Julie Delpy: ‘I do have a lot of neuroses’

The actress and filmmaker opens up about her fear of heights, her fantasies of dying and why she only takes roles she has written herself

On solid ground: Julie Delpy in Paris (AFP/Getty)

Julie Delpy screams and makes a bolt for the door. It’s quite a start to any interview. “The door isn’t locked is it?” she yells at a bemused publicist. Thankfully, it is not. Delpy explains that if the door had been locked behind us as we stepped out on to the roof terrace at the top of a Toronto skyscraper, she would have been tempted to jump. “This is what people with vertigo have,” she says. “It’s because they want to jump. It’s not a fear of heights, it’s a fear of jumping.”

She looks accusingly at the waist-high glass balcony that surrounds us. “If I can’t jump, I don’t have a fear of heights. But the idea that I can actually make the decision to jump makes me hysterical. Not that I want to die, it’s just that, what if I went crazy for 30 seconds? Thirty seconds is long enough to climb up and jump.”

Julie Delpy with Dany Boon in ‘Lolo’ (David Koskas)

When I try to rationalise her fear by saying that catching a train or crossing the road offer more danger, the 45-year-old actress retorts, “Yeah, train tracks are tempting, too. Crossing the road is not really tempting, people would mostly avoid you, you wouldn’t necessarily die. Here you would die.” She pauses significantly. “A sure death is always tempting.”

The Paris-born star has a macabre side, but she never loses her light tone, not even when she says something like, “Maybe I’m suicidal and I don’t know about it... You know probably it’s like a mental issue that I have, self-destructive, like if I had a gun I would probably just put it in my mouth to see what it felt like.”

She wonders if this comes from her father, the theatre director Albert Delpy who once went up Notre-Dame in Paris and tried to jump from the top. He was only prevented from doing so by a friend who smashed him over the head with a stone. It sounds like the plot of a play that her mother, the avant-garde theatre actress Marie Pillet, might star in.

Much like Céline in the Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight trilogy, Delpy is full of stories and quirks. She started out playing the wise young girl who made a brief appearance in Jean Luc-Godard’s Détective in 1985, and Lise, the estranged girlfriend in Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang in 1986. But her ambitions were always to be more than the French flame. Even after she won worldwide raves for her turn in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: White, she went to New York to study film-making.

Julie Delpy with Ethan Hawke in ‘Before Sunrise’ (Rex)

Her ability to tell stories is what attracted Richard Linklater to cast her in Before Sunrise, and she received writing credits on both of the sequels.

As a director she found herself at the meeting point of Linklater and Woody Allen with her films Two Days in Paris and Two Days in New York. When she made a 16th-century historical drama The Countess and Skylab, a family drama that revolved around the threat of a Nasa rocket crashing into Western France in 1979, she had less international success.

Audiences like Delpy to be the female version of Allen, making smart, funny contemporary tales in which she stars as the unpredictable neurotic. Her new film – for which she is once again writer, director and star – is another example. In Lolo she plays Violette, a fortysomething fashion events organiser, who after years of failed relationships picks up a seemingly reliable and safe boyfriend, played by Dany Boon, while on a girls’ holiday in the south of France. The IT worker moves to Paris and their relationship blossoms, much to the chagrin of her son, Lolo.

“I always say I have a lot of neuroses, I’m a bit of a hypochondriac,” she says when I bring up similarities with Allen. “I love characters who are hypochondriac. Actually my character is more of a hypochondriac than I am, because in real life I smoke, I do everything wrong. I think I tend to like neurosis in films and neurotic characters, I find them amusing and entertaining.”

She also subverts stereotypes. In the opening sequences Violette is the huntress, the jocular, strong-willed woman on the hunt for men.

“I wanted to describe those characters as two women who have reached a place in their life where there is something a little cynical, a little blasé. They use dirty words and don’t give a shit about anybody’s judgment. I know these women in their forties who treat men as commodities. Men will be offended, in a way, to see these women being so direct.”

One of her favourite books is the erotic tale Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille, she tells me. “The French talk about sex much more easily than any other country. We are in a country where even the bourgeoisie are doing it. Everything is exposed. For example, an American president who has an affair – it’s the end of their career. For a French president, it’s the start of a career, unless he rapes someone in America; then he gets in trouble. We had the Marquis de Sade, all those writers, it’s part of the culture.”

Violette is adroit at her high-profile job – Karl Lagerfeld makes a cameo appearance as himself in one scene – but at home, she is a complete mess. “It’s usually something that I find, when people are awesome at work, then their personal life is something of a mess,” she adds. “I was thinking the other day, wouldn’t it be awesome if someone like me, who in real life is kind of a nervous, insecure person, like the opposite of a sociopath that makes it to the top, would actually succeed. If someone like me succeeds in life, it’s pretty amazing.”

Delpy has a young son, Leo, with her former boyfriend the German film composer Marc Streitenfeld. He was born in January 2009 and it was mollycoddling him from birth that gave her the idea of doing a film about a mother-and-son relationship.

“Even after two days, the doctor was saying to me, ‘You know one day, you have to let him go.’ And that freaked me out. Even though I understand my parents let me go when I was 16 and I moved to America when I was 19.”

She had to start creating her own roles, she says, because of the gender stereotyping she has had to deal with throughout her career. “For so many years I’ve been dealing with so many stereotypes, like women being hysterical, women having mood swings, women being incapable of directing movies. Even up to yesterday a photographer was taking pictures of me and Dany Boon and he said, ‘I want to take a picture of the director and the actress,’ meaning I was excluded right away. Like it’s impossible that I could be the director.”

Writing and creating have largely overtaken her career as an actress and musician. She released a self-titled album in 2003 and composed the score for The Countess. Apart from a brief cameo in Avengers: Age of Ultron, though, she has not acted a part that she has not written since 2007.

Even accepting the part in Avengers seemed to be the punchline of an elaborate joke. “What happened is that I was having a talk with my agent and saying now that I’ve reached 44, I’m at the age where I can play a villain in a superhero movie. Because once a woman passes 35, she becomes a villain, usually. The next day he calls me and says ‘Guess what, they have just called me from Marvel! You have got to do it.’ So I have this completely un-meaningful part in Avengers. I don’t even know if I’m credited in the film.”

Next she will take a role in Todd Solondz’s new film Wiener-Dog. It’s a refreshing change, she says.

“He’s so fun to work with, he’s completely obsessive. He has his own way of seeing things, completely paranoid. He’s really kind of obsessive on the details, which is not always good for actors. It’s great to work with him and just be an actor, and not write anything at all.”