Fire in the blood: Julie Delpy writes her own roles

Countess Bathory has had a bad rap. The 16th-century Hungarian aristocrat is alleged to have killed virgins and bathed in their blood in a bid to discover the elixir of life. She is almost as important to vampire myth as Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration behind Bram Stoker's Dracula. And the French actress and director Julie Delpy is determined to correct popular misapprehensions about the so-called Blood Countess.

Later this year, Delpy is due to begin work on The Countess, a Gothic thriller inspired by Bathory. She is making it with the British company Intandem, but don't expect some Hammer-style gore fest. Delpy, who will direct and play Bathory, is promising a balanced view of the life and times of one of Eastern Europe's most notorious bogeywomen. Delpy's thesis is that the Countess was more sinned against than sinning.

"I get into it deeper than just a woman bathing in blood," Delpy explains. "She was a very smart woman and very influential politically. She was one of the richest women in Hungary. When her husband died, they [the court] needed to get rid of her. The myth was that she was a horrible monster, but I show another side. I never think in history that people are totally clean or dirty. It is never black and white. She was probably very cruel and very violent – but probably no more than anyone else."

The Bathory that Delpy describes sounds like a feminist icon for the Middle Ages – a woman who chafed against the patriarchal constraints of her era and was vilified by history as a result. As for the bathing in virgins' blood, Delpy explains that away as the behaviour of a woman who didn't "accept the condition of being human, which is ageing and dying". She adds that she won't be delving too deeply into "the weird sexual stuff", much of which she suggests was made up in an attempt to destroy Bathory's reputation.

It is a measure of Delpy's determination that the film will start shooting later this year in Eastern Europe, several years after she started trying to finance it. She is disarmingly frank about the challenges she has faced along the way; all the financiers were intensely sceptical about a young, untested director making a period epic, even if she was able to recruit actors such as Vincent Gallo, Daniel Brühl and Radha Mitchell to join the cast. "People are scared because I am a woman and an actress. A lot of movies by actresses aren't successful."

She tells how her agent fired her when she decided to write the screenplay for Richard Linklater's Before Sunset rather than just sticking to acting. "When I gave him the script, he said it was retarded to have people talking so long. My problem is that so many people in the business don't take chances on things that are unique."

You can't help but feel sceptical when a beautiful actress with a string of prestigious movie credits behind her tells you what a struggle life has been. Then again, Delpy, now 37, has been trying and failing to direct her own projects since she was 16 years old. "When I enter the room, I don't have the kind of personality that says, 'Listen, I am a genius, give me the money'," she says. "I am not a self-secure person. I can't come into a room and say I am going to do a great job and the movie is going to make a lot of money. I don't think it is honest. It [film-making] has always been a struggle for me and I believe it always will be."

At least Delpy has some useful role models for her career as a director. As a teenager, she appeared in Jean-Luc Godard's Détective (1985). Godard, with whom she worked three times, regarded her as a muse and gave her some advice, which she still follows. He warned her that the world was very conventional and that she would come under pressure to conform. "He put it in a poetic way, [saying] that they were trying to make me go a certain way, but that I was the wild river and should go the way I want. In a weird way, I have always followed this advice. I hate preconceived and pre-packaged careers."

Meanwhile, Krzysztof Kieslowski (in whose Three Colours: White she starred) advised her not to base her own movies on other films but to draw from her own experiences. "What was wonderful about Kieslowski was that he paid so much attention to details – the physical behaviour of characters," she says. "I felt so loved by him when he was directing. He was so close to the actors when we were working. Actors need attention constantly – and the more they get, the better they get."

Finally, Delpy's own career behind the camera seems to be on the rise. She was Oscar-nominated for co-writing the screenplay for Before Sunset, in which she also starred, and her first feature, the low-budget romantic comedy Two Days in Paris, was warmly received at the Berlin Festival and will close the Edinburgh Film Festival later this month.

It is an extraordinarily droll and well-observed film about a French woman, Marion (Delpy), and her American boyfriend, Jack (Adam Goldberg), spending a couple of days in Paris on their way home to New York. Delpy's screenplay delights in exposing the cultural divide between France and the US. Jack is continually made to feel as if he is on another planet as he encounters Marion's old friends (many of whom he suspects are her former lovers), her bohemian parents (played by Delpy's own mother and father) and a succession of boorish, racist taxi drivers. Jack is discomfited by almost everything about old Europe: the dilapidated flats, slow internet, dietary habits and cultural snobbery. He, meanwhile, lives up to many of the clichés about arrogant, patriarchal Americans.

Delpy is well-placed to observe French-US relations. Having established herself as an actress in France, she studied directing at New York University and then, in the mid-Nineties, decamped to LA to star in The Three Musketeers and Killing Zoe. "I didn't really plan on having a Hollywood career – it just happened," she says. "Some people take issue with the fact that I left France and think, 'Oh, we were not good enough for her', when the bottom line is that I was getting no interesting offers in France when I left... What do I do? Stay in France being offered the part of a girl that is naked on the floor being raped for 18 hours?"

Her own attitude towards France and the US is ambivalent. The cultural snobbery, she suggests, runs both ways. "Sometimes I take the side of the Americans and sometimes the side of the French. When people tell me, 'Oh, Americans just do big crappy movies', I am like, 'No, there are a lot of good small indie American films, whereas sometimes in Europe they're trying to imitate American crappy movies.' When people have preconceived ideas, I hate that. When they tell me, 'Oh, Americans are all stupid Bush people', that is so stupid I want to smack them."

Still, Delpy is no fan of the new French President. She describes Nicolas Sarkozy as "extreme right-wing, fooling people that he is just a liberal guy. He is going to destroy every social progress in France over the last 70 years." She is resigned to the fact that the French are too chauvinistic to have elected a woman as leader. To her mind, Ségolène Royal never stood a chance.

As one of the few French female writers to have been nominated for an Oscar, Delpy is aware that her status is rising in the film world. "People look at me like, 'Well, let's not be totally horrible with her because she might have potential.' I am a tiny fish... but I could get bigger."

Even so, she has been around long enough to realise that her new-found popularity is contingent on success. "I am very conscious of what this business is about. It's about money and nothing else," she declares cheerfully. As a producer as well as a writer, director and actress, Delpy claims to enjoy the deal-making. "I have developed my business side," she says.

Multi-tasking has its advantages, of course. When you do everything yourself, you don't have to rely on the whims of casting agents. As director, she gets to choose who will be best to play Countess Bathory – namely, herself.

'Two Days in Paris' closes the Edinburgh International Film Festival (www.edfilmfest.org.uk), which runs 15 to 25 August; 'The Countess' is in pre-production