‘Everybody's starved of affection': Past Lives director Celine Song on the brutal dating scene and her realistic new romcom

The Guardian

2 days ago

'Our financial literacy is so fucked,' says Celine Song. We're having breakfast in Manhattan on a sunny Saturday in early July, a few weeks after her new film, Materialists, has opened in New York City. She's wearing a charmingly ironic outfit: a T-shirt that says 'HOWDY' and a baseball cap that says 'Big' (she's petite, 5ft 4in, for the record) – but she speaks with almost disarming earnestness.
She's frustrated, she tells me, that people have described one of the characters in her film, a private equity manager with a $12m apartment, as a 'billionaire'. 'If you're a billionaire, your big apartment is not $12m!' she exclaims. 'The average income of an American adult is $35,000. What that means is half of America makes less than $35,000. Three times that is $100,000. Ten of that is $1m. And a billion dollars is not a hundred of that. No, it's a thousand of that.'
She's offended because a billionaire would never be a likable character in her movie. 'I think because of how visible billionaires are, we think that's what wealth is. And I'm like: no, that's just crime.'
It's a bit unusual to be talking about financial literacy in the context of a romcom, the genre that Materialists defiantly embraces with its story of a high-end matchmaker (Dakota Johnson) torn between an old flame with no money (Chris Evans) and a suave, moneyed suitor, the 'not-billionaire' in question (Pedro Pascal). Romantic comedies, particularly those set in New York City, tend to be escapist fantasies: you're not supposed to wonder how the heroine can afford to live in a swanky one-bedroom in Manhattan or wear Louboutins; you're certainly not supposed to ponder the moral implications of the hero's wealth.
But in Materialists, every detail is spelled out. Early in the film, Lucy (Johnson) announces to Harry (Pascal) that she makes '$80,000 a year before taxes' – something the private equity partner should keep in mind before pursuing her. The characters' apartments, Song says, were carefully researched and designed based on their economic situations. There's Harry's $12m penthouse in the expensive Manhattan neighbourhood Tribeca. Lucy lives in an aspirational studio in the posh neighbourhood of Brooklyn Heights that she rented right before the Covid-19 pandemic (Song looked on US real estate website Zillow to estimate the rent); Evans's character John lives with three roommates in south-west Brooklyn's Sunset Park. (It was supposed to be in Williamsburg, before the film's construction crew said that he'd never be able to afford that.)
It's not that Song is a mercenary realist. The only subject that makes her eyes light up as much as money is love, which she describes as 'being hit by lightning'. Song's first feature film, Past Lives, which nabbed two Oscar nominations in 2024, spins a beautiful time-crossing and bicultural saga around a happily married Korean immigrant in the US – a stand-in for Song – who re-encounters a childhood sweetheart and confronts the life that could have been. The characters talk about inyeon, a Buddhist belief in relationships as something fated and cosmic, cutting across life cycles.
There's no such wistful dreaming in Materialists. Harry's romantic overture to Lucy is to tell her that he's interested in her 'intangible assets'; he wants to date the broker, the person who decides who is and isn't valuable. 'I feel like as we grow into this efficiency-focused, productivity-focused way of thinking about the world, everything we do is so that we can be better, faster, stronger,' Song says of our culture of relentless optimisation. 'Where is the place where you're just like an animal who's trying to live?'
Song, 36, was born in Seoul to artist parents. She says her father, a film-maker, named her after the impish stage magician played by Juliet Berto in Jacques Rivette's French new wave classic Céline and Julie Go Boating. When Song was 12, the family emigrated to Ontario, Canada, where she lived throughout her college years, before moving to New York to pursue a master of fine arts degree in playwriting at Columbia University. By the time she started making movies, she had achieved considerable success in theatre for deeply personal, yet daringly experimental plays, including 2019's Endlings, which weaves together the stories of three female Korean divers and a Korean-Canadian writer in New York, and a live production of The Seagull on the Sims 4, staged during lockdown in 2020.
Song never really suffered the indignities of modern dating. As portrayed in Past Lives, she met her husband, the screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes – who recently wrote Luca Guadagnino's tennis film Challengers – at a writing residency in Montauk in Long Island when she was 24. But in her early years in New York, she got a pretty acrid taste of dating culture when she worked as a matchmaker for six months, after hearing about the gig from a friend in the industry. It seemed like an 'HR job' with a more 'involved client-facing element' – and Song had studied psychology in her undergraduate years.
