Julie Delpy in the Hot Press Interview

Julie Delpy arrived in London two hours ago on a straight flight from LA, but even jet-lagged and dressed down in denim, she’s devastatingly radiant – sunny, cascading curls, an incredibly delicate frame, perfectly angelic features – yep, I’ve never felt more fit for the glue-factory than I do at this very moment.
Her (thoroughly deserved) rep as the fittest bird on the arthouse scene isn’t even the half of it. She’s steely, strong, fiercely intelligent, armed with a winningly dark, sexual sense of humour and an inclination to ask you just as many questions as you fire at her. She speaks fluent French, English and Italian and reaches for any and all of the above as she deems linguistically fit. If this is Julie Delpy frazzled, I dread to think how intimidating she’d be during a chess match (bien entendu, she’s good at that as well) or strutting around in her finest dancing shoes.
With so much going for her, it’s small wonder that Ms. Delpy’s undaunted by paths-less-trodden. Indeed, she’s every (seemingly fragile) inch the bohemian French chick. There’s the fantastically nomadic lifestyle that sees her zig-zagging between New York, LA, London and her native Paris on a regular basis, her joyfully militant single-status, and her admirable dismissal of the blandishments of Hollywood. Aside from an appearance as D’artagnan’s love interest proper in 1993’s The Three Musketeers, and a stint in the pre-eminent medi-gore TV show E.R. (where she proved the most exciting thing since George Clooney hung up his stethoscope) she’s entirely resisted the lure of commerce before art, preferring thoughtful, independent dramas (Before Sunrise, But I’m A Cheerleader, LA Without A Map and, er, Killing Zoe) and challenging European projects (Europa Europa, Villa des Roses) over the kind of exotic dolly-bird roles to which Emmanuelle Beart regularly said ‘Oui’.
“It’s a strange thing”, she tells me in her faintly Americanised accent with a sweet Gallic rasp on the last beat, “but I’m not sure I was consciously rejecting Hollywood. For the longest time I resisted it because it didn’t feel true to me. My agent or whoever would send me scripts and I never found myself interested in anything they offered. And they’d be like, ‘But it’s a big Hollywood script’. But I have taken work for money before. Not often, but I’m not maybe so pure as you think.”
She is equally ill disposed toward what she terms “the French girl” roles in her homeland and bursts into a hilarious parody routine to more fully illustrate her contempt of same. You’d probably have to have been there, and I can’t really do it the justice it deserves, but the simpering Oh Maman! performance climaxed with a marvellous cherubic trembling bottom lip. Bravo.
The lady may not be for turning where artistic compromise is concerned, but in her own (admittedly) below-the-radar way, she’s still chalked up an impressive list of acting credits. Making her film debut for iconoclastic auteur Jean-Luc Godard at 14 in Detective, she’s since worked with such continental luminaries as Bertrand Tavernier, Leos Carax, Jacques Rivette and Agnieszka Holland.
“It’s been great with people like them, because you learn so much. From Kieslowski, I loved the way he was so attached to really small details about characters and visual symbolism. With Godard you learn to be natural. Same with Rick (Linklater) you have to work very hard at being natural. And that’s cool, because I really hate that very stylised French method of acting. The bullshit stuff I just showed you!”
Unsurprisingly, keeping such company has ignited her own interest in getting behind the camera, and she studied film in New York, (predictably) coming first in the class. Her directorial debut, the experimental short Blah Blah Blah, was shown during the Sundance Film Festival in 1995. As someone who describes herself as being in a constant state of creative flux, hence the cooking, the painting, the singing, the dancing, the all-round renaissance girl activity sheet she claims that writing and directing are the most natural things in the world.
