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Features
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Filmmaking on a Song
For writer-director-producer-editor-star Julie Delpy, Nouvelle Vague is not some post-World War II French cinema movement but rather a musical means to a low-budget end.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007 at 12:15 PM
By Brent Simon
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Lester Cohen/WireImage.com
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Looking glam at the Egyptian Theater premiere
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The daughter of French actors Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet, Julie Delpy was born into an artistic family, and the values with which she was inculcated extended beyond those of your typical actress. Echoes of this are glimpsed in Delpy’s own eclectic career - she not only attended but also graduated from NYU Film School - both in front of and behind the camera, as well as the fact that she nurses a long love of music.
In fact, in 2004, in addition to co-writing the film’s screenplay, Delpy penned and performed several songs for Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, a follow-up to Before Sunrise. One of three tunes on the soundtrack, the heartrending, acoustic “A Waltz for a Night” served as her character Celine’s pivotal confession to Ethan Hawke’s Jesse, with whom she spent a single evening in Vienna nine years prior.
It’s seemingly kismet, and not particularly surprising, then, that music features prominently in the making of 2 Days in Paris, Delpy’s latest film — which she wrote, directs and stars in opposite former, if brief, off-screen beau Adam Goldberg. “I co-wrote a song with a band named Nouvelle Vague, which is actually a really good French band, and it was the way that I financed all the music in the film, all the songs playing in the background,” Delpy tells FilmStew. “Because if I gave (a song) to the music company that works with the financing company in Germany who financed the film, then they would pay for all the songs in the film”
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Lester Cohen/WireImage.com
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Nouvelle Vague, performing in Hollywood in 2006
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“So I gave them the song,” she continues. “That was the deal, and that’s what you do on independent films; all sorts of little deals, and you have to give a bit of yourself to get money from them. But it wasn’t bad, though I had to write the song at night while I was mixing the film. That was a bit exhausting.”
Delpy doesn’t know any other way, though. In fact, talking to her, and listening to digressive, flight-of-fancy stories about a brisk, 20-day production schedule on location in the City of Lights last summer, one can reasonably come to the conclusion that she in a way feeds off of such chaos, breakneck pacing and on-the-fly pacts and revisions. It must have been the same on the set of her 2002 directorial debut Looking for Jimmy, which was set in Los Angeles.
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Jean-Paul Aussenard/WireImage.com
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Arriving straight from the Zodiac set
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Her latest film follows a New York couple - French photographer Marion and American interior designer Jack - as they attempt to re-infuse their two-year-old relationship with a bit of romance on the final leg of a European vacation, only to have plans constantly thwarted by a combination of Marion’s offbeat, non-English speaking parents (played by those real, aforementioned parents), and a series of random encounters with Marion’s flirtatious ex-boyfriends, which throws Jack for a loop. Given that so much of the film is dependent on Marion and Jack’s chemistry, but also takes place within the context of a larger ensemble, including several party scenes, it was important to Delpy to have some time to rehearse before filming commenced.
Unfortunately, due to Goldberg’s schedule commitments on another movie (read: big Hollywood studio film (Zodiac)), production got pushed back one week, causing the film’s delicately cobbled together financing to be thrown into doubt. Catching a plane straight from his other film, Goldberg finally arrived a mere 12 hours before the shoot.
“But I think it served the film in way,” says Delpy, calmed by hindsight, “because I would get on set and I would have prepared all my shots and stuff, I would be like, ‘OK, let’s just rehearse once and then shoot it.’ So much of the film, I kept from the first take… “
“I love that feeling that people are unsettled,” the 37-year-old Paris native continues. “I think actors, the less they’re thinking, the better they are. The more they’re thinking, the more they start to stumble through their acting and try to put meaning in every word. But in real life people just say things, you don’t think it out 10 hours before.”
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Yuji Ohsugi/WireImage.com
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Co-star Daniel Bruhl
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Though that sense of looseness and spontaneity drives the picture, that doesn’t mean that 2 Days in Paris is an exercise in pure improvisation. Delpy prefers naturalistic tones and rhythms, but has struck upon her own method for achieving that end.
“You know what? Structure is a lot of planning, figuring out character a lot of planning, and that’s the hard work,” she says. “But I believe writing should be very quick, that’s how I write. You know, when we were working on Before Sunset, we were working on the structure for like, a long while, really figuring it out - the story and characters from beginning to end.”
“Then I wrote the first draft that I sent to the guys in only four days,” adds Delpy. “Now, obviously it changed after that and stuff, but the car scene and me having the breakdown was written in like an hour, because suddenly it’s natural - you hear the voice and you go straight to it. I like that kind of approach.”
While joking that it’s the antithesis of Before Sunset (that movie was beautiful and classy, she says, this one brassy and at times a bit crude), Delpy admits there is some thematic overlap. “The movie is about love,” she says. “My friends call it the last temptation — before you really decide to commit yourself to someone.”
“[Marion and Jack] are both at that cusp where they can say either we break it or we keep on going, but if [it’s the latter] we’re going to have to come to a place where we’re more true to one another, where we commit to one another,” she suggests. “So instead of keeping dirty messages from ex-boyfriends and flirting with firemen, I’m going to give up all the potential possibilities and commit to you and you only.”,/p>
“So it’s about that commitment, that moment where you take that step. But it’s kind of scary. Some people think, ‘Oh my God, those people should make that step in their 20s,’ but the reality is that in the world we live in, a lot of people are still making those steps in their 30s.”
For Delpy, still single but smitten with the idea of relationships, she likes her romance the same way she enjoys writing — in quick, meaningful staccato bursts. “I was raised with the idea that you bump into someone, you fall in love and it’s romantic,” she says. “You don’t go on a series of blind dates — that sounds scary to me.”
“I’ve never met people that I’ve gone out with like that,” she reveals. “I’ve met someone, liked them, then we started talking on the phone and that was it. I like unplanned things — romance has to be very genuine and unplanned.” Just like the narrative track on which 2 Days in Paris coasts along.
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