Jean-Luc Godard first cast Julie Delpy in 1985, at age fourteen, in Détective, but many film-goers first met her in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s White as the nasty Parisienne hairdresser who turns soft behind prison bars with her unforgettable pantomime. Others met Delpy as Ethan Hawke’s neurotic object of desire in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset (for which she was an Academy Award–nominated screenwriter) or, most recently, in her disarming comedy, 2 Days in Paris, in which she starred, and which she also scored and directed.

I talked to Delpy by phone from Paris, where she is doing postproduction on her new film, The Countess, out in 2009. The interview took place over the course of a few weeks, in French and English. At the time of the interview, Delpy was pregnant with a boy, and our conversation was often punctuated, and occasionally cut short, by contractions.