Nothing new this week, but I found this old interview of Julie Delpy for the Boston Phoenix, after the release of 2 days in Paris in August 2007 - where we learn, among other things, that Jean-Luc is Max, Julie Delpy's own cat.
Here are some extracts:
Is the cat named Jean-Luc because he looks like the director? No, but I always thought it was funny, and I could imagine Marion would call her cat Jean-Luc because she likes Godard films.
The cat is terrific, though he doesn’t have a lot to work with. He is terrific.
You still have him? Yeah, he’s on the bed right now.
(...)
You’ve had experience with some of the top directors of the past 20 years. what have you learned from them? Kieslowski was very supportive when I decided to go to film school in New York. I spent about a year meeting him quite regularly, talking about writing screenplays and moviemaking and all that and how to make your films your own and no one else’s. Which is funny, because everyone’s comparing my film to Woody Allen’s. But I really didn’t mean to. I just am, unfortunately, neurotic, and I think it transpires throughout the film and comes out that way. I love Woody Allen; it’s not a bad compliment, but I know it’s going to backlash on me eventually.
Well, Kieslowski is the Woody Allen of Polish filmmakers. Which is a very different sense of humor. And Richard Linklater, not in the directing so much, but the fact that he let me write so much of Before Sunset and a lot of Before Sunrise as well, made me realize that I could write — because I had written before but had always been rejected. The fact that my writing was validated in Before Sunset.
Assuming you've had relationships with French men and American men... Also German, Italian, Spanish...(laughs)
...How are French and American men different? I wouldn't say there's a difference. I've been with an American guy who was very open-minded and I've been with a very uptight American guy. I've been with very uptight French men and very liberated French men. The only thing is that the approach to relationships and family is slightly different in America, I would say.
How so? Well, from my experience, the family is much heavier in Europe. Actually, in Latin countries like France, Italy, Spain, you don't really get rid of your family - ever. I feel like my American friends can kind of cut the ties. In France you don't cut the ties.
(...)
How do you enjoy living in LA? There are certain things I really love about Los Angeles. For me, being in LA is very easy, peaceful. I lock myself in my room, I get to-good food. It's so simple. I love Paris and I love New York, but LA is good for me. It's like being away and writing. I write things that never get made, things that aren't good. But sometimes they do get made, like this film; and hopefully my next one. For me it's good to write for years; to learn to write in English.
What do you miss most about Paris? I'm here five months a year, basically. A little more in LA, but a lot in Paris. You know what I miss ? I miss the stuff I put in the film: the cafés, the markets, the subway. I love the subway in Paris.
Ethan Hawke authored two novels. Do you see yourself writing books? Well, you know what's funny? 2 days in Paris I started as a novel. After 50 pages, it's like: "Fuck it, I just wanna write a movie." I don't have the patience to write a novel. I've tried many times and every time I end up writing a screenplay. I think cinematographically - always.
(...)
Would you consider making a third film with Linklater and Hawke, to complete a trilogy? Maybe when we reach 42 or something; yeah, in a few years, or sooner. They all want to do it, but we want to find the right story. It took us years to do the second one.
2 days in Paris is a stranger-in-a-strange-land film. Do you have favourite movies in that genre? It's funny, because some people it's kind of a Woody Allen, the film? But I never actually watched Woody Allen films before. I mean, yes! I've seen all the Woody Allen films and actually love the early ones, like Bananas and All You Always Wanted to Know About Sex and Love and Death and stuff.
The 10th edition of Cinema au clair de lune (4-22 August, 2010), the open air cine festival organized by Forum des Images in Paris, reserves a good surprise: 2 days in Paris in on the program for the 14th of August, to be seen in the Parc de Choisy (13th arrondissement).
"2 Days in Paris" is pure Julie Delpy, figuratively and otherwise. Since first becoming known to American audiences in the early '90s, she's revealed herself to be an artist of sundry and unexpected talents, with a distinctive voice and point of view.
Most of these are on display in her first feature-length movie, which she wrote, directed, produced, edited, scored and stars in, opposite Adam Goldberg. She cast her real-life parents, Marie Pillet and Albert Delpy, as her parents in the movie. Finally, for what one can only assume is good measure, she sings the song that plays over the end credits, accompanied by the slinky French pop band Nouvelle Vague. If one were to learn that Delpy manned the craft services table between takes, it would come as no great surprise.
(...)
At first blush, "2 Days in Paris" looks like it's going to be the story of a culture-clashing couple. But slowly and rather slyly, Delpy zeros in on something much more subtle and complex. What interests her are not the superficial differences between people from different countries -- your skinned rabbit is my tourist in a Bush/Cheney T-shirt, and so forth -- but the way in which the distances between people, genders and cultures (the very distances we rely on to grant us the perspective needed to see how completely insane other people, genders, cultures really are) seem to shift constantly according to circumstances.
