Building on the success of her Oscar-nominated debut, Past Lives, writer/director Celine Song continues to explore love’s contradictions in a keenly observed look at the modern realities of love and dating. Set against the backdrop of New York City’s elite matchmaking scene, A24’s Materialists stars Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a successful, high-end matchmaker navigating a world where romance is reduced to checking boxes. While attending the wedding of a former client, Lucy meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), the dashing brother of the groom, and also unexpectedly encounters her ex, John (Chris Evans).
Drawing from her own experiences as a former matchmaker, Song’s latest is a sharp commentary on the commodification of love and a serious striving to understand how something so ephemeral has become so transactional. In an age of self-improvement, the (often complicated) journey to find a partner remains an essential part of the shared human experience. On the heels of an opening weekend that surpassed the entire domestic run of her feature debut, Boxoffice Pro connected with writer/director Celine Song to discuss her thoughtful look at dating in the 21st century and how her work brings the universal language of love into the communal experience of the cinema.
The questions that your work poses are bold and pointed, but your films are also so thoughtful and delicate. Is that an intentional part of crafting your stories, or is that Celine? Or both?
It’s really hard for me to separate the work that I do from the thing that ends up being made. So much of it has to do with making something that I really care about, and that becoming something that can’t be anything but something that I made. Which, of course, is always going to be filled with the things that I’m interested in and the things that I’m obsessed with. That’s really what it’s like for me to develop my voice as a filmmaker and continue to grow. These are not the only movies I’m going to make; I’m going to make movies forever. These are the first two. I can’t wait for the third, the fifth, and the 20th.
You allow actors and your characters the space to think, which is so compelling to watch. Does part of that collaboration come from the rehearsal process of talking through the meaning behind your words?
We do what I call rehearsal, but it’s really table work, where we do go through every single scene that each actor is in. So, for example, every single Lucy and Harry scene we go through with Dakota and Pedro, and every single Lucy and John scene I go through with Dakota and Chris. And then, of course, the scenes where it’s just Lucy, I spend time with Dakota. We go through every line and talk about how we intend to walk into the scene and how we intend to walk out. It’s the basic rule of drama where the way that you walk into the conversation has to be different when you leave the conversation. Then after all that, the actors go and do it as a bit of their own homework, because they’re going to be the ones who have to actually say the line. They put in a lot of work, and I ask them to.
Then when we come on set, some of those [takes] are going to be considered a bit of rehearsal. I usually have some idea of how we want to block it. And then, of course, actors actually step into the space, and maybe we’ll find something where it’s like, “No, it’s better if it’s a little bit more here.” We show up with a lot of plans, and then on the day, we still work it out a little bit. I do multiple takes, and the first run at it we treat as a rehearsal. Then we talk about it, and we do it again. We shoot on film, so there’s often a fun little interlude as we change the magazine, where we can talk about it for more than 30 seconds. Some of it is practical, but almost all of it is about a psychological or narrative beat.
Love defies algorithms. Lucy refers to Sophie as her favorite client, who is also her most difficult. She can’t crack Sophie. That plays nicely into the bigger question that Lucy’s wrestling with in her own life.
She really does talk about it as if you’re talking about an object or a piece of merchandise in the marketplace. Which I think is also connected to the way that we talk about ourselves in a corporate setting, where we say things like, “Well, how do you stand out as a candidate for a job?” It’s part of something that’s rooted in competition. In a capitalist approach to the world, if it is survival of the fittest, how do you stand out? How do you have exceptional qualities?
You’ve said that you want to make things that are going to teach you something. What did Materialists teach you?
I feel like it deepened my understanding of my own materialism and then also my own sense of romance. I feel like I learned more about love through making this movie. You’re watching me piece it together through my characters, which are embodied by my amazing actors, who are also working it out. This is always going to be a question: How do we get the happy ending that we’re in search of? Happiness is a thing that, like love, we’re all pursuing, but it is so hard to figure out. Happiness is very connected to love and the way we feel love. So how can we be happy when we’re in a situation where we’re loveless? It feels impossible.
So much of the thing that I’m working out is how I want to be happy. A bit of math from a materialist drives the story towards something that makes sense. It’s something that makes sense and something that ends in love. I think I learned that no matter how hard I try, it’s still going to be something that is this beautiful, ancient mystery that there is no formula for. There’s only inspiration. There’s only a feeling.
Both of your films have moments that draw directly from your own experience. As a writer, does having a shared experience help you get to know your characters?
It’s actually more the way that the pieces of experiences I’ve had as a human being usually serve as a really powerful inspiration, because I know that if I have gone through something, other people have as well. It’s a way to make something that is grounded in reality and in life. That’s then able to contribute to character building, for example, because I can point to how it feels. Of course, it requires a great deal of faith when it comes to believing that the experiences that I’ve had—if I describe them accurately—are going to be the same for other people in the world. It’s a bit of faith that I’m a part of humanity [laughs].
I have to believe that I’m a part of the human race and that we share something universal, which is to live. I think to live life is a universal experience, and it’s a collective experience too. If I feel that this film accurately represents my heart and my life and the way that I feel that the world is in some way, then I know that a ton of people in the world will respond with, ‘Yes, I’ve felt that way before, too.’ This is something that I had to take a leap of faith with on my first movie, Past Lives. Because there was so much of that response, it gave me so much courage when it came to Materialists to talk about a different feeling, in some ways a more complicated feeling.
Because the conversation is about universal emotions, everyone brings their own story to the conversation. What has it been like sharing the film with audiences?
I love how much it is a reflection of where the audience member is in their life. Are they in love? Are they heartbroken? Have they given up on it? Are they really hopeful for it right now? What’s going on with their marriage? Whatever it may be, the response or the feeling that the audience expresses as a result of the film is so connected to where they are in their life and who they are too, right?
I got excited by the idea that the movie is just coming out, but in five years, if an audience happens to revisit it, what will it feel like for them? In 10 years, if they revisit it, what will that feel like? I love doing that with the movies I love. I watch them again once in a while, and you learn and feel something different because you’re a different person, while the movie is still the same.
The scene that’s happening behind the end credits is a short film in and of itself. How did you plan and put that sequence together?
We were going to try and build it somewhere if they wouldn’t let us shoot there, but I just feel so lucky that we actually got to shoot it at the New York City marriage bureau. And actually, most of the background artists you see on screen, a lot of them are crew members. I think almost all of them are actual couples. My props team brought their partners, and then they were in the scene. You can see our camera loader and his wife. It’s just so romantic. It was such an amazing opportunity to also meet everybody’s family and everyone’s partners. We got so close and it was the final week of the shoot. The great thing about making a movie about love is that you get to hear so many love stories.
The reason why I wanted to talk about it is because of the way that the material and the immaterial play such a powerful role in marriage or any kind of partnership. Marriage records are the most profound historical records. Every historian will tell you that the most reliable record that exists is the marriage record. What’s amazing about marriage records is that they go back so far. There’s one in every city, in every corner of the world, and it’s usually just two names placed next to each other. What we don’t know, the thing that is immaterial, is what kind of marriage they had, right? Maybe one marriage was wonderful and perfect, another one was abusive and violent, another one was that they were in love and they fell out of love, and then another one was that they didn’t love each other in the beginning and they grew into love.
We don’t know what kind of love actually passed between these two people. Not to mention queer love, because there’s no record. What passed between those two people, the kind of love that existed—good, bad, and the ugly—all of it is only something that those two people know and those two people feel. Only John and Lucy, and only Lucy and Harry, know what passes between them. This immaterial thing, this ephemeral thing, is as ephemeral as a flower ring. I don’t understand how we could argue, just because there’s nothing material attached to it, that the feeling that passes between two people is less important or less substantial than the records of marriage. Those are the kinds of things that I was thinking about when Materialists was scripted.
It’s great that these are the questions you’re chasing, because we all encounter love in our own unique and universal way. To have an opportunity for a community to come together and experience that in a movie theater is really special.
It’s a universal theme, right? It is one of the great dramas of our lives. We live and then we die, but somewhere in between, we encounter love. No matter how ordinary or how extraordinary you are, that’s something that we do; loving somebody is something we do. It is absolutely worthy of cinema. It is so completely worthy of talking about it seriously, lightly, happily, depressingly—every possible way that is involved in human life. It’s a completely universal theme.
I also learned that when I was releasing Past Lives. Men, women, old, young—every single person was obsessed with love. Everybody was really interested in it, and the only difference was there were those who were too embarrassed to admit it. They lowered their voice and whispered it to me. Other people would be very open, very loud, and tell everyone about it. To me, that’s the only difference. The truth is that we’re all deeply fascinated with it because it is a great drama. It’s a very brave and heroic thing that we all are asked to do in our one life we have.
Did you grow up going to the movies? Is there a specific memory that stands out to you?
I’ve been going to movies forever. You start with the cartoons, and then you start going to ‘grown-up’ movies, and those are really cool. Then there was a time when we were just going to see a Rob Schneider movie. Every other week there would be a new Rob Schneider movie, and we would go.
I remember one experience where it was my birthday and my friends all wanted to go see a movie with me. Everything was for adults or was probably going to be a little bit dark, so we went to see Glitter. I remember us thinking that, because of the way that the movie looked and because it was Mariah Carey, it was going to be totally cool for seventh and eighth-grade girls. We realized, “Oh wow, it’s a dark story of a woman who is on the verge.” But we enjoyed it so much. I weirdly had such a great, revelatory time—and the music’s great.
It’s great to be surprised when you go to the movies and get wrapped up in a story.
Go to the movie theater and just look at the posters and pick one. Sometimes you go, and it’s like, ‘What’s the one I can walk into right now?’
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