“What I know now, is that I want to only work with directors that interest me, or direct my own stuff,” she says. “I’m someone who needs to create. It’s not just a therapeutic thing. It’s as essential to me as breathing. And I’d go crazy without writing, I’ve been writing since I was sixteen, but its only now I’m truly happy with the scripts I’ve been doing. Of course, it’s funny because even some of my friends don’t realise that Ethan and I wrote so much of Before Sunrise, because we couldn’t be credited for legal reasons. So sometimes when I’m working on something romantic, people will say ‘Oh, this is like Sunrise’, and I always think, ‘Yeah, it ought to be’. That’s probably why I want to do something completely different now. So I’m working on a film about Elisabeth Bathory, and I’ve written this sexual, comic noir movie. But it’s hard getting stuff of the ground. There’s still massive resistance to the idea of women directors, so it’s difficult getting money together. You walk into a room, and because you’re a woman, it goes against you.”
For all her varied output, she remains best known, particularly among most of my male friends, as the enigmatic uber-bitch of Kieslowski’s Three Colours White, and the captivating stranger on a train, Celine, from Richard Linklater’s classic Generation-X romance Before Sunrise.
This rightly revered date movie follows Delpy’s immortal Celine and Ethan Hawke’s Jesse around Vienna for a hipper-than-thou one-night-stand. It’s a remarkably low-key affair they talk, they drink wine, they fuck, they talk some more – but it all amounts to considerably more than an accomplished inter-railing masturbatory fantasy, for Before Sunrise is an achingly beautiful film that perfectly nails the sensation of falling in love. Devoted fans, and there are many of them, were delighted when Jesse and Celine showed up in Linklater’s dreamy animated project Waking Life, but some were distraught at the prospect of a Sunrise sequel set nine years later. After all, the film had closed on an ambiguous note, where they agree to meet up six months later. Would a follow-up blow the fantasy of the first brief encounter?
As it happens, nothing could be further from the truth. Before Sunset is both a fulfilling, enriching sequel and a fantastic stand-alone film, easily the best of the year. Jesse’s now unhappily married, and Celine’s drifting through a series of unfulfilling lovers. They hook up for 80 minutes in Paris to discuss what might have been and what could still be, and despite the lack of explicit action, it’s every bit as thrilling and captivating as that first night back in 1995.
Still, I wonder if Julie felt at all apprehensive that a sequel would detract from the original film, which derives much of its charm from the idealised (and oftimes delusional) bliss of unfulfilled romance?
“Yes, absolutely. I was a little worried. Love can really only be perfect when it remains unfulfilled. And we actually started with that idea, that love is only perfect if you never meet that person again. But we wanted to play with that. What if you meet that one person that has been a maybe in your head for so many years, and it does work? It’s everyone’s biggest fantasy and worst nightmare in a way. And it was funny because when we started writing, we all had such energy and we just wanted to make the film, and a week and a half before be started shooting we watched Before Sunrise for the first time in years, because we’d avoided watching it in case it blocked our creativity. And suddenly we were like, ‘Oh shit, this actually is a really fucking sweet movie’. So then we were determined to do it justice, and we went back over the script and took out anything that wasn’t heartfelt or true to us. Before Sunset had to be emotional and intense, because if we’d made a bad movie it would have hurt the first film.”
The 34-year old has often spoken about the autobiographical dimension of her writing, a notion particularly pertinent to the kind of free-form poetry offered by Before Sunset, a collaboration between herself, Hawke, Linklater and his regular writing partner, Kim Krizan. How much of Celine then, is an extension of Julie Delpy?
“Lots of things about Celine are very close to me, but when I wrote her I wanted her to represent womanhood more generally. I didn’t want it to be just me or like reality TV or something, because that stuff is just vulgar and gross. And I’m very much a woman’s woman. Mostly my friends are strong, independent women I can’t stand girls who are threatened by other women, and who spend their time running down the competition – that’s just so fucked-up. So I looked to my friends, and for all their strength, for all the ways that their minds are clear, they’re very confused and very vulnerable. When you look at my mother’s generation they had to fight for the feminist cause, but for us, you often end up channelling so much into work and other things, that you don’t get to figure emotional stuff out. I did this diagram of all my friends, and what they have in common, and vulnerability stood out so I used that for Celine.”
She admits, however, that many of Celine’s characteristics directly reference her own endearing peculiarities and preoccupations. The exchanges (well - she talks, he listens) about consumerism are taken from an essay she wrote, much of the dialogue previously existed in one of her own biographical scripts (“It’s so funny”, she laughs, “because again everyone said that script was just like Before Sunrise”) and, yes, if you’ve caught the film already, the Nina Simone ‘Lost In Time’ act is all Julie.