One moment, Jack is categorically rejecting all modes of European public transport (in case of terrorist attack), and the next he is recoiling from his compatriots because they have bad taste in books. Likewise, Marion chafes at Jack's American provincialism one moment, and can't believe how xenophobic Parisian taxi drivers are the next. No sooner has either one of them settled on a single, hidebound world-view than a situation arises to smack them out of it.
The more Jack -- who doesn't speak a word of French -- interacts with Marion's family, the more entrenched he becomes in abstract absolutes. "I'm an American," he tells one of Marion's exes. "What's mine is mine!" And yet, not long before this he found himself fending off Marion's father Jeannot's insinuation that all Americans are ignorant of French and even American literature. Jack may be covered in tattoos, but when Marion's former hippie mother (her first words of dialogue are "Can't those poor exploited nurses go on strike? This isn't America!") lets him in on a little secret about her sexual past, he's instantly transformed into a prig and a prude.
Naturally, the worm eventually turns, and Marion is left furious and sputtering after a chance encounter with an ex-lover who used his "immersion in Thai culture" (he worked for a foreign aid organization) as an excuse to do some very bad things. Is the German eco-activist (Daniel Brühl, seeming like he just walked off the set of anti-globalist caper "The Edukators") that Jack meets at a fast-food chain an Earth-saving "fairy," as he claims, or is he a terrorist? Delpy's wry, acerbic sense of humor and privileged perspective make her the ultimate outsider-insider, perfectly positioned to ask the most astute questions.
Eventually, a kind of synthesis arises from the battle of the perspectives -- that is, that there are no absolute ideas and no fixed identities. One man's freedom, as we know, is another man's French.
Amongst the film's admirers stands also Roger Ebert, from the Chicago Sun-Times:
(...) Marion and Jack wander about Paris, talking in that way that lovers have when they're beginning to get on each other's nerves. But, no, this is not a retread of Richard Linklater's "Before Sunset" (2004), in which Delpy and Ethan Hawke walked and talked around Paris. It is a contemplation of incompatibility, as Paris brings out a side of Marion that Jack has never quite seen: Is she a radical political activist and a shameless slut, or does she only act like one? She runs into old boyfriends so often it makes Paris seem like a small town, and attacks one of them, in a restaurant, for taking a sex vacation to Thailand.
At home, her father quizzes Jack on French culture, and her mother is so eager to wash and press his clothes that he barely has time to get out of them. Both of Delpy's parents are professional actors, and so these are only performances, I hope. In addition to casting her parents, Delpy puts her mark on this film in many other ways: She starred, directed, wrote, edited, co-produced, composed the score and sang a song. When a women takes that many jobs, we slap her down for vanity. When a man does, we call him the new Orson Welles.
Delpy in fact has made a smart film with an edge to it; her Jack and Marion reveal things about themselves they never thought they'd tell anybody, and we wonder why they ever went out on a second date. Much has been made of the similarities between Delpy here and Diane Keaton in "Annie Hall" but if Delpy's character found a spider as big as a Buick in the bathroom, she'd braise it and serve it up for lunch.
Which is an oblique way of saying that Julie Delpy is an original, a woman who refuses to be defined or limited. Her first great roles were in Bertrand Tavernier's "Beatrice" (1987), Agnieszka Holland's "Europa Europa" (1990) and Krzysztof Kieslowski's "White" (1994); she was in Linklater's "Before Sunrise" "Waking Life" and "Before Sunset" and she dumped Bill Murray at the beginning of Jim Jarmusch's "Broken Flowers." In between, she studied film at NYU and made herself available for 30 student productions.
What she has done here is avoid all temptation to recycle the usual lovers-in-Paris possibilities, and has created two original, quirky characters so obsessed with their differences that Paris is almost a distraction. I don't think I heard a single accordion in the whole film.
Julie Delpy herself has been interviewed a lot about her film, the motives for it and the major themes - men and women relationships, and cultural differences. Here is a great interview from empireonline:
The journalists seem always surprised on how tough Julie Delpy can be, especially in contrast with her angelic physical appearance; an example of that astonishment with the very original interview that Ryan Gilbey made for The Guardian a few years ago when Julie Delpy was promoting 2 days in Paris:
Julie Delpy smokes and smokes. She smokes so much she should consider wearing ashtrays as trinkets. We are in a faux-rustic restaurant in Berlin's Potsdamer Platz, where she is promoting the sharp and funny 2 Days in Paris, a romcom with bite, which she wrote, directed, produced, edited, scored, starred in and presumably smoked all the way through making. At first I think the only time she's not smoking is when she's talking. But she has so much to say - she can rattle off an entire exhaustive answer before you've finished asking your initial question - that eventually the division between speaking and inhaling vanishes, and the words are tumbling from her mouth wreathed in smoke. It doesn't sound very attractive, but remember this is Julie Delpy. She could be up to her elbows in offal, belching the Marseillaise, but she'd still have admirers establishing cults in her name. And chances are she'd still loathe that kind of attention.
