Julie Delpy's latest film, which she wrote, directed and stars in, packs quite the punch - much like the woman herself. She talks to Ryan Gilbeyamid a lot of huffing and puffing
Julie Delpy smokes and smokes. She smokes so much she should consider wearing ashtrays as trinkets. We are in a faux-rustic restaurant in Berlin's Potsdamer Platz, where she is promoting the sharp and funny 2 Days in Paris, a romcom with bite, which she wrote, directed, produced, edited, scored, starred in and presumably smoked all the way through making.
At first I think the only time she's not smoking is when she's talking. But she has so much to say - she can rattle off an entire exhaustive answer before you've finished asking your initial question - that eventually the division between speaking and inhaling vanishes, and the words are tumbling from her mouth wreathed in smoke. It doesn't sound very attractive, but remember this is Julie Delpy. She could be up to her elbows in offal, belching La Marseillaise, but she'd still have admirers establishing cults in her name. And chances are, she'd still loathe that kind of attention.
"I hate being a male fantasy," she spits. "So many times I've been in a room pitching some movie to the financiers, and they're blatantly just staring at my legs." Before this conjures images of a stereotypical Hollywood executive leering from behind his desk, Delpy is quick to point out that she won't take that behaviour from revered arthouse auteurs either. In the early 1990s, she auditioned for the dual lead roles in Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Véronique. "He asked me to do a sexy gesture," she says, her incredulity undiminished after all these years.
"That really bothered me. So I did this . . . " She pokes her tongue out and tugs on her earlobes like a playground brat. "I knew by the look on his face that I hadn't got the part. But I was really mad with him. All that younger-woman bullshit you get. That f**king pervert. That . . . man." She makes the noun drip with derision.
Delpy and Kieslowski eventually worked together in Three Colours: White(1994), in which he cast her as a woman who divorces her husband when he fails to consummate their marriage. And the pair enjoyed a friendship - Delpy now says that the late director was "the greatest man in the world".
"I think my audition for Véronique convinced him I could play someone a bit hard to handle. Not that I'm bad-tempered, but I have my pet peeves. I always hated, when I was growing up, all these directors who wanted to be my Pygmalion." Hearing this, it's impossible not to mentally run through the roll-call of film-makers on Delpy's CV.
At 14, she appeared in Jean-Luc Godard's Detective, having been encouraged to act by her parents, Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet, who are both actors (they have crowd-pleasing turns as her on-screen folks in 2 Days in Paris). Later, she worked with Volker Schlöndorff ( Europa, Europa), Leos Carax ( Mauvais Sang), Bertrand Tavernier ( La Passion Béatrice) and Carlos Saura ( La Noche Oscura).
THAT'S A LOT of potential Pygmalions to choose from. "I like to be the Pygmalion, instead of someone else," she decides. "I prefer to make people into things, not be moulded by other people."
The most interesting thing about the 37-year-old Delpy in person is her unexpected hardness. I suddenly realise she's never shown it fully in any of her performances. Yes, there was a hint of it in Three Colours: White. But while she is sublime in her signature role, as the idealistic Celine in Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise(1995) and its sequel Before Sunset(2004), she only gets to play the odd prickly moment. Even in An American Werewolf In Paris (1997) - which, like her brief spell in TV's ER, was one of the few mainstream concessions in a stubbornly marginal career - she is a smiling lycanthropic temptress, never quite dredging up the darkness necessary to tip that film from comedy into horror.
The woman herself is another matter. Beneath the playful indiscretion and hearty laughter is something flinty, businesslike and brusque.
It's all the more fascinating because she was out in public a few nights earlier, putting on what I now realise was a performance. After a rapturously received gala screening of 2 Days in Paris, she stumbled up the red-carpeted steps, then blathered absent-mindedly into the microphone. It was nothing like the focused, clear-sighted woman sitting before me. Possibly she felt there was spikiness enough in her film, and that the audience that night deserved a taste of Brand Delpy, with its inbuilt promise of gap-year goofiness.
