French actress Julie Delpy came to North American fame and acclaim thanks to the brilliant 1995 romantic film “Before Sunrise.” She would later co-write the two sequels, “Before Sunset” and “Before Midnight,” alongside director Richard Linklater and co-star Ethan Hawke, nabbing Oscar nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay for both scripts. She’s now moving into television with her (not all-that-well-promoted) Netflix series “On The Verge,” that she wrote, produces, stars, and even directs four episodes of.
During a recent interview with Marc Maron on the WTF Podcast, Delpy revealed that instead of waiting to hear back about the second season of her new series “On The Verge” — the decision of which admittedly rests with France’s cable TV channel StudioPlus, as it’s not technically a Netflix Original (which likely explains the lack of promotion)—the writer/director has been busy writing a bunch of film scripts.
“Yeah, waiting to hear, I never wait to hear. Because I don’t like that position and I’ve been in that position as an actress, I wait to hear. So, I wrote a new script to do in France, a really fun movie to do with my dad, a French film,” she told Maron.
Delpy is also writing an American drama about an interesting man she met around storage units with an “insane story” about his “difficult life” and promised him she’d make a movie about his life.
Another project that Delpy is working on is “A Dazzling Display of Splendor” that stars Emilia Clarke (“Game of Thrones”). A film about the very early days of Hollywood, in 1910 that she’ll write and has been doing research on for “multiple years.” That focuses on “the studios in New York and New Jersey, and how everything fell apart because of some crazy winter, and they realized they couldn’t keep having the industry.” Alongside “a family of vaudeville actors that decide to move to Hollywood.”
It’s not shocking that Delpy would be putting together backup projects, given that she started thinking about the characters for “On The Verge” back in 2013 and developed a script. Still, it took multiple years before money was put into the project, so the hesitancy to wait for a second-season pick-up is undoubtedly warranted and practical. The actress also suggested that “On The Verge” was set up at several studios before it finally landed and got made at CanalPlus. Perhaps a greenlight will seal the deal on what’s next as the series landed in Netflix’s Top 10, again, without much of a North American marketing push.