“Basically, when you’re an actor, when you’re not working, you’re nothing,” Delpy says.

“(But) when you’re a director, when you’re not directing, you’re thinking, you’re preparing, you’re planning.

“When you’re a writer, you’re always a writer. The moment you go to your computer and write two lines, you’re a writer.”

Having witnessed her actor parents’ dejection when they weren’t employed, Delpy was determined to keep herself busy, whether studying film at New York University or making music (she released a pop-folk album in 2003).

Hollywood has never quite known what to make of Delpy, 37, the incandescent French beauty who chilled as the cruel wife in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 1994 film White, a year before charming Ethan Hawke’s hostel hopper as the eloquent Celine in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise.

The latter film revealed Delpy to be less mysterious and more fascinating than the popular notion of the European star who wears head scarves and adopts, as her default trait, inscrutability. Delpy is highly scrutable.

A Los Angeles resident for many years, she’s loquacious and lively, and her English barely accented, as she discusses 2 Days in Paris during a stop in San Francisco.

The film culminates a process that began when Delpy wrote her first script as a teenager and continued with an Oscar nomination for co-writing Before Sunset.

That rapturously received 2004 sequel to Sunrise transformed Delpy, for a time, into the Julia Roberts of American art houses.

But even after Sunrise, offers didn’t pour in.

“The film didn’t make a billion dollars, so they don’t care,” Delpy says of the studio mind-set.

Getting work as an actress is challenge enough; getting financing for a feature film is a thousand times harder.

Delpy acknowledges that her approach didn’t make it easier.

“My personality doesn’t inspire people to give me money,” she says.

“I don’t like to give the image of someone who is ‘ooh, such a good director’ … I like being humble. Obvious confidence is against my idea of the creative process, which is having a lot of doubts. Doubts bring work, and work makes it better … I think that’s what people feel and they get nervous.”
But she impressed a neophyte French producer, who helped her shepherd 2 Days in Paris to the screen. Delpy also enlisted Adam Goldberg to play Jack, uptight American boyfriend to Marion, Delpy’s freewheeling French character.

As the couple’s already frayed relationship starts to unravel during a visit to Marion’s parents, the comic moments hinge on the dynamic between Delpy and Goldberg, a one-time real-life couple.

Like Before Sunset, 2 Days in Paris features Delpy and a male co-star walking the streets of Paris. But the vibe is less dreamy, more cranky. Jack grills Marion about her ex-boyfriends, and she sputters out lies in response.

“That’s actually one quality that I picked up from my own self,” Delpy says with a laugh. “I’m so bad at lying that it’s, like, I should not ever lie.”

The film exaggerates culture clashes between its American and French characters, primarily via the interactions of Marion’s libertine, rabbit-roasting father (Delpy’s father, Albert Delpy, and mother, Marie Pillet, play her parents) and Jack.

Delpy spends about four months a year in Paris. But she and the French film industry long ago parted ways, she says.

“That’s one bad thing about the French, that they’re very resentful … I live in America, you know, I’m the great evil.

“You have narrow-minded people in France, just like anywhere else, and it’s kind of why I left, and it’s fine with me.”

Though not crazy about Hollywood suits, either, she enjoys Los Angeles.

“LA is not the city of dumb people and bimbos,” she says. “Well, it is … but it’s also a city that attracts a lot of interesting, talented people, and if you get to hang out with the right people, it’s actually quite an interesting town.”

Happily involved with German-born film composer Marc Streitenfeld for three-and-a-half years, Delpy still finds abundant material in the complexities of romantic relationships.

“I am a true believer in forever and stuff, but I am questioning it as well.”

Due to Before Sunrise and 2 Days in Paris, which already opened in several cities to positive reviews, Delpy gets hit up for relationship advice.

“Like I’m an expert!” she says with a laugh.

“I’m, like, ‘I don’t know, that’s why I am making these films’. I’m trying to figure it out.”

Source: news.com.au