"I hate being a male fantasy," she spits. "So many times I've been in a room pitching some movie to the financiers, and they're blatantly just staring at my legs." Before this conjures images of a stereotypical Hollywood executive leering from behind his desk, Delpy is quick to point out she won't take that behaviour from revered arthouse auteurs either. In the early 1990s, she auditioned for the dual lead roles in Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique. "He asked me to do a sexy gesture," she says, her incredulity undiminished after all these years. "That really bothered me. So I did this ..." She pokes her tongue out and tugs on her earlobes like a playground brat. "I knew by the look on his face that I hadn't got the part. But I was really mad with him. All that younger-woman bullshit you get. That fucking pervert. That... man!" She makes the noun drip with derision.
Delpy and Kieslowski eventually worked together in Three Colours: White (1994), in which he cast her as a woman who divorces her husband when he fails to consummate their marriage. And the pair enjoyed a friendship - Delpy now says that the late director was "the greatest man in the world". "I think my audition for Veronique convinced him I could play someone a bit hard to handle. Not that I'm bad-tempered. But I have my pet peeves. I always hated, when I was growing up, all these directors who wanted to be my Pygmalion." (...)"I like to be the Pygmalion, instead of someone else," she decides. "I prefer to make people into things, not be moulded by other people."
The most interesting thing about the 37-year-old Delpy in person is her unexpected hardness. I suddenly realise she's never shown it fully in any of her performances. Yes, there was a hint of it in Three Colours: White. But while she is sublime in her signature role, as the idealistic Céline in Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise (1995) and its sequel Before Sunset (2004), she only gets to play the odd prickly moment. Even in An American Werewolf In Paris (1997) - which, like her brief spell in TV's ER, was one of the few mainstream concessions in a stubbornly marginal career - she is a smiling lycanthropic temptress, never quite dredging up the darkness necessary to tip that film from comedy into horror. The woman herself is another matter. Beneath the playful indiscretion and hearty laughter is something flinty, businesslike and brusque.
It's all the more fascinating because she was out in public a few nights earlier, putting on what I now realise was a performance. After a rapturously received gala screening of 2 Days in Paris, she stumbled up the red-carpeted steps, then blathered absent-mindedly into the microphone. It was nothing like the focused, clear-sighted woman sitting before me. Possibly she felt there was spikiness enough in her film, and that the audience that night deserved a taste of Brand Delpy, with its inbuilt promise of gap-year goofiness.
(About 2 days in Paris) A rather worrying motif of castration and dismemberment runs through the film. "The truth is it was written and directed so quickly, I didn't have time to analyse it. Yes, there is talk about chopping off penises, condoms cutting off circulation, penises needing to be lifted with balloons, so I have to say ... No comment." She seems genuinely bashful, caught out by the subtext of her own film. "I scare myself. I think I have a penis obsession. Because I don't have a penis. Well, I mean, I have one at home. But it's not on me. It's attached to my partner. Maybe I wish I had one ..." She takes a few urgent drags on her cigarette, wafting away the smoke, and the subject.
(On the differences between "2 days in Paris" and "Before Sunset") "I twisted the idea of Before Sunset. I love that film but the characters are in a bubble; Paris has no influence. Here, it's the opposite. The city is destroying Marion and Jack - their environment is literally attacking them."
"I love acting," she says, "but I'm not a very actressy person. I don't like the vanity it encourages, the way it makes you concerned about your age or your appearance. Writing doesn't have that problem. For me, writing comes - well, I wouldn't say before love but ..." She thinks for a moment, gives a little wobble of the head and changes her mind. "Yeah, I'd say it comes before."
The Hollywood Reporter gives more precisions about Skylab, which Julie Delpy is about to film in Brittany next month:
"It's a real feel-good movie. It's tender and funny, in the spirit of '2 Days in Paris'," producer Michael Gentile told THR. "It's really Julie Delpy's vision of France through the eyes of a French woman who has lived in the U.S. for many years."
The Skylab of the title refers to the NASA space station that made an unplanned return to terra firma in 1979. We're not sure of the connection there, but Gentile calls the film "Julie's vision of France through the eyes of a French woman who has lived in the US for many years." Maybe it's a metaphor about crashing back down to Earth?
There's no information yet about the Two Days in Paris sequel, except that it's called Two Days in New York. Not much of a stretch then, to infer that this might well be the reverse of the original, with Delpy visiting Adam Goldberg's folks in the Big Apple. Expect much in the way of Linklater-influenced slacker-chic and improvised dialogue. Expect it to be great.
Ce site est un blog franco-anglais à propos de Julie Delpy, l'actrice, scénariste, réalistrice et chanteuse aujourd'hui franco-américaine; je le complète à mesure de mes possibilités...N'hésitez pas à laisser un message lors de votre passage!
This is a franco-american blog about actress, writer, director and singer Julie Delpy; don't hesitate to let a message or ask for a translation if necessary...
Film:The countess (as writer, actress, director) is out in French and european cinés, no release dates yet for the United States - DVD release in Germany, Turkey and France
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