Parallel Lives

Adam Goldberg and Julie Delpy have more in common than “True Love.”

The rising star from “Saving Private Ryan” and the French actress who caught many a director’s eye in Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” seem a matched set these days when it comes to career paths: Both are 28-year-old actors on the rise starring in ABC’s much ballyhooed upcoming pilot “True Love”--a first turn at romantic comedy for both, and each has written a feature film that he or she plans to direct. Delpy has been signed to star in Goldberg’s film, “Neorealism,” alongside Goldberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” co-star Giovanni Ribisi. (Goldberg, though, is not in Delpy’s movie, “Tell Me.”)

While it’s not unusual to see actors write, direct or produce a movie as a side career, it is unusual to see them as a dual force--especially when they didn’t know each other beforehand. At first blush, it would appear that “True Love” brought them together. But that’s not exactly the case, explains Goldberg.

“I had a deal with the network, and they wanted me to do this show about this young New York couple who are madly in love but drive each other crazy . . . very passionate, very tumultuous. They can’t keep their hands off each other, but they argue like crazy,” Goldberg says. “I think, ‘Why not raise the bar and make her French?’ I’m a big fan of French movies. So I insisted on her being French.

“The first person that popped into my head was Julie. The only person that liked the idea of having a French girl was the writer, Maya Forbes [“The Larry Sanders Show”]. So the network brings in somebody else, an American actress. I’m thinking, ‘Fine--who cares? I’m crazy about Julie. I’ll just send her my script.’ We meet, and she loved it [and] decided to do it right then,” he says. “Well, then the actress for the show doesn’t work out. The network says, ‘Hey, OK, we’ll use Julie.’ I’m saying, ‘No way. I want her to do my movie more than the show!’ ”

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Delpy made Goldberg’s decision a lot easier: She agreed to do both the TV series and the movie.

“I think to myself, ‘Why not? I’m a gambler,’ ” says Delpy. “TV is a great opportunity to do something funny when a lot of people don’t see me that way. This pilot is interesting and light, and my character is pretty high-energy, not too Zen. It’s extremely different from either one of our [upcoming] movies.”

Carolyn Ginsburg, senior vice president of ABC’s comedy series programming, notes: “This is one where we’ve really got our fingers crossed that it goes to a series. Adam is brilliant and gifted. Julie is refreshing and very funny. . . . It’s this whole idea that with true love the fire, the excitement never goes away no matter what happens, no matter how they fight it.”

But will it fly? “It’s my job, I have to be the optimist,” says Ginsburg. “But it’s a pilot, and there’s no way of knowing if it will see the light of day. We’re looking at an air date of next fall.”

After shooting the pilot in mid-January, Delpy tapped casting director Rick Montgomery (“There’s Something About Mary”) to aid in her talent search for “Tell Me,” her dark comedy about a neurotic housewife who is taken hostage by a stranger whose gun proves no match for her manipulative mind.

Delpy co-wrote, will direct and produce the $5-million film with Andrea Sperling and France’s Why Not Productions. It is her first full-length feature. The native Parisian previously wrote and directed “Blah, Blah, Blah,” a short film about life in Los Angeles that screened at the Sundance Film Festival, the L.A. Independent Film Festival and was broadcast on Canal Plus in France.

The daughter of actors, Delpy worked with many acclaimed French directors before being introduced to American audiences in 1993’s “The Three Musketeers” as D’Artagnan’s (Chris O’Donnell) girlfriend--what she affectionately calls the “Raquel Welch role,” in reference to the 1974 film version. In Europe, she appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Detective” and “King Lear,” Carlos Saura’s “The Dark Night,” Agnieszka Holland’s “Europa Europa,” Bertrand Tavernier’s “The Passion of Beatrice,” Volker Schlondorff’s “Voyager” and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “White.”

She has also appeared in “Killing Zoe” and “An American Werewolf in Paris,” as well as starring in the recent NBC miniseries “Crime and Punishment” and Showtime’s “The Passion of Ayn Rand.”

About her directing, Delpy is cautiously confident. “I have been shooting these video movies, which I’m pretty excited about,” Delpy says. “But this is my first 35-millimeter feature. I think, because I started in this business so young, at 14, and I worked very early with so many great directors, that I was artistically ready to direct at 18. But because I worked with so many great directors, I wasn’t secure enough to do that. Now I just say, ‘Why not? What’s to fear?’ ”

That’s the feeling, as well, with Goldberg, who is casting “Neorealism,” about an obsessed director who makes a movie about a director making a movie. No shooting date has been set.

“I think of myself as an actor when it comes to working and making a living, but I have wanted to be a filmmaker since I was 15,” he says. “I can’t speak for Julie, but I imagine she’s in a similar place. She just likes to work, to act and to stretch. You can make a good living as an actor, but there’s so much more.”

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Goldberg first became known to audiences in Linklater’s 1993 film “Dazed and Confused,” playing a high school wise guy who gets beaten up at a local park. He’s also known to American audiences for his role as Chandler’s frighteningly neurotic roommate Eddie in the NBC series “Friends.”

When he was cast for the part of Pvt. Mellish in Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” Goldberg was willing to swap pay for DreamWorks’ agreeing to finish his first directorial effort, “Scotch and Milk.”

“I remember when I auditioned for the part, I didn’t even know who I was playing,” Goldberg recalls. “They had people reading scenes from ‘A Midnight Clear’ [another World War II film], a really strange auditioning process. My first thought was, ‘Hey, if I get this part, maybe they’ll just do the post-production on my movie.’ I never thought it could become what it did.”

What it did was put Goldberg on the map. He also voiced the part of the Jack Russell terrier Flealick in “Babe: Pig in the City,” and he’ll appear in Ron Howard’s “Ed TV” and Fox 2000’s “Sunset Strip.”

On television, Goldberg was a regular on the ABC series “Relativity” and guest-starred on numerous series, including “Murphy Brown” and “NYPD Blue.” He also wrote and will direct a pilot for MTV called “Her Majesty.”

“I like acting, but, like Julie, I want to make films,” he says. “You can’t always get the parts you want. I’ll never forget the time I was on a break in a film, in my dressing room, having this intense phone conversation, trying to raise financing for my film. There I was with this huge Afro on my head and a coke spoon hanging around my neck. Thank God it wasn’t a videophone!”