Celine Song’s Visions of Love

Song is, by all accounts, a New York director. She was born in South Korea and raised partly in Canada, but Manhattan is her home and the primary setting for her acclaimed debut feature, Past Lives, as well as her upcoming second film, Materialists. (A24 is the distributor for both pictures.) After we were approached by a pair of awestruck students from the School of Visual Arts, I asked if she got recognized a lot. She hesitated for a moment: “Yes.” In New York, at least. Past Lives played at the Angelika movie theater for the better part of a year, which helped earn her visibility among the hordes of local cinephiles.

As we navigated toward the park—the backdrop for a key scene in Past Lives—the city seemed to match Song’s abundant, fast-flowing energy. She was dressed in the kind of clothes that allow a person to bounce around town with ease: black sneakers, loose black Muji pants, a black camp shirt streaked with algae-green tie-dye. Song spoke quickly, vibrantly, and at length, veering in and out of jokes and conversational detours with the confidence of someone who knows precisely where she’s headed. She would interrupt herself to ask questions (“When did you meet your partner?”), note the paucity of recycling bins and acknowledge the possibility that nothing actually gets recycled (“I have to live with faith”), and marvel at a pink petal that had floated down from on high and startled her (“Ah, pretty!”).

We settled ourselves on an empty park bench, and Song assumed the sideways posture of a teenager engaged in conference, cross-legged and facing me directly. There, among the pigeons, we discussed two of life’s most absorbing conundrums: love and money.

These twin fixations are the basis of Materialists, in which a jaded matchmaker named Lucy (Dakota Johnson) finds herself considering a future with either Harry (Pedro Pascal), a perfect-on-paper and very wealthy man who doesn’t quite set her heart racing, or John (Chris Evans), her theater actor ex-boyfriend who can’t give her the financial security she craves. Like a character in a Jane Austen novel, Lucy thinks about dating in explicitly economic terms—just as everyone in Hertfordshire knows that Mr. Darcy makes £10,000 a year, Harry’s $12 million home is part of his appeal. In this way, Materialists is a refreshing departure from romantic comedies where 20-somethings live in palatial Soho lofts and nobody seems stressed about money. “Lucy is somebody who would like to go to a nice restaurant,” explained Song. “Her parents’ marriage probably fell apart for economic reasons. Poverty will do that.”

But then love comes careening in, illogical and mysterious. “Marketplace economics, which works in every other aspect of our lives, does not apply to dating, love, or marriage. When it comes to that, it’s going to fall apart,” said Song. What makes a person right for you? It’s probably not their salary, height, weight, or density of functioning hair follicles—but some other, more alchemical and inexplicable thing. “You’re just saying, Well, I can live with this person,” Song laughed in astonishment. “It’s a really amazing thing to be like, I’m just in love, I don’t know what to say. That’s, stupidly, what it is.”

She wrote Materialists in the six months between completing Past Lives and premiering it at the Sundance Film Festival. It was an amniotic but anxious time for Song, who had until then worked primarily as a playwright. “I was kind of waiting for my life to begin,” she said. She decided to write about an experience that had been on her mind for years: For a period of six months, while she was pursuing a theater career at night, she spent her days working as a professional matchmaker.

When Song shares this biographical detail with people, they tend to get very interested. And her findings were intriguing. She knew plenty of stage actors who, like John, were handsome and fit, but whose financial precarity would disqualify them in the eyes of her matchmaking clients—who, in turn, didn’t want the high-earning doctor with a bit of a belly. (“I’d be like, bro! He’s a neurologist! He’s busy!”) She was fascinated by the way that people felt comfortable evaluating potential partners based on specs, only to short-circuit when it came to genuine connection. “They feel very entitled. They’ll tell you: ‘I go to the gym, I feel entitled to someone who goes to the gym,’” Song said. “But the thing that people don’t feel entitled about is love.” In Materialists, Lucy herself sees love as something beyond her grasp, having committed herself to marrying rich or dying alone.

By now, we know that Song didn’t need to feel anxious about the reception of Past Lives. With a nomination for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars, she attended the awards in Los Angeles on March 10, 2024. The next day, she flew back to New York. A day later, she was in a van scouting locations for Materialists.

