“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).
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New scans from 2007 magazines have been added to the gallery. Happy reading!

• Creative Screenwriting - Volume 14 Number 4
• MovieMaker - Summer 2007
• Total Film (UK) - 2007
• Clippings

At 37, Julie Delpy has stopped waiting for Hollywood to call.

And she’s stopped waiting for Paris or the rest of Europe to call, either. The French actress, a Hollywood transplant since the early ’90s, still spends a few months a year in her home city. But starring in such acclaimed films as Europa, Europa; Three Colors: White; and Before Sunrise didn’t guarantee her work there.

She became a screenwriter, earning a co-writing Oscar nomination for Before Sunset, the sequel to her romantic idyll Before Sunrise. She’s been directing. She even composes the scores to her films, making her “the most ambitious actress working today” (USA Today).
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There’s a great moment in Julie Delpy’s “2 Days in Paris” when Marion, a French photographer, is about to have the big, teetering-on-the-edge-of-breakup talk with her high-strung boyfriend, Jack, played by Adam Goldberg.

In a voice-over, Marion steps aside and says, “To sum up the four hours of discussion that followed . . .” For some filmmakers, that would be a cheat, an easy way to cover the gaps in a screenplay with some narration. For Delpy, the writer-director who plays Marion, it’s a lovely, eloquent scene as she sums up the confounding crescendos of love, lust and relationships through a series of funny insights in the style of Woody Allen.

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She’s been writing film scripts for 20 years, and I’m sure every one of them is better that that for “The Invasion” or “The Nanny Diaries” or 90% of the other movies made these days. She’s made films with some of the world’s best directors — Jean-Luc Godard, Leos Carax, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Richard Linklater. She’s got a degree from NYU’s film school and has a dirty mind. So it’s hard to believe that in order to make her first feature “2 Days in Paris” Julie Delpy had to write, direct, edit, compose a soundtrack, tape cables, reduce her co-producer to penury and and put her ex-boyfriend, her parents and her cat in the cast. Is it because she’s French? Because she’s a woman? Here’s her side of the story, the first part of the transcript of the interview you can also find in “Backtalk” in the next issue of the Phoenix.

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