Back in Paris and scripting the life of a mass-murdering, oversexed Hungarian countess - while wondering why the poor voted for Sarkozy - the actress’s thoughts turn to living in London

Sunday September 2, 2007
The Observer

Here I am at home and all I do is sit and write. When I read things about this Julie Delpy character - she writes, she acts, she sings -she sounds fabulous. As if she’s running around, doing exciting things, dressed in a tutu: ‘Ah, it’s Tuesday, I’m going to put on my tutu and dance around the apartment.’ So why do I feel my life is so boring? So why am I sitting here in front of this screen? And, sadly, not wearing a tutu.

The simple answer is that I’m trying to finish rewrites on the next film I’m scripting, The Countess. It’s about Elizabeth Bathory, sometimes called the Bloody Countess, born in the 16th century in Hungary. She’s thought to be a serial killer who killed lots of young girls. Even better, she tortured her young victims and sucked on their blood to preserve her youth. So evil and there’s the vampire connection, the sex… that’s the story, anyway.

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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.
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Advice from women, for women, on directing:

— Julie Delpy, longtime actress who directed, wrote, edited, wrote the score for and co-stars in 2 Days in Paris: “It’s going to be a harder road. You have to prove yourself more. You have to do better than men. You can’t fail. You can’t have weakness. Also, I think the danger when you’re a woman director — because you don’t want to be weak, because the minute you have a weakness people will blame it on you being a woman — you don’t want to become too harsh.”

Source: chron.com

Actress Julie Delpy has wanted to be a director since she was 17, when she wrote her first script. In 1992, having acted for great filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Krzysztof Kieslowski, she went to the NYU film school. She did well and graduated eager to get behind the camera. Years later, all she had to show for it was a short film and a indie feature that never saw theatrical release in the United States. She also had a drawer full of scripts that reflected her love of science fiction and other nongirlie topics. She couldn’t get any of them produced. “I was kind of losing hope,” she said.

Then a friend suggested she write a script that bore some similarity to “Before Sunset,” the successful 2004 film Delpy had starred in and co-written. She had shared an Oscar nomination for the screenplay, and her friend’s supposition was that financiers would feel “safe” with a project that seemed like “Before Sunset.”

The trick paid off. Delpy wrote 40 pages of a relationship farce set in Paris, which she then shopped around. She found financing for it in Germany. The result is “2 Days in Paris,” a witty, Woody Allen-esque comedy about a Frenchwoman (Delpy) who brings her American boyfriend (Adam Goldberg) home to Paris. It’s slated for a late-summer release.

“This is why my first film is a romantic comedy,” said Delpy, now 37, with evident exasperation. “It is only because it is the first time people will give me money to make a film. People will trust a woman to do something with a relationship more than they will to do something with a war story or science fiction.”

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