From the start, it was a heftier production than Past Lives. “With Chris and Pedro and Dakota, it’s harder to be like, ‘we’re just a little indie film!’” Song said. As a second-time director, she still found herself navigating some learning curves on set. She was unprepared, for instance, for the sheer amount of time required to safely install a beat-up old car on a truck bed in order to capture a conversation on the road between Lucy and John. “I’d be like, well, I’m learning my lesson,” she said. “Look at me! Look at me sitting here, waiting for the thing to happen.”

Song knows what she wants, though, and how to express it to her collaborators. For the matchmaking office where Lucy works, she told production designer Anthony Gasparro that the colors should be “uberfeminine, but alpha—and cold.” (Picture a steely girl boss. Picture a bluish, pinkish gray.) To costume designer Katina Danabassis, she described the film in vertical terms: Harry is up in the penthouse, in his gorgeous Zegna tuxedo and Elder Statesman knits, and John is down on the pavement, wearing a thrifted Foxy produce tee and too-tight trousers, while Lucy needs a wardrobe that allows her to travel between the two. “Celine likes to get theoretical,” said Danabassis. “It adds a layer of meaning-making that helps me shape things.”

Song’s references for Materialists included Pride and Prejudice, Broadcast News, Working Girl, The Player, The Apartment, and the films of Nora Ephron. (Outside of romantic comedies and dramas, she also looked at the noir genre, likening Lucy to a hard-boiled detective who’s seen it all.) Although Materialists is set in the present day, Danabassis aimed to create a timeless sensibility with its costumes, drawing on photos of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy on the streets of 1990s New York. “For me, he’s the ultimate style icon for men,” she said. “Biking to work, the cast on his leg. Could you be any hotter or cooler?” JFK Jr.’s impeccable style informed Harry’s elegance—because, as Danabassis and Song both noted, it was important that he actually have great taste and never seem gauche—while Lucy’s look followed the Bessette-Kennedy principle that simplicity can often yield the biggest impact. A streamlined Proenza Schouler gown in a magnetic shade of blue and a little skirt suit with a killer pair of Paris Texas boots helped cement Lucy as the main character and a professional who knows not to steal her clients’ shine.

Song told me that she feels lucky to have surrounded herself with department heads, like Danabassis and Gasparro, who understand the kind of movies she wants to make. When they show her an idea, it’s never off-base—if she doesn’t get it right away, she just asks to see it in context. (Lucy’s blue dress looked like “a sheet” on the hanger, with its broad waist ties flopping loose; as soon as Johnson put it on, Song saw the vision.) Similarly, Song only shows her scripts to those who have personal buy-in on the project: her husband, Challengers and Queer screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes; her producers; and A24. “I only like feedback from people who have skin in the game,” she told me.

Although Materialists has long since wrapped production, Song spoke about the film’s ideas with a sense of absorption and curiosity that made it seem as though she might very well head back to her apartment to continue refining the script. Intellectual engagement appears to be her natural state: When I ventured a theory that she disagreed with—aren’t we always settling, in one way or another, when we commit to a romantic partner? And isn’t that kind of beautiful?—she didn’t shut it down or glide past it, but rather chewed it over until we arrived at a more mutually satisfying version of the idea. (Maybe “settling” isn’t a sufficiently generous word when it comes to matters of the heart—but, certainly, adult life involves making choices that necessarily close doors, and that is beautiful.) She spoke with urgency, but she didn’t seem pressed for time. When I asked the actor Zoë Winters about working on Materialists, she described something similar: Song was remarkably available and always made sure that the actors had enough time to work through their scenes. “The pace, for me, felt really open and easeful,” said Winters, who plays Lucy’s most crucial matchmaking client.

Two things can be true: a director can have a lot of time for her team and also, as Song told me, see it as her job to stress them out slightly about the importance of nailing a given scene, especially in the unruly environment of New York City. There are production assistants holding back droves of pedestrians, and grips sweating to make sure the light stays consistent. “Shooting outdoors in New York is a nightmare,” she said.

We rose from our bench and migrated toward the park’s monument to Admiral David Farragut, featuring granite carvings of solemn women representing Courage and Loyalty, where Nora and Hae Sung reunite in Past Lives. The park was filled with people laughing with friends and milling about. The PAs would have had a hellish job on a day like this. But according to Song, filming in the city among its many landmarks is uniquely rewarding: “Once you’ve seen the movie, you can’t see those places without knowing that’s where it happened.” How illogical to take on such a difficult task, and yet: how romantic.

Eliza Brooke is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC.