I stumbled across this story via the FILMMAKER Mag blog: in a lengthy story for the Contra Costa Times, Mary F. Pols talks to a number of female filmmakers, from super-indie to mega-Hollywood, about working in a business that is still overwhelmingly run by dudes. There’s a lot of good stuff in the piece, but an anecdote from actress/director Julie Delpy particularly caught my eye.
Delpy’s second feature film as writer/director, 2 Days in Paris, opens in the U.S. next month. Festival buzz has generally been positive, but no one who’s seen the thing can overlook the similarities between it and the film that marks Delpy’s greatest triumph as an actress, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset. Well, turns out, there’s a reason for that. After working for some of world cinema’s greatest directors and attending NYU film school, Delpy “had a drawer full of scripts that reflected her love of science fiction and other nongirlie topics”–none of which she could find financing for. Then, as Pols tells it,
[A] friend suggested she write a script that bore some similarity to Before Sunset, the successful 2004 film Delpy had starred in and co-written. She had shared an Oscar nomination for the screenplay, and her friend’s supposition was that financiers would feel “safe” with a project that seemed like Before Sunset.
The trick paid off. Delpy wrote 40 pages of a relationship farce set in Paris, which she then shopped around. She found financing for it in Germany. The result is 2 Days in Paris. [...]
“This is why my first film is a romantic comedy,” said Delpy, now 37, with evident exasperation. “It is only because it is the first time people will give me money to make a film. People will trust a woman to do something with a relationship more than they will to do something with a war story or science fiction.”
Delpy goes on explain that she’d “sell out to direct a big action movie” in a heartbeat. Her lifelong dream, she says, is to make a film like Blade Runner. “But you need money to make Blade Runner.”
Ignoring, for a moment, that Delpy probably shouldn’t be whining about how the big boys won’t give her money to make a summer tentpole before her first real feature is even released, I’d be fascinated to see what kinds of scripts are lying dormant in other filmmakers’ drawers. Does Harmony Korine have a high school comedy that no one wants to pay for? Does Sofia Coppola secretly want to remake Raging Bull? And considering how many relatively nameless, style-less directors are handed “big action movies” these days, does demonstrable competence in a specific genre actually hurt more than it helps?
