Art Imitating Strife: Simon Helberg on We’ll Never Have Paris

“We attempted to cleanse our demons, and it became this strange, masochistic catharsis.”

So says Simon Helberg, best known as creepy aerospace engineer Howard from the sitcom The Big Bang Theory, of his debut feature We’ll Never Have Paris. It's a warts-and-all comedy retelling of how some self-destructive vein in his personality very nearly torpedoed his relationship with Jocelyn Towne, now his wife of more than six years – and, along with him, the co-director of this film. “That’s right,” Helberg says on a phone call from their home in LA. “I’ve been living with this agony for that long.”

Due to close the Edinburgh International Film Festival, We’ll Never Have Paris follows Helberg’s Quinn Berman, a neurotic, hypochondriac, heightened version of himself with a dose of Woody Allen mixed in. A year after Frances Ha took the festival by storm, this offers a male perspective on the quarter-life crisis. Quinn’s relationship to Towne (dramatised here as Melanie Lynskey's Devon) has reached the point where they need to “make a decision,” in Helmer’s words, but when he tries to propose he does so with such cack-handed clumsiness she doesn’t even know what’s going on. So, as any logical man would, Quinn seeks counsel from his blonde bombshell florist-colleague Kelsey (played by Maggie Grace). "I think I might be in love with you, a little," Kelsey blurts out to Quinn. And then: “Are you really going to marry the first girl you’ve ever been with?”

“I broke up with my girlfriend because I felt like I needed to sow my oats, but I couldn’t even sow one single oat,” Helberg says, stopping to sigh along the way. After an intensely awkward encounter with Kelsey, Helberg/Quinn realises what a mistake he’s made. “I don’t know why, but men have this tendency to want something like this, and they make a real song and dance about it,” he says.

“But I immediately regretted my decision. I chased down the girl that was supposed to be my wife, and then found myself confessing to her every thought and every impulse and every bad decision I’ve ever considered making. I just totally self-destructed.”

Unfortunately for Helberg/Quinn, or at least Helberg/Quinn’s wallet, Towne/Devon took a flight to Paris “to find herself” and immediately met a cultured, affluent, classical violinist who could be an off-the-peg nightmare for any man trying to win a girl back. “You can stop looking now, because you’re perfect the way you are,” he tells her after turning up from America, before getting comprehensively rebuffed. “Maybe I need to do some exploring myself,” she tells him.

“Yes, she really met a guy in Paris,” says Helmer. “And I proceeded to weep on all the national monuments of France.”

There’s a pause on the end of the line, before he offers: “We went through it in life. We dramatised some things to make a better movie, but unfortunately there is a lot of truth to the film. I wanted to make a film about that part of my – our – life, almost to make me believe that I did, actually and really, screw up on that kind of epic scale. I wanted to figure out why I did all those things.”

---

“I broke up with my girlfriend because I felt like I needed to sow my oats, but I couldn’t even sow one single oat” – Simon Helberg

---

As well as credited as a director, Helberg performs in almost every scene of this film. Towne watched his performance – as he doubts his love for her, somehow seduces, masturbates about, and then has sex with, other women – from behind the camera, providing instructions via walkie talkie.

“I lost 15 pounds making the movie,” he says. “I was putting myself out there, while my real-life wife sat behind the camera, instructing me on how to wail more, in a higher-pitched decibel. She’d say things like: ‘No, you need to sound less masculine, because I remember at the Père Lachaise you were really grovelling.’ It was good for her; she got to finally get her own back.”

One moment sticks in his mind, of his wife offering direction on how he should simulate a handjob. “Suddenly my wife was jumping on top of me in front of the crew and saying: ‘The camera's going to be here, so we need your hand stroking in this direction, so it only looks like you’re touching him…’ My in-laws were sitting behind the camera at this point. There were a lot of complicated elements at play, I think it’s fair to say.”

With an amazing Franco-pop soundtrack and a strong supporting cast, including the ever-jovial Alfred Molina as his hectoring Dad, Zachary Quinto as a bored, rich clothes-horse, and Jason Ritter in a too-small part as Devon’s brother, We’ll Never Have Paris is an easy, light watch. But there’s an element of seriousness behind the set-pieces. “When you get married, you look into a crystal ball,” he says. “You have no idea what your life will be like when you’re old and withered, but you make the decision to be with this person. Making a decision for the rest of life is going to raise questions and doubts and fears, and probably everybody fumbles a bit when it comes to the moment. Nobody maybe fumbled things as much as I did. But if anyone out there is having questions then, trust me, don’t beat yourself up.”