“You know what else?’ she smiles, “all that stuff about being obsessed with details? That’s me. Being late for school everyday because I would examine every tiny thing on the way there. That was me. I did that everyday as a kid. But it was kind of the deepest part of me that informed Celine, and I fantasised around that. There’s a French acting saying that you should put a little art in your life, and life in your art. After all, who the hell would want a movie that was all me? A French actress dealing with life in LA? That would mean something to about three people.”
Ooh, I don’t know. Offhand, I can think of more than three people who might take an interest if she popped up in say, a dog-food commercial, let alone a project that was entirely about her.
Quite unlike her screen alter-ego, though, there are no romantic possibilities outstanding and no equivalent ‘one-that-got-away’ Jesse figures hovering around her personal life.
“It’s not like I have no regrets,” she explains, “but not about lovers. Anyway, I don’t waste my energy on regrets about anything. When I was younger such things could consume me, but as you get older, you’re much more comfortable with who you are, what you want and don’t want, and of course, like they say in the film, you’re happier with all your perversions.”
One suspects as well, that Celine’s quest for a soulmate differs somewhat from progenitor’s ideal. A fan of Rainer Maria Rilke’s On Love and Other Difficulties, Julie’s very much into the idea of remaining separate but equal within relationships, and she despairs of women who are afraid of being single. “I’m a romantic person,” she says, “but I don’t think it’s possible to live with someone except in parallel. You can’t truly merge with someone. That just ends in suffocation. It’s terrible that so many women compromise their identities for the sake of romance. It’s not healthy to lose so much of yourself. Even when twins grow in a woman’s body ˆ they grow next to one another, not on top of each other. Like in physics, when there’s space between two objects, there’s an exchange of energy that is much more obvious than when objects are glued to one another. And I think the same is true of people. Of course, my parents have lived together for thirty-five years, and that works fine, but I need space. I hate when a guy arrives in your apartment with his razor and his cat and his dog a week after you’ve first slept together. That’s freaky for me.”
So she’s not one of the Bridget Jones brigade then, sitting home thinking, ‘All men are bastards, why can’t I get one up the aisle’?
“No way”, she exclaims, tossing back the blonde curls with mock haughtiness. “I don’t believe in marriage at all. I think it’s a recipe for pain. I don’t like the ritual of it. Suddenly, you have to do this, or you have to do that. I would like to have children. I’d like to find the time eventually. I’m not one of these women who gets to 34 and thinks about her biological clock. I wouldn’t have a child just because time is running out. But I just find myself more and more ready. Still, I don’t want marriage. I want respect and love and time apart.”
Besides, who needs boys when you have a pussycat? “I adore my kitty,” Julie gushes, “his name is Max, and even though we’re living in LA now, where bizarrely Max is the number one name for pets, he still stands out from everyone else.”
Intriguingly, three of the songs from her eponymous debut album appear on Before Sunset’s soundtrack, and two of them ‘Ocean’s Apart’ and ‘A Waltz for A Night’ fit the narrative perfectly despite having been penned back in 2001, long before the idea for a sequel was more than a glint in Linklater’s eye.
“Well, ‘Ocean’s Apart’ is a big theme in my life because I travel so much, and when I leave Paris, I often end up with a sea between myself and a lover. ‘A Waltz for A Night’ was written because I like to see beauty in everything, and one-night stands can be beautiful, so I wanted to do a love-song about that. I don’t like that whole Sex In The City thing, where sex and one-night-stands are meaningless, like a service, just something else to consume. There’s no love or magic in that. Like this big trend among kids in the suburbs to get into group sex; that’s just sad. I mean, I love sex, and I love talking about sex. I maybe even am guilty of having far too much sex in my sense of humour. But it should be about oneness. It should be a wonderful thing between two people, even if it’s quick. That’s not to say I do one-night stands. Well, rarely.” And she breaks off into a terrific beam. “Well, not without feeling anyway.”

