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 both in front of and behind the camera (she not
only attended but also graduated from NYU Film School) 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 says. “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. 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 seem to 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. For the full interview feature, from FilmStew, click here.