Advice from women, for women, on directing:

— Julie Delpy, longtime actress who directed, wrote, edited, wrote the score for and co-stars in 2 Days in Paris: “It’s going to be a harder road. You have to prove yourself more. You have to do better than men. You can’t fail. You can’t have weakness. Also, I think the danger when you’re a woman director — because you don’t want to be weak, because the minute you have a weakness people will blame it on you being a woman — you don’t want to become too harsh.”

Source: chron.com

Poolside, in a private cabana, wearing big, dark glasses and a sundress, Julie Delpy is talking. Her French accent, the bright white patio and the blue, rippling pool water conspire to provide an illusory Mediterranean mood to what is actually just a hotel in Westwood. As well-groomed bathers and wait staff float by on the mild air, Delpy leans in and begins railing against the evils of jealousy.

“Jealousy is always negative,” she says. “To be with someone jealous is the worst thing. It’s like the worst feeling in the world, and it’s suffocating. I’ve experienced men that are jealous. I don’t really feel jealousy. I think it’s cute when men flirt with other women.” When Julie Delpy talks, she trails off from one idea and segues into a variation on a similar theme and keeps going, assuming that you’ve gotten the gist without exactly wrapping up a single sentence.

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As she sprawls on a sofa in a dingy London hotel, Julie Delpy is doing her level best to deny her directorial debut, Two Days In Paris, which closes this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, is in the slightest bit autobiographical. In it Marion (Delpy) is a Parisian who returns to her home town with her American boyfriend Jack (Adam Goldberg) for a disastrous weekend. “It’s funny - a lot of people say to me, ‘Oh, you must feel really exposed’ and I don’t. They say, ‘Is it really your story with a guy?’ and I’m like, ‘No, it’s a fantasy.’” While this may be true, she has blurred the line between fantasy and fiction before, in 1995’s romance Before Sunrise and its sequel Before Sunset, with its theme of mid-life crisis appearing to emulate co-star Ethan Hawke’s then current break-up with Uma Thurman.

But Delpy maintains it was not the case then and is not so now. “The film comes more from thinking ‘What if I went to Paris with my boyfriend and everything went wrong?’ It’s a fantasy of my own paranoia of having problems in a relationship.” While she says she’s never had such an experience herself, even she can’t deny that there are similarities between her life and her character’s. Not only does she regularly shuttle back between the US and Paris, she willingly confesses that she based Marion’s parents on her own mother and father, stage actors Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet.

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Not long ago, I had a chance to sit down with Julie Delpy in Manhattan to talk about 2 Days in Paris, her upcoming directorial effort that’s bowing on August 10th. (You can check out Erik’s glowing Berlinale review here.) As she waited on some black tea to arrive, we quickly got into talking about the film, which is about a native Parisian played by Delpy who brings her American boyfriend home to Paris for a quick visit; the two of them try to survive what the resulting cultural shockwaves do to their relationship. We also got into the subject of her next directorial project — a biopic of the infamous 16th century ‘Blood Countess’ Elizabeth Bathory — and discussed the unconventional arc of her career in general. Delpy has been quite vocal about having grand ambitions as a director — she dreams of helming major action/sci-fi blockbusters — but told me with characteristic bluntness that her filmmaking goals wouldn’t force her to put acting on the backburner. “I don’t have to choose, so I’m not going to,” she said, pointedly. Here’s the interview.

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I’ve just added brand new goodies to the gallery and I hope you all enjoy the beautiful photos and the interview with Ms Delpy.

• 8x scans from h - July 2007
• 1x photo to set #001 of 2007
• 6x new additional photos to set #014 of 2004