Before Sunset is now on releaseulie Delpy arrived in London two hours ago on a straight flight from LA, but even jet-lagged and dressed down in denim, she’s devastatingly radiant – sunny, cascading curls, an incredibly delicate frame, perfectly angelic features – yep, I’ve never felt more fit for the glue-factory than I do at this very moment.
Her (thoroughly deserved) rep as the fittest bird on the arthouse scene isn’t even the half of it. She’s steely, strong, fiercely intelligent, armed with a winningly dark, sexual sense of humour and an inclination to ask you just as many questions as you fire at her. She speaks fluent French, English and Italian and reaches for any and all of the above as she deems linguistically fit. If this is Julie Delpy frazzled, I dread to think how intimidating she’d be during a chess match (bien entendu, she’s good at that as well) or strutting around in her finest dancing shoes.
With so much going for her, it’s small wonder that Ms. Delpy’s undaunted by paths-less-trodden. Indeed, she’s every (seemingly fragile) inch the bohemian French chick. There’s the fantastically nomadic lifestyle that sees her zig-zagging between New York, LA, London and her native Paris on a regular basis, her joyfully militant single-status, and her admirable dismissal of the blandishments of Hollywood. Aside from an appearance as D’artagnan’s love interest proper in 1993’s The Three Musketeers, and a stint in the pre-eminent medi-gore TV show E.R. (where she proved the most exciting thing since George Clooney hung up his stethoscope) she’s entirely resisted the lure of commerce before art, preferring thoughtful, independent dramas (Before Sunrise, But I’m A Cheerleader, LA Without A Map and, er, Killing Zoe) and challenging European projects (Europa Europa, Villa des Roses) over the kind of exotic dolly-bird roles to which Emmanuelle Beart regularly said ‘Oui’.
“It’s a strange thing”, she tells me in her faintly Americanised accent with a sweet Gallic rasp on the last beat, “but I’m not sure I was consciously rejecting Hollywood. For the longest time I resisted it because it didn’t feel true to me. My agent or whoever would send me scripts and I never found myself interested in anything they offered. And they’d be like, ‘But it’s a big Hollywood script’. But I have taken work for money before. Not often, but I’m not maybe so pure as you think.”
She is equally ill disposed toward what she terms “the French girl” roles in her homeland and bursts into a hilarious parody routine to more fully illustrate her contempt of same. You’d probably have to have been there, and I can’t really do it the justice it deserves, but the simpering Oh Maman! performance climaxed with a marvellous cherubic trembling bottom lip. Bravo.
The lady may not be for turning where artistic compromise is concerned, but in her own (admittedly) below-the-radar way, she’s still chalked up an impressive list of acting credits. Making her film debut for iconoclastic auteur Jean-Luc Godard at 14 in Detective, she’s since worked with such continental luminaries as Bertrand Tavernier, Leos Carax, Jacques Rivette and Agnieszka Holland.
“It’s been great with people like them, because you learn so much. From Kieslowski, I loved the way he was so attached to really small details about characters and visual symbolism. With Godard you learn to be natural. Same with Rick (Linklater) you have to work very hard at being natural. And that’s cool, because I really hate that very stylised French method of acting. The bullshit stuff I just showed you!”
Unsurprisingly, keeping such company has ignited her own interest in getting behind the camera, and she studied film in New York, (predictably) coming first in the class. Her directorial debut, the experimental short Blah Blah Blah, was shown during the Sundance Film Festival in 1995. As someone who describes herself as being in a constant state of creative flux, hence the cooking, the painting, the singing, the dancing, the all-round renaissance girl activity sheet she claims that writing and directing are the most natural things in the world.
“What I know now, is that I want to only work with directors that interest me, or direct my own stuff,” she says. “I’m someone who needs to create. It’s not just a therapeutic thing. It’s as essential to me as breathing. And I’d go crazy without writing, I’ve been writing since I was sixteen, but its only now I’m truly happy with the scripts I’ve been doing. Of course, it’s funny because even some of my friends don’t realise that Ethan and I wrote so much of Before Sunrise, because we couldn’t be credited for legal reasons. So sometimes when I’m working on something romantic, people will say ‘Oh, this is like Sunrise’, and I always think, ‘Yeah, it ought to be’. That’s probably why I want to do something completely different now. So I’m working on a film about Elisabeth Bathory, and I’ve written this sexual, comic noir movie. But it’s hard getting stuff of the ground. There’s still massive resistance to the idea of women directors, so it’s difficult getting money together. You walk into a room, and because you’re a woman, it goes against you.”
