“Love makes fools of all of us”: Celine Song on the inspiration behind her new film, Materialists

After striking gold with her quietly powerful drama Past Lives, Celine Song became the new young writer-director to watch. Two years later, she’s back with Materialists, a New York–set romantic comedy starring Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans and widely beloved internet daddy Pedro Pascal. The film follows Lucy (Johnson), a successful matchmaker whose own heart has grown hardened to the possibility of love, as she finds herself caught between her starving-artist ex, John (Evans), and Harry (Pascal), a wealthy and well-groomed financier. The enigma of love is a source of endless fascination for Song. “We talk about true love like we’re talking about Santa Claus,” she says. “It’s like a kid made it up.” Here, Song tells us about the inspiration behind her new film, why love makes her feel dumb and living in ambitious cities.

Your first feature, Past Lives, was one of the biggest films of 2023 and earned two Oscar nominations. How did you decide to do a romantic comedy for your second? I wrote this movie between finishing Past Lives and when the film came out at Sundance. There was a weird six-month period where I knew I was a filmmaker, but the rest of the world didn’t know it yet. I was going a little bit nuts waiting for Past Lives to premiere and start its life. I decided to write this story—which was going to be my next movie—about an experience I’ve been wanting to write about ever since I worked as a matchmaker for a brief period in my 20s. When I left that job, I thought, One day, I’m going to crack that story. 

While I was releasing Past Lives, I already had this script that I was putting together. I went to the Oscars, which was so cool, and flew back to New York the next day. The day after that, I was in a scouting van for Materialists.

Materialists pays homage to classic New York rom-coms while subverting many conventions of the genre. Were you inspired by any films in particular? I don’t really write with a genre in mind. I just write, and then somebody tells me what the genre is. I knew that the story was a modern romance, which helped guide me. I was thinking about modern romantic films for inspiration, or at least to help me feel like the movie was part of a lineage. But I was also conscious of the fact that I was making it for the world that exists today, in 2025.

Both of your films are about the mysterious alchemy of love—why we fall in love with certain people and not others. What is it about this theme that resonates with you? It’s something I feel like a lot of modern adults can relate to—the idea that we’re supposed to be in control, to understand the game and how to win it, to try to outsmart the system. But love makes fools of all of us. It’s humiliating and humbling. It’s the one domain where all of my answers and smarts and the things that usually make me feel in control go out the window. The only solution is to surrender. You can’t solve love with math or an algorithm. The only thing you can do is acknowledge it when it enters your life and say yes when it’s offered to you. What a stupid thing!

When I was releasing Past Lives, I realized that everybody is obsessed with love. It doesn’t matter who you are—everyone wants to talk about it, everyone wants to talk about feelings. At the same time, we’re embarrassed to talk about it. Why are we so embarrassed to say that we want to be loved? I think the truth is that we want to feel valuable, which is something that the characters in the movie say.

Speaking of talking about love, you’ve said that you love movies with great conversations, and conversations are such a foundational part of Materialists. What’s your approach to writing dialogue that feels natural and real? There’s a natural fantasy of being as concise and efficient in our real-life communication as a character in a movie. Take the final scene between Harry and Lucy in the film—that would probably be a six-hour conversation in real life. To get it down to six minutes requires a lot of wrangling. It’s always a question of: How are we going to enter and exit this conversation in a way where something has changed? If nothing has changed, the conversation isn’t worth seeing. Of course, in real life, we have tons of conversations where nothing happens. But a fundamental part of drama is that the characters have to leave a conversation differently from how they entered it. To me, it’s all about the fastest and most logical way to get from A to B.

Both of your films feature characters who are caught between the past and present—emotionally, culturally or ideologically. Why are you drawn to this tension? With Materialists, it’s less about time and more about a material reality that exists in New York. That idea is reflected in the way we made the movie. In Past Lives, the movement of the camera followed horizontal lines, like the way time moves. In Materialists, the camera often moves vertically. It was all about the height of the shots. The most basic part of any drama is to present a dilemma and then watch the main character make decisions and choose their own destiny, so it’s kind of a heroic journey for Lucy. She goes through the heroic cycle and comes out of it a different person.

I have to ask about Pedro Pascal. Is he as wonderful in real life as he is on the internet? Yes. He’s so wonderful.

The whole cast is a dream team. Is working with big-name talent any different? Ultimately, the creative process is the same. They might attract more attention on the streets of New York, but the work itself is always going to remain between the actors and the director. We’re all working together for a more robust drama and stronger storytelling.

How does being from Seoul and Toronto influence your perspective? Every city I’ve lived in leaves a mark. Both Seoul and Toronto are huge metropolitan cities that are diverse and ambitious. I feel like I’ve only ever lived in cities that one could describe as places of ambition. In both of my movies, the female lead is somebody who is quite ambitious about their work and their life.

New York could certainly be characterized that way too. New York is of course also that kind of place, in probably the most modern way. Seoul has a long history as a city, but as a place of big ambition and hustle, it’s a much more recent thing. I would say that Canada—it’s a little more chill here.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.