Julie Delpy is cold. When turning down the air conditioning in a San Francisco hotel suite doesn’t yield immediate relief, she grabs a furry throw blanket off the couch and secures it snuggly over her lap.

The blanket, which she assures me isn’t real fur, will prove to be her only cover-up. Speaking in practically unaccented English, the 37-year-old French actress is disarmingly forthright when describing her struggle to get to direct a feature film - her first, “2 Days in Paris,” opens Friday - and to uphold a moral principle to not sleep her way to the top.

Delpy’s natural beauty has been both an asset and a liability. Her porcelain complexion and fine blond hair are set off this morning by a loden green dress, definitely her color. She has the kind of open face and perfect features that the camera loves, as fans of “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset” - the bittersweet romances she’s best known for in America - can attest. Jean-Luc Godard discovered Delpy when she was 14 and cast her in “Detective,” but her movie career in her native country was stymied by a traumatic experience five years later.

Someone she describes as “a very big producer in France” pressured her to sleep with him.

“He was sending me notes saying, ‘Listen, I could make you a star if you wanted.’ And I was like, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Fine. I’ll just destroy every possibility you have in France,’ ” Delpy recalls, nervously picking on her fingernails as if still disturbed by the memory. “I know it sounds like a cliche about the actress and the dirty old producer, but it is a reality also. I said no to many, many ‘opportunities’ like this. The minute men are in my face saying, ‘I could make you this and that,’ I’m like, ‘Get away from me.’ I don’t want to owe anything to anyone. I don’t want to look in the mirror when I’m in my 60s and think, ‘OK, that’s how I succeeded.’ ”

Fearful that the bigwig might make good on his threat, Delpy moved to New York to study filmmaking, encouraged by Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski. When they did “White” together, he would tell her that the industry needed more women directors and women’s points of view.

Although Delpy has written scripts most of her adult life, only two that she put her own money into (one a short) got made. Financing for a feature-length film became available only after her 2004 Oscar nomination for writing “Before Sunset” along with co-star Ethan Hawke and director Richard Linklater.

“The nomination changed something,” she says. “It made people think of me possibly as a filmmaker. Still, you know, a lot of people don’t know how to judge me. They see potential, but since I don’t make blockbusters or write blockbusters, I’m nothing to them. In the movie business, until you make ‘Transformers,’ you don’t exist.”

Her “2 Days in Paris” couldn’t be more different from that big-budget sci-fi action flick. It’s an independent film about a Frenchwoman, Marion (Delpy), who invites the American she lives with in New York to Paris to meet her family and friends. Provoked by cultural misunderstandings, everything that could go wrong does.

Besides directing, Delpy also served as screenwriter, editor, producer and star, and she wrote the music. Add to this casting her parents as Marion’s mother and father and former boyfriend Adam Goldberg as the love interest, and “2 Days in Paris” could be subtitled “The Julie Delpy Story.” Yet she insists that the film isn’t autobiographical. Take the sexual references, as good a place as any to start. Marion is continually running into former lovers, which drives Goldberg’s character crazy.

“That has never happened to me,” she says. “It’s more of a paranoid fantasy of mine - that I would bump into a boyfriend at every corner. I’ve never even invited anyone I’m dating home to meet my parents.”

“2 Days in Paris” has fun with the American notion that the French are promiscuous, something Delpy denies about herself and her fellow countrymen and women.

“It’s true that French people are more comfortable talking about sex, but that doesn’t mean that they do it more or are more perverted. Probably they have the same amount of sex as anyone. But the French have an openness of talking about sex within families,” she says. “My parents made it clear that sex is supposed to be a nice thing, you know, like a celebration. My relationship to sex is very healthy because of that. I lost my virginity really late, in my late teens. I actually think of sex as something very beautiful and something that should be special, and I don’t take it lightly. I’ve rarely had one-night stuff. I’m not like an easy woman, you know. I used to make out with a lot of guys, but I would not have sex with them. I just kissed a lot. That’s OK. But I think of sex as very linked to love.”

Delpy lives in Los Angeles with German movie composer Marc Streitenfeld. They’ve been together since 2004, and she would like to take a year off soon to have a baby with him.

“I’m not very big on marriage. It’s never been a fantasy,” she says. “I guess it’s more significant for religious people, but I’m not big on religion either.”

She grew up unconventionally, the only child of bohemian stage actors Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet. There was no money for nannies.

“I would just go with my parents and watch them perform from the back of the theater,” she says. “I hung out with other actors’ kids. It was a lot of fun for kids to have this artist’s life. Basically, I was raised in the back of the theater and the dressing room.”

People who read the “Paris” script wondered how she could cast her own father as the dad who is, to put it mildly, rather crude.

“But I knew he would be adorable even when the part called for him to be awful,” making derogatory comments about his daughter’s derriere, for example. “My parents were really impressed that I could manage an entire crew,” she says. “They couldn’t believe it because, in life, I’m kind of a funny goofball. I can be neurotic, worrying about diseases and airplanes. But I have no confusion on the set. I feel very strong and very in control, and my parents didn’t know that side of me.”

The side of Paris that Delpy shot is “a little rougher and less cute” than what’s usually shown.

“Paris can look like a beautiful postcard, and then you turn a corner and there are four working prostitutes,” she says. “It’s a real place. It can be a lovely city, but it can also be very tough.”

“Before Sunset,” to which Delpy’s new movie will inevitably be compared, is also set in the City of Light. It ends ambiguously, without indicating whether the lovers will stay together, perhaps leaving things open for another sequel.

“Ethan sent an e-mail a few days ago asking when we are going to do a third one,” says Delpy, who would be game if Hawke and Linklater are. “I would love to work with those guys again.”

While there’s nothing definite on that front, she is in preproduction on “The Countess,” a biopic about a notorious 17th century Hungarian countess who tortured and murdered young girls and was rumored to have bathed in their blood to make herself youthful. Delpy will direct and star as the murderess.

“It’s a very unusual subject,” she acknowledges. “I wouldn’t say I’ll have a big budget, but bigger than on ‘2 Days in Paris.’ ”

Her dream is to spend the rest of her career alternately between directing and acting for other filmmakers.

“Acting comes easier, but I love doing both,” she says. “You know, for me, the worst is when I don’t have anything to do. That’s when it gets bad, when I don’t feel good. But when I’m working, even the stress of working is not that bad, as long as I have a few days off to recuperate.”

She could always spend them in Paris.

Source: sfgate.com