For all her varied output, she remains best known, particularly among most of my male friends, as the enigmatic uber-bitch of Kieslowski’s Three Colours White, and the captivating stranger on a train, Celine, from Richard Linklater’s classic Generation-X romance Before Sunrise.
This rightly revered date movie follows Delpy’s immortal Celine and Ethan Hawke’s Jesse around Vienna for a hipper-than-thou one-night-stand. It’s a remarkably low-key affair they talk, they drink wine, they fuck, they talk some more – but it all amounts to considerably more than an accomplished inter-railing masturbatory fantasy, for Before Sunrise is an achingly beautiful film that perfectly nails the sensation of falling in love. Devoted fans, and there are many of them, were delighted when Jesse and Celine showed up in Linklater’s dreamy animated project Waking Life, but some were distraught at the prospect of a Sunrise sequel set nine years later. After all, the film had closed on an ambiguous note, where they agree to meet up six months later. Would a follow-up blow the fantasy of the first brief encounter?
As it happens, nothing could be further from the truth. Before Sunset is both a fulfilling, enriching sequel and a fantastic stand-alone film, easily the best of the year. Jesse’s now unhappily married, and Celine’s drifting through a series of unfulfilling lovers. They hook up for 80 minutes in Paris to discuss what might have been and what could still be, and despite the lack of explicit action, it’s every bit as thrilling and captivating as that first night back in 1995.
Still, I wonder if Julie felt at all apprehensive that a sequel would detract from the original film, which derives much of its charm from the idealised (and oftimes delusional) bliss of unfulfilled romance?
“Yes, absolutely. I was a little worried. Love can really only be perfect when it remains unfulfilled. And we actually started with that idea, that love is only perfect if you never meet that person again. But we wanted to play with that. What if you meet that one person that has been a maybe in your head for so many years, and it does work? It’s everyone’s biggest fantasy and worst nightmare in a way. And it was funny because when we started writing, we all had such energy and we just wanted to make the film, and a week and a half before be started shooting we watched Before Sunrise for the first time in years, because we’d avoided watching it in case it blocked our creativity. And suddenly we were like, ‘Oh shit, this actually is a really fucking sweet movie’. So then we were determined to do it justice, and we went back over the script and took out anything that wasn’t heartfelt or true to us. Before Sunset had to be emotional and intense, because if we’d made a bad movie it would have hurt the first film.”
The 34-year old has often spoken about the autobiographical dimension of her writing, a notion particularly pertinent to the kind of free-form poetry offered by Before Sunset, a collaboration between herself, Hawke, Linklater and his regular writing partner, Kim Krizan. How much of Celine then, is an extension of Julie Delpy?
“Lots of things about Celine are very close to me, but when I wrote her I wanted her to represent womanhood more generally. I didn’t want it to be just me or like reality TV or something, because that stuff is just vulgar and gross. And I’m very much a woman’s woman. Mostly my friends are strong, independent women I can’t stand girls who are threatened by other women, and who spend their time running down the competition – that’s just so fucked-up. So I looked to my friends, and for all their strength, for all the ways that their minds are clear, they’re very confused and very vulnerable. When you look at my mother’s generation they had to fight for the feminist cause, but for us, you often end up channelling so much into work and other things, that you don’t get to figure emotional stuff out. I did this diagram of all my friends, and what they have in common, and vulnerability stood out so I used that for Celine.”
She admits, however, that many of Celine’s characteristics directly reference her own endearing peculiarities and preoccupations. The exchanges (well - she talks, he listens) about consumerism are taken from an essay she wrote, much of the dialogue previously existed in one of her own biographical scripts (“It’s so funny”, she laughs, “because again everyone said that script was just like Before Sunrise”) and, yes, if you’ve caught the film already, the Nina Simone ‘Lost In Time’ act is all Julie.
