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.

Not unsurprisingly, Delpy cast them both in the roles, and makes no apologies for it. “They’re two wonderful actors, and I’ve always wanted to direct them,” she says.

Born in Paris in 1969, Delpy admits she didn’t automatically want to act just because her parents were in the profession. “My parents didn’t have much money,” she says. “So often I’d inherit my cousin’s clothes. I made my first cash acting, so I could go and buy my own clothes.” Both her mother and father regularly went through periods of unemployment, she says, “which is why, when I began acting I promised myself that I would do other things as well.” She wrote her first screenplay at 16, though, as she dryly notes, it has taken “20 years to get money out of people” to let her direct.

At the time, Delpy could be forgiven for thinking she was not going to emulate her parents’ wavering fortunes. Her first role came for the legendary French director Jean-Luc Godard, in his 1985 film noir Détective, and she swiftly began working with some of Europe’s most maverick directors before meeting Polish maestro Krzysztof Kieslowski, who wound up casting Delpy in her finest role to date - as a woman in an unfulfilled marriage - in the 1990s’ Three Colours trilogy.

Prior to this, the fresh-faced blonde starlet had already auditioned for Kieslowski for The Double Life Of Veronique, though it didn’t go well. He asked Delpy to perform a sexy “gesture” on camera, and she stuck her tongue out in response. “I don’t like to be a male sexual fantasy,” she says. “I like men to be my sexual fantasy! And I suffered from that in France, where it’s very much you take an actress and make her into your own little sexual fantasy - and I didn’t want to be that.”

Certainly Delpy has never been one to play into the hands of filmmakers - which is probably why she has not much of a mainstream career to speak of. “I don’t go into the Hollywood world,” she shrugs. That said, this month she makes a fleeting appearance in The Hoax, playing with Richard Gere’s mistress. “It was fun to do,” she shrugs. “I got to wear a lot of Seventies make-up and crazy hair.”

Yet her reticence to appear in commercial fare is understandable. In 1997, she took the lead in the woeful An American Werewolf In Paris, the sequel to John Landis’s London-set horror classic. A “money job”, as she puts it, her career then drifted towards a depressing lull. “From 30 to 33, I didn’t really get anything I was interested in and I meant nothing to anyone,” she reflects. “It made me go back and think, ‘Do I want to be an actress, waiting for a part by the phone, waiting for my agent to find me work?’ And I realised it’s not really me.” Her first attempt at forging herself a new identity was in co-writing Before Sunset, which eventually saw her, Hawke and director Richard Linklater nominated for an Oscar. One of the most critically praised films of 2004, it gave Delpy the natural impetus to want to direct. Nevertheless, she found that people were “scared” to finance any of her existing scripts, until “a friend of mine told me one day, ‘Write something that seems like Before Sunset but make it totally different, so people will be reassured and give you money.’”

It evidently worked, though she’s keen to separate the two films: “Before being a romantic story, Two Days In Paris is a comedy.” Now, Delpy is about to go into production on her second film as writer-director, period drama The Countess. Co-starring William Hurt and Radha Mitchell, Delpy has cast herself as murderous 16th century Hungarian aristocrat Elizabeth Bathory.

At least nobody can accuse her of basing it on herself this time. “I hope people won’t think that I kill young virgins and bathe in their blood.” v

Two Days In Paris closes the Film Festival on August 26, before going on general release on August 31 www.edfilmfest.org.uk.

Source: Scotsman.com Living