At the now not-so-recent press day for 2 Days in Paris, the subject of the next film both in front of and behind the camera for multi-hyphenate Julie Delpy
came up. A historical drama
set in the 17th century, The Countess centers
around infamous Hungarian noblewoman Erzebet Bathory, who allegedly sacrificed virgins and bathed in their blood; it looks to shoot later this fall, and/or into early 2008, costarring Radha Mitchell, Vincent Gallo and William Hurt, among others.
“It’s historical, there’s
no fantasy. And there’s no vampires,” Delpy says, repeating the latter bit four
times, perhaps for subconscious emphasis. “It’s about cruelty and power. I
always liked that Stanford experiment about putting students in the place of
jailors and prisoners. They were planning on doing the experiment for three
weeks and after five days they had to stop because total nice, normal people
were abusing people, which I think tells you what, when you have no limits [on
power], humans are capable of doing. And the film is about a woman who’s never
been affixed limits of what is allowed to be done. She’s very cruel and, it
seems, [also] very normal, but I tell a parallel story. Yes, she has the reputation
that she killed 600 young women and bathed in their blood, these young virgins.
But there’s also the other side of the coin, which is that the king owed her so
much money that they had to get rid of her, so that’s why they created this
mythical monster — a witch and vampire bathing in blood. So I tell both
stories.”