“You know what else?’ she smiles, “all that stuff about being obsessed with details? That’s me. Being late for school everyday because I would examine every tiny thing on the way there. That was me. I did that everyday as a kid. But it was kind of the deepest part of me that informed Celine, and I fantasised around that. There’s a French acting saying that you should put a little art in your life, and life in your art. After all, who the hell would want a movie that was all me? A French actress dealing with life in LA? That would mean something to about three people.”
Ooh, I don’t know. Offhand, I can think of more than three people who might take an interest if she popped up in say, a dog-food commercial, let alone a project that was entirely about her.
Quite unlike her screen alter-ego, though, there are no romantic possibilities outstanding and no equivalent ‘one-that-got-away’ Jesse figures hovering around her personal life.
“It’s not like I have no regrets,” she explains, “but not about lovers. Anyway, I don’t waste my energy on regrets about anything. When I was younger such things could consume me, but as you get older, you’re much more comfortable with who you are, what you want and don’t want, and of course, like they say in the film, you’re happier with all your perversions.”
One suspects as well, that Celine’s quest for a soulmate differs somewhat from progenitor’s ideal. A fan of Rainer Maria Rilke’s On Love and Other Difficulties, Julie’s very much into the idea of remaining separate but equal within relationships, and she despairs of women who are afraid of being single. “I’m a romantic person,” she says, “but I don’t think it’s possible to live with someone except in parallel. You can’t truly merge with someone. That just ends in suffocation. It’s terrible that so many women compromise their identities for the sake of romance. It’s not healthy to lose so much of yourself. Even when twins grow in a woman’s body ˆ they grow next to one another, not on top of each other. Like in physics, when there’s space between two objects, there’s an exchange of energy that is much more obvious than when objects are glued to one another. And I think the same is true of people. Of course, my parents have lived together for thirty-five years, and that works fine, but I need space. I hate when a guy arrives in your apartment with his razor and his cat and his dog a week after you’ve first slept together. That’s freaky for me.”
So she’s not one of the Bridget Jones brigade then, sitting home thinking, ‘All men are bastards, why can’t I get one up the aisle’?
“No way”, she exclaims, tossing back the blonde curls with mock haughtiness. “I don’t believe in marriage at all. I think it’s a recipe for pain. I don’t like the ritual of it. Suddenly, you have to do this, or you have to do that. I would like to have children. I’d like to find the time eventually. I’m not one of these women who gets to 34 and thinks about her biological clock. I wouldn’t have a child just because time is running out. But I just find myself more and more ready. Still, I don’t want marriage. I want respect and love and time apart.”
Besides, who needs boys when you have a pussycat? “I adore my kitty,” Julie gushes, “his name is Max, and even though we’re living in LA now, where bizarrely Max is the number one name for pets, he still stands out from everyone else.”
Intriguingly, three of the songs from her eponymous debut album appear on Before Sunset’s soundtrack, and two of them ‘Ocean’s Apart’ and ‘A Waltz for A Night’ fit the narrative perfectly despite having been penned back in 2001, long before the idea for a sequel was more than a glint in Linklater’s eye.
“Well, ‘Ocean’s Apart’ is a big theme in my life because I travel so much, and when I leave Paris, I often end up with a sea between myself and a lover. ‘A Waltz for A Night’ was written because I like to see beauty in everything, and one-night stands can be beautiful, so I wanted to do a love-song about that. I don’t like that whole Sex In The City thing, where sex and one-night-stands are meaningless, like a service, just something else to consume. There’s no love or magic in that. Like this big trend among kids in the suburbs to get into group sex; that’s just sad. I mean, I love sex, and I love talking about sex. I maybe even am guilty of having far too much sex in my sense of humour. But it should be about oneness. It should be a wonderful thing between two people, even if it’s quick. That’s not to say I do one-night stands. Well, rarely.” And she breaks off into a terrific beam. “Well, not without feeling anyway.”

Before Sunset is now on release.