But she knew she couldn't make lightning strike for her clients, and they knew it, too. 'I was basically given instructions on who to say no to,' she says of the job. 'They were saying: 'I'm not even available to get hit by lightning by certain people who don't meet my criteria.'' The worst of them, sampled in the film, were brazen with their bigotry. 'People would rank what races they wanted. They would literally say: 'No Asians'. They wouldn't admit that even to their therapist.'
She had wanted to make a film about the experience for years, but the script had never quite worked. Then she realised why. 'I thought the focus was on the clients. But the problem is that the clients are not that interesting, because they all want the same thing. If I asked 10 clients what kind of guy they wanted, they would all say: over 6ft tall, makes more money than me, great body, strong hairline.'
Things clicked when one day, years ago, she ran into an old friend from graduate school at a fancy gala dinner for theatre donors. She was there as one of the rising playwrights that wealthy patrons could rub shoulders with; he, once a very promising acting student, was there as a server. When she went over to greet and hug her friend, she sensed that they were both embarrassed. It was as if they were breaking an invisible barrier – like Rose going below deck to fraternise with Jack in Titanic.
'How Victorian is that?' she says. 'But it's 2017!'
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She realised that the movie she was trying to make was about class, which is what all the great romances are really about, anyway. Early in Materialists, when Lucy meets Harry at a fancy wedding she's helped facilitate, John interrupts them – he's there as a waiter. It's our first indication that Lucy is an impostor in the world of wealth that she's insinuated herself into so elegantly and seamlessly. The cold calculus with which she surveys people as dating prospects hits something of an iceberg whenever she's with John: love, as always, gets in the way of logic.
Lucy eventually undergoes a reckoning in Materialists, but Song doesn't judge her protagonist too harshly. She has deep empathy for women like her, who trust in logic to rescue them. She brings up the 'tradwife' trend taking over social media, where women embrace traditional gender roles and domesticity, as a symptom of a crisis beneath the surface. 'I think it has so much to do with how deeply broken our economic systems are, especially in the US. As we have learned, the American dream is not achievable. You cannot jump your class. But what's one of the few ways that you can still jump your class? Well, marriage.'
If there is an element of escapist fantasy to the film, it's that the protagonists, all deeply insecure in their own ways about their desirability, are played by three of the most beautiful people in the world. To have Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans vying for your hand is an embarrassment of riches, and Song admits that even casting Dakota Johnson as Lucy – a woman who believes there's nothing special about her – was a bit of a 'fantasy trick'. 'But the thing is, it wasn't a stretch for my actors to play these roles; they got it better than me. Who feels more like merchandise than the guy who plays the Mandalorian or Captain America?'
For all its hard-nosed cynicism, Materialists is even more sentimental of a romance than Past Lives; its declarations about romance are all the sweeter for the superficial, number-crunching conventions they resist. Even so, making a star-studded romantic comedy after the critical success of Past Lives is a bold move.
The genre is more or less dead today, or relegated to Christmas specials on streaming services. Even A24, which distributed the movie in the US, seemed to be self-conscious about releasing a romcom: the company published a 'syllabus' for Materialists, a list of Song's reference films, replete with highbrow names such as Thomas Vinterberg and Mike Leigh, as well as Merchant Ivory productions and Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence. But Song herself is unselfconscious about her love for romances.
'I still remember showing Past Lives at this festival in Ireland,' she says. 'This one really burly Irish guy was asking me a question during the Q&A. And he started crying, telling me the story of his own childhood sweetheart. And I remember thinking: it's funny that when it comes to the matters of love, we relegate it to the girlies. But the truth is that everybody's just actually starved of love and affection. I knew, when I was making Materialists, that there is a very real market for it.'
She embraces the idea that Materialists might spark more conversations about love and romance. 'It is so romantic that I get to invite the audience to the movie theatre for two hours to do nothing but talk about love and dating and relationships and marriage.' But then again, there's always the matter of money. 'We get to be so real! I get to say things like $12m [apartment]! You know, the most reliable, audible response in every screening I've been in is the moment when Harry says '$12m'.'
Materialists is in UK cinemas from 13 August.