Julie Delpy felt Overwhelmed when her directorial debut, Two Days in Paris, premiered at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. The culmination of years of struggle and frustration, it was a day she thought might never come. “It’s been really, really hard,” the French actress says. “I wrote my first script when I was 16. I directed my first film when I was 36. It took me 20 years to convince people to give me money.”

Her friends say she is the unluckiest person they know, given how hard she works at writing. Delpy partly ascribes her prolonged wait to get a film made to her refusal to write to formula. “I always write things that are quirky or different, either in genre or style, something that will be different, and it scares people away,” she says.

“They’re like a deer in the headlights. They’re terrified of giving money to something original.”

Nor, she believes, are the money men sympathetic to women directors. Believing her sex to be an obstacle, Delpy says she sometimes sent her scripts out with men’s names attached. People responded positively to her work - and even offered her money - and then they met her. “When I came into the room, they just didn’t want to finance my film any more,” she says. “We’ve seen women progress in politics, but in the film industry there’s a stigma. There’s no equality. It’s not there yet.”

She suggests that this extends to the kinds of subjects women can acceptably write about. Two Days in Paris is a romantic comedy, but she has also written thrillers, dramas and broader comedies - none of which has been produced. “We still have to fight that stereotype about not being able to talk about anything but love or romance,” she says. “I think that’s bullshit.”

I feel my eyebrows shoot up when she recalls how she described an idea she had for a Second World War story told from the side of the Japanese to Crash writer/director Paul Haggis. “Then he pitched his movie [to Clint Eastwood] two weeks later,” Delpy says. I’m unsure what to make of this claim. Is she really suggesting that he ripped off her idea? I wonder. “It happens,” she continues, laughing. “I’m never mad at people because I think I should have just shut my mouth. But the difference is that when Clint Eastwood decides to make a movie, the next day he has the money. Fifteen years later, I have the money.”

Whatever the truth in this, the point Delpy is making is that she would not have been trusted to write a war movie. “They’re like, ‘Can a woman handle that kind of subject? Can a woman talk about a warrior in Japan?’ Why not? Most men directors who do war movies haven’t been in a war. Why would they be better?”

On paper, at least, Two Days in Paris sounds like a compromise. A romantic comedy about a French woman, Marion (Delpy), and her American lover, Jack (Adam Goldberg), spending time together in the French capital, its outline is not a million miles from Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset. Delpy contributed to that film’s Oscar-nominated screenplay, and the echoes are deliberate.

Frustrated at getting nowhere, she took a friend’s advice and pitched a script that sounded like Before Sunset. She then went off and made her own movie. Two Days in Paris has the talkiness of Linklater’s Parisian heartwarmer, but the differences outnumber the similarities. Delpy’s effort is edgier, more cynical, ruder and far funnier.

It is also overtly political. At one point Marion’s contention that a blow job is something trivial segues into a discussion about the link between politics and sexual morality in the United States, with Jack claiming that fellatio ended the US’s last chance of becoming a functioning democracy. “I truly believe if America was not puritanical, Bush would not be in power,” says Delpy. “Imagine in France, Mitterand or Sarcozy being in trouble for having a mistress - it would be a joke. No-one cares. But I feel like, for some American people, that’s the kind of values that define a good president. That’s a tragedy because then you end up with someone like Bush.”

Delpy refused to compromise the film’s political dimension, insisting that it was an “essential” element, as politics have always been a part of her life. She describes her parents - Marie Pillet and Albert Delpy, who play her eccentric onscreen mum and dad in Two Days in Paris - as “true” anarchists. “They’re not like militant anarchists in the street with the black flag, crying ‘no God, no master’, but they live like that,” she says. “They don’t care about success, they don’t care about money. They just want to work and have a good life and they have no God, no master, they’re free. And that’s what I’m trying to achieve in my life as well: freedom.”

