‘Materialists’ Filmmaker Celine Song On Love And Her ‘Incredible’ Cast

She might have only two feature films under her belt so far, but cinematic storyteller Celine Song has already made a lasting impression in Hollywood and with moviegoers everywhere.

Following the success of her breakout 2023 film Past Lives, with Oscar nominations for her Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture for the A24 film, Song, 36, has now brought another story about love to the big screen with Materialists.

Starring Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal, Materialists centers around Lucy, a successful matchmaker in New York City, who begins to question her work practices and her overall outlook on what love actually means.

Sitting down with the writer, director and producer on Zoom, I first wondered how this modern Materialists story about dating, romance and love initially came about for Song.

“So, I worked as a matchmaker for six months. I did that as a day job because I couldn’t afford to pay rent being a playwright. So, I actually needed to make some money and this was kind of the only job that I could get, because of course in New York City, to be a barista, you need 10 years of barista experience. I couldn’t get any of these other day jobs that my other playwrights were getting. So, I was looking for something and this is something that a friend of mine, I learned, was doing. I applied for the job and I got it. I only did it for six months, because the truth is that I was having too much fun doing it. It’s an amazing experience. I feel like I learned more in those six months than I did in any other part of my life, because people are very, very honest with their matchmaker. It’s a little different than talking to a therapist, where you are intentionally talking about intangible. You’re talking about the things that are going on in your heart and your mind – that’s what you’re talking to your therapist about – but a matchmaker, you talk about the asset that you would like to acquire, which is a boyfriend or a girlfriend. The way that people will talk about the partner for life that they’re looking for, it would be in numbers, but the truth is that I also knew that’s just not what love feels like. It just has nothing to do with what love is. I wish it was, so that we can all gain it – the way that we’re gaming everything else in life, but the love is an ancient feeling and it’s one of the great mysteries that have been with us forever”

When the Materialists trailer premiered to the public earlier this year, people were immediately struck by the nostalgic vibe of its storytelling teaser – with a comforting charm that moviegoers had come to know from romantic comedies in the late 1990s and early 2000s. So, was the trailer cut Song’s idea or her film distributor, A24?

Song said, “It’s kind of like that would always be the thing that would guide the tone, or the way that I wanted to make it or how real I wanted it to be. What’s amazing about those [earlier rom com]

movies is that they’re about something, right? They’re about something that modern people are dealing with in their life and in their love. It’s always going to be about a pretty frank conversation and I think that’s what’s so powerful about romantic comedies as a genre. They’re always about a conversation that we all are dying to have. We all want to have this conversation, desperately, and it’s an amazing place where you get to spend two hours, just get to talk about it. So, it’s meant to be that.”

She added: “A24, my favorite part and what I really love so much about working with them is always that they listen to the filmmaker about what the movie is. I can say all those things and then the studio can take it and not believe a word I say – but when they actually listen. They believe that the filmmaker knows the movie better than anybody else, which is a fact. I’m the person who has worked on it the longest, know it the deepest and I know every single person who worked on it. I’m the only person who knows the guys who drive the trucks on it and also the actors. I know everybody in the studio. I know what it was like when I was sitting in my room looking at my final draft, just typing away, dreaming about this movie. [A24] will always believe me when I say this is what the movie is.”

Coming off of her filming Past Lives, I was curious what Song might have taken from that experiences and brought to her filming with Materialists next.

“Well, I wish that it worked that way, where I was like building it from that place – but the truth is that, in both cases, I’m just telling the story that I want to tell. Honestly, it’s just purely that I didn’t know how to make a movie before I made Past Lives, and Materialists is lucky because as a film, it’s being made by somebody who has made a movie before. So, I think that I brought everything I know about filmmaking. So to me, it’s just a step forward as a filmmaker, more than it being something like that. It’s so fundamentally a step forward, just in terms of like the craft of it or like what I get interested in it and what I want to achieve. I wrote the script for Materialists before Past Lives came out. So, there was no way for me to know.”

Song added: “So to me, it’s like Materialists wasn’t like a response to Past Lives, as much as it is another first movie in a way. By the time that I was making Materialists, I knew how to do prep for production or post-production. Also, I could get more ambitious doing it because I knew more.”

When it came to her Materialists stars Johnson, Evans and Pascal, Song has nothing but praise to say about her film’s actors, not only as professionals, but as collaborators and fellow humans.

“I think it’s so clear just how incredible they are and how amazing they are. It’s always a very intimate relationship that I have with my actors, because we’re often talking about – at least in the two movies I made – is we’re talking about love, connection, empathy. What we have is what they’re able to convey with their performance – what they’re going through as characters. So, we get really deep into the character and we often meet somewhere in the character, and in doing so, I think we get really close. So, I got really close to all of them and I love them. I’m so happy that they’re the ones who are making this movie with me. They showed up with such a deep understanding of their characters.”

Being the leading filmmaker on this Materialists project, I wondered what it means to Song to have such agency over her work and becoming such a strong force in Hollywood today.

Song said, “I feel like it’s something that is quite true and it’s something that I know is being protected so beautifully by my studio, first of all, which is that it’s the belief that I’m the person who understands and knows my movie the best. If you don’t believe in me, if you don’t want to take the leap of faith on me, then I don’t know what they want to take the leap of faith on. That’s what I feel. So, I think maybe that’s the only thing I can do. There would be so many moments [on-set] where Dakota would just look at me and she would say, ‘It’s going to be amazing.’ It’s faith.”

Coming off of her experiences thus far in her career, I was curious of the advice that Song has for other creatives, who have a good idea for film or for television, but do not know how to effectively get it off the ground.

“I would say write the script. I’ve always found that the way into convincing somebody to make something is to write the script. It’d be so much easier if we didn’t have to write the script. Writing is so hard – it’s so hard and frustrating and annoying and takes a lot of time. I wish that we didn’t have to write anything and still get to be a filmmaker. You write a script and then you show it to somebody that will be so jazzed about it. The only way that’s going to happen is if you yourself are jazzed about it.”

While concluding my conversation with Song, I wondered what the Materialists filmmaker would say to her main characters Lucy, John and Harry within this cinematic universe. After seeing their intertwining stories from the outside in, what does she feel they need to hear most about love and dating?

Song said, “I think the thing is they all get told what I want to say to them in the movie. I feel like that’s the truth. I think they are all told what they need to hear in the movie. It’s very hard to hold onto hope, that love is possible, even more than being able to get a guy who is, you know, six feet tall and makes this much money. It feels like it’s easier to try to get that right, than to fall in love – but what I believe is that everyone will be able to fall in love. It’s actually entirely a possibility, believe it or not. It’s very hard to believe, but it is true. I believe in it for all of them. I believe that every single character in the film will fall in love. I can’t tell them what the specs of that person is going to be, but I can tell you that you will fall in love and that is going to happen. That is completely a possible thing, even though it feels impossible, at times.”