2 Days in Paris - 2007

This movie was not only written by Julie Delpy, but also directed and produced by her. It tells the story of a couple spending a week end in Paris. Marion, a French photographer, and Jack, her neurotic American boyfriend, went to visit Marion's parents and pick up their cat there. After spending the vacation in Venice, they decided to stay there for a week end. During this week end, they will soon realize that, even though they have been together for two years, they do not really know each other.
Jack has doubts about Marion's fidelity after discovering suspicious texts of her exes on her phone, and meeting some of them in the street and at a party organized by one of her friends. French people seem to be very keen on sex and to have a very strange sense of humor according to him. He does not feel comfortable around them. Moreover, he does not understand a word they say in French.
In her movie, Julie Delpy highlights the stereotypes Americans have about French people and makes fun of them. It is definitely not a movie to take literally. She also tackles the subject of the difficulty of relationships and the modern role of the woman in a couple who does not want to be consumed by her partner.
2 Days in Paris is probably the most popular movie by Julie Delpy, and one of the most appreciated by the audience. I personally think it is her best movie.
Besides, it won the Coup de Coeur Award from the Mons International Festival of Love Films.

Before Sunset - 2004

Before Sunset was not only written by Julie Delpy, but also Richard Linklater, Kim Krizan and Ethan Hawke. The latter plays the lead with Julie Delpy herself. The movie is the sequel to Before Sunrise dated of 1995 by Richard Linklater and Kim Krizan. In the first movie, the two main characters Céline and Jessie had met on a train to Vienna and spent the night together getting to know each other until sunset. Céline, a French young woman is very romantic and give Jessie, a young American, her ideas and thoughts on love and life in general. Not much happens in the movie, it is only about two people talking, walking around a beautiful city and seizing the moment.
The sequel tells the second encounter of the couple, but this time in Paris. In the first movie, they promised each other to meet six months later at the train station, but Céline could not make it. So, they finally met again by chance nine years later in a bookstore. Since then, Jesse had become a famous novelist and had written an American best seller inspired by what happened nine years earlier with Céline. Jesse is doing a European book tour and lands up in Paris where he notices that Céline is in the room and smiling at him...
As in Before Sunrise, their time together is counted since he has a schedule to respect and a plane to catch very soon...

Céline has a boyfriend who is a photojournalist, and Jesse got married and had a child. She is now an advocate for the environment, and has been living in the USA for a while. He confides to her that he is not really happy with his marriage and he never really stopped thinking about her. They both very fast realize that they have not forgotten about each other. At the end of the movie, Jesse comes with Céline to her Parisian flat, and Jesse does not seem to want to catch his plane anymore...

The movie received a highly positive reception from the critics and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Looking for Jimmy - 2002

Looking for Jimmy is the first movie Julie Delpy wrote and directed in 2001. It lasts 80 minutes and tells the story of a French girl called Al living in Los Angeles who organizes a barbecue party at her place to celebrate her friend V's birthday. V's best friend Jimmy, who is also Al's boyfriend, has disappeared, so they decide to go look for him throughout the city. The movie is about their 24 hours "hunt".

One of the particularities of the movie is that it was filmed in real-time in LA streets, and the camera only stopped shooting when its batteries had to be changed. Moreover, Julie Delpy only shot the movie with friends of her: Emily Wagner as V, Billy Wirth as Billy and Tara Subkoff. She also respected the rules of the 1995 avant-garde filmmaking movement Dogme95 forgetting about the use of elaborate special effects or technology and concentrating on traditional values of story, acting and theme. The movement's aim is to prove that a movie can be recognized for its quality without having depended on huge Hollywood budgets. Thus, Julie's budget for this movie was only of 5000 dollars.

The Kind of Person She Is

Before starting to sum up and analyze all of the six films she wrote, I'd like to speak a little bit more about her personality and her life choices, so that you can understand better her writing choices.
First of all, she is a very talkative person who likes to share thoughts and intellectual interests with other people. She is open-minded and instinctive. She describes herself as a neurotic person and says she can be pretty temperamental, not to say difficult.
Julie Delpy is also known to have a great sense of humor and be uninhibited. On TV shows, she speaks very freely, and answers almost every kind of questions, even the most indiscreet ones. I remember having watched an interview of her dated of 2005 on the French TV show Tout le monde en parle. She was talking about her not waxing any part of her body and only shaving her legs. She had been invited to answer questions about the movie Before Sunset, but the conversation turned very fast into something else, something much more... personal.

Apart from that, Julie invests a lot of energy into her career and public life, maybe even more than in her private life. She is very likeable, and it is very easy to appreciate her. It seems like she can anticipate what the public will appreciate to watch on a screen, but the truth is that she only follows her instincts and does what she wants to. If the public enjoys her work, it is because it actually can identify with the stories her movies tell.

As far as her love relationships are concerned, she tends to be more attracted to men who are as open-minded as she is, adventurers and often foreigners and/or men with very different backgrounds than her own. Incidentally, she married a German composer: Marc Streitenfeld.