Politics, sex and morality explain why Delpy has lived in Los Angeles, with dual citizenship - and importantly, dual voting rights - in both America and France. Forced to choose between the two, she would opt for her homeland (”I am deeply European”), although she originally left because she no longer liked it there. “It sounds really weird but I had an issue with certain morals in the movie business,” she says. “I saw too many young ladies - actresses - that were dating men that were five times their age, and that bothered me.”

But isn’t that true in Hollywood as well? “When I say five times their age, I mean five times their age,” Delpy counters. “You don’t see in America a 14-year-old dating a 60-year-old. You see that in France and it’s accepted. I have certain morals, especially regarding integrity, and I would never use things other than my work and talent to make it. And anyway,” she laughs, “I only fall in love with young attractive men. On the set I’m not going to fall in love with the old producer; I’m going to fall in love with the grip trainee.”

When it comes to the subject of love, Delpy is more realist than romantic. In fact, she says her life improved when she got over the “crazy” fantasy of Prince Charming. “I totally gave up on that and I feel much better,” she smiles. Two Days in Paris does not sentimentalise Marion and Jack’s relationship. On the contrary, it is poisoned by bitterness and jealousy and paranoia as Jack finds himself constantly confronted by Marion’s exes, who appear out of the woodwork at every turn. A castration theme runs through the film, although Delpy claims that this was unconscious on her part. When I suggest Jack’s inability to understand the language also means he is castrated by the culture, she is reminded of working with the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski on Three Colours: White. “He was telling me why the husband in White couldn’t have sex with his wife and it’s because he was emasculated by the culture, and, in a way, that’s the same thing here,” she suggests. “Jack can never have sex with Marion, he feels condoms are too small, cutting off circulation to his brain, stuff like that, and it’s all referring not just to cultural things but to the position of men right now, and finding their place in a woman’s life.”

She thinks a lot of us are confused and lost because we no longer know what our role is as a man. Women liberated themselves in the 1960s. Now, Delpy suggests, men need to liberate themselves from old ideas of masculinity, such as that “they’re supposed to be providing, supposed to be at war, supposed to be not sensitive, supposed to be tough and strong. It’s bullshit. Men should be crying as much as women.” Her father blubbed more than her mother as they watched films such as Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life together, she says, so “it’s weird when I meet men now and they’re trying to put on this façade - I don’t believe in that.” Boyfriend Marc Streitenfeld, a German composer, is “way more sensitive and fragile” than Delpy emotionally, she says. “I shouldn’t say that because he gets upset because he doesn’t want to show it because he wants to be the man,” she chuckles, mischievously. “But I find that very moving.”

Something else she believes men have to get over is their squeamishness about a woman’s sexual history. Meeting Marion’s former lovers drives Jack insane with jealousy, but Delpy loves it when her man tells her stories about his ex.

“Men, though, don’t want to know that they’re possibly not the first one to,” pause for dramatic effect, “enter.” For us it’s all about conquering new lands, I joke. “Ah yes,” she smiles. “You plant the flag into the woman and you, like, wave it, and that’s yours.”

My analogy with conquest makes her laugh, because she has just written a line rebutting the idea that women are things to be conquered in the screenplay for her next film, The Countess.

A period drama about the 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman Elizabeth Bathory, who was accused of killing virgins for pleasure and bathing in their blood, the film has been a long-gestating labour of love for Delpy. She has fought for years against attempts by companies to turn the film into a “bad B-movie horror film”, she says, and now looks set to make it according to her own vision.

“It’s got everything I love, vanity, cruelty, romantic love, but in a very twisted way, the destruction of a woman in power,” she says. “I think it’s going to be rich and crazy and interesting to watch.” Personally, I can’t wait.

• Two Days in Paris screens at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on 25 and 26 August at Cineworld, and is released across the UK on 31 August. Julie Delpy is in conversation at Cineworld on 26 August at 2:30pm, visit www.edfilmfest.org.uk for details.

Source: scotsman.com