was missing music," she recalls. "I have this file on my computer where I have themes and bits of music I wrote for fun. So I picked one and it worked and I wrote a special piece for the jealousy music that sounds like the music in Jaws. Instead of the sharks are coming, the Frenchmen are coming!" she cackles. "I kind of made fun of that so the music adds comedy to the film."

Delpy is now busy preparing to film The Countess, in which she will star as a real-life 15th-century Hungarian aristocrat, Erzebet Bathory, whose murderous ways inspired Gothic horror stories including Bram Stoker's Dracula. According to legend she bathed in the blood of virgins, believing it would preserve her beauty. Australia's Radha Mitchell will co-star as her friend and accomplice.

"The murders could be myth and the truth may be that she was a powerful woman who needed to be gotten rid of," Delpy says. "She was also a Protestant and the Catholics were worried about the Protestants taking over."

In other words it's bound to be scandalous, whichever way the story goes. And Delpy wouldn't have it any other way.

2 Days In Paris is released on Boxing Day.

The French connection

WHILE the French have a thriving film industry, the actors who make the transition from foreign film stardom to the mainstream are few and far between. We look at those who have crossed over.

Brigitte Bardot Bardot was one of the first French actresses to gain recognition outside her homeland. This had little to do with her acting talent, however, and more to do with her innate style and sex appeal. Bardot retired from the screen in the 1970s, devoting her life to animal welfare and sun worship.

Catherine Deneuve Regarded as one of the grande dames of French cinema, Deneuve had a successful career in the 1960s, with hits such as Belle De Jour, in which she played a housewife who moonlighted as a prostitute in the afternoons. She was later discovered by Hollywood, gaining notoriety for playing a lesbian vampire in 1983's The Hunger.

Juliette Binoche Binoche started acting in her teens but drew widespread attention for her work opposite Daniel Day-Lewis and Lena Olin in 1988's The Unbearable Lightness Of Being. She continued to beguile international audiences, winning an Oscar for best supporting actress in the 1996 epic, The English Patient.

Audrey Tautou The gamine Tautou won audiences' hearts with her role as the sweetly idiosyncratic Amelie Poulain before moving on to blockbuster material in The Da Vinci Code. She is working on a biopic about French style icon, fashion designer Coco Chanel.

Eva Green The latest ingenue to emerge from France honed her skills on the stage before hitting the cinematic big time in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers. But it was the role of Bond girl Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale that transformed her into a marquee name. She's due to appear on cinema screens this week as a good witch in The Golden Compass.

And then there's ...

Gerard Depardieu Proving that you don't have to be female and dripping with sex appeal to make the transition from French cinema to international fame is Depardieu, whose charm and talent clearly have no borders.

© 2007 Sun Herald

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