To Materialists director Celine Song, a "great act of bravery is saying yes to love"
The A.V. Club spoke to the Past Lives filmmaker about her goal to bring respect to the dramedy/rom-com genre.
Photo: A24
Celine Song is a sucker for a film about feelings. As a playwright, screenwriter, and director, the Korean-born Canadian found her muse in our hearts—she revels in discovering how they steer us away from hurt, or provide us a wellspring of endless bravery as we seek a romantic match. With her second feature, Materialists, Song doubles down. Past Lives was a gauzy, almost nostalgic meditation on how we see our past relationships in light of our current love. Materialists is more blunt in exploring the roots of matrimonial connections and how we’ve bastardized that pursuit even more in the digital age by squeezing out every ounce of serendipity or wonder from the process in order to successfully tick the most qualities off on our personal attribute checklists.
That’s not a place where the unabashedly romantic Song lives. When The A.V. Club asked her what book or film profoundly opened up her creative self as a teenager, she offers, “Probably Demian by Hermann Hesse.” The 1919 novel is far from light reading, but its exploration of the human struggle to find self-realization certainly remains a theme in Song’s own yearning to deconstruct our messy selves.
“Somebody told me once that Hermann Hesse should be encountered as a young person because it means a lot at that time,” she says. “It’s the first time that I had a sense of what the vastness of life could be like. It’s very much about, how do you decide what kind of a life you want to live? Because everybody else tells you that you should live one way or the other, it doesn’t mean that’s the way you should live. You can invent your own way.”
Song has been dedicated to finding that path for her own life and career by ingesting a wide array of influences that she’s expressed through outlets like fan fiction and video games like The Sims. The romantic drama and rom-com genres have always been near and dear to her emotional vocabulary.
“I would watch every single Victorian romance possible,” she says. “If you are in a corset, I’ll watch it. It’s one of those genres where it’s deceptively some of the deepest, most incredibly enlivening cinema. I rewatch those movies, over and over.”
She also cites the works of Nora Ephron, Billy Wilder, and James L. Brooks as foundational. “All their movies, I feel like I grew up so obsessed with them and obsessed with those characters, and then the story, and also what they have to say about love.”
When we point out the parallels in Materialists to James Ivory’s 1986 adaptation of E.M. Forster’s A Room With A View, and Song lights up at the comparison. “That’s one of those references that we were talking about when I was making the movie with all my departments,” she confirms. “It’s so much more about this woman at the center of it who is making a decision for her life. Those are my favorite stories, where it’s about a woman who is having so much authority and making decisions for her life. It’s about accepting love when it’s offered to you, which is a brave thing to do. It feels like a simple thing, but you get to see and experience, in A Room With A View and Materialists, these women whose great act of bravery is saying yes to love.”
But before she could clearly create her own version of these emotional stories as a writer-director for film, Song says there were stepping-stone career experiences that helped consolidate her worldview and shape her individual voice. In 2021, she was part of the season-one writers’ room for Prime Video’s series adaptation of The Wheel Of Time under showrunner Rafe Judkins.
“I learned so much about leadership from Rafe Judkins,” Song says. “I learned everything about leadership when you’re running a show, or in my case, running a film. So much of it is about responsibility. He taught me about the responsibility of the chief creative person, to make sure that it’s good. I learned so much from that, as an artist, holistically.”