2 Days in Parisis a bit of a sock in the mouth for anyone who thought there was something ditsy about Delpy. Contrary to the wistful title, there is a real punch in every punchline here. Delpy plays Marion, opposite Adam Goldberg as her American boyfriend, Jack. The two go on holiday to Europe and visit Marion's parents in Paris.
What is meant to be a relaxing digression becomes a battlefield, in which the white, male, American ego and the French self-image suffer the severest injuries.
Jack looks on aghast as Marion's old boyfriends emerge from the woodwork, and she goes into flirting overdrive. Even as her film targets male sexual insecurity, Delpy exposes the rankness, and rancour, of this supposedly romantic city, culminating in a tense scene in which she bawls out a sexist, xenophobic taxi driver. "I don't argue with them in real life," she admits. "That's why I wrote myself that scene. It's what I wish I had the guts to say." As witty and abrasive as the film is, it risks being overshadowed by memories of Woody Allen (Delpy wears his trademark thick-framed spectacles for much of her screen time) and Before Sunset, which was set in the same city.
"The glasses were to help me alter my appearance," she explains. "I was trying to appear as different as possible from how I looked in Before Sunset. I put on 25lbs, and I found those glasses in a flea market just before shooting. I love Woody, but I never tried to make a film like him. What really inspired me was Jaws- but instead of the shark, the threat to Jack comes from all these virile French guys. He's under attack."
She's not kidding. A rather worrying motif of castration and dismemberment runs through the film. "The truth is it was written and directed so quickly, I didn't have time to analyse it. Yes, there is talk about chopping off penises, condoms cutting off circulation, penises needing to be lifted with balloons, so I have to say . . . no comment."
She seems genuinely bashful, caught out by the subtext of her own film.
"I scare myself. I think I have a penis obsession. Because I don't have a penis. Well, I mean, I have one at home. But it's not on me. It's attached to my partner. Maybe I wish I had one . . . " She takes a few urgent drags on her cigarette, wafting away the smoke, and the subject.
AS FOR THE superficial similarities between 2 Days in Parisand Before Sunset, Delpy maintains that the film wouldn't have got made without them. She has been writing scripts of wildly different kinds since she was 16.
There was Tell Me, about a hostage who charms her kidnappers by telling them stories. And Bathory, about a countess who bathed in virgins' blood. (The latter is currently in production as The Countess, with Delpy once again directing and starring.) Getting them financed was another matter. As far as backers were concerned, she was a cutie-pie, and they wanted a script that reflected that persona.
"The response I got whenever I pitched something was, 'Why don't you write something sweet?'." She had co-written Before Sunrisewith Hawke, Linklater and Kim Krizan, though she and Hawke were not credited.
"It was very painful for Ethan and me. Richard 'didn't have the power' to get us credited." She makes sarcastic quote-mark signs with her fingers when she says that.
On Before Sunset, both actors received not only their dues but an Oscar nomination for best screenplay to boot. Still, it was clear that she would only be trusted to direct something within the confines of the romantic-comedy genre.
"So I wrote 2 Days in Paris," she shrugs. "But I twisted the idea of Before Sunset. I love that film but the characters are in a bubble, Paris has no influence. Here, it's the opposite. The city is destroying Marion and Jack - their environment is literally attacking them."
Delpy still has a home in Paris, but spends much of her time in Los Angeles, where she writes furiously in between other pursuits - singing, for instance (she released a self-titled CD four years ago), or plugging away at her acting career, which shows no signs of becoming any more predictable or purposeful than it is now.
Delpy merely does whatever piques her interest: a walk-on as the girlfriend walking out on Bill Murray in Broken Flowers; playing the actress Nina Van Pallandt in The Hoax, opposite Richard Gere; or appearing with Forest Whitaker in the ensemble drama The Air I Breathe.
"I love acting," she says, "but I'm not a very actressy person. I don't like the vanity it encourages, the way it makes you concerned about your age or your appearance. Writing doesn't have that problem. For me, writing comes - well, I wouldn't say before love but . . . "
She thinks for a moment, gives a little wobble of the head and changes her mind. "Yeah, I'd say it comes before."
