In her 20s, long before she wrote and directed the Oscar-nominated “Past Lives,” Celine Song spent six months working as a matchmaker in New York. By day, she’d meet with single women rattling off requirements for a potential mate, from appearance and height to income. By night, over beers with her artist friends, she couldn’t help but notice a disconnect: Many of her favorite people would be instantly rejected based on those criteria.
“I’d be like, ‘You guys would be not good mates for any of my clients,’” she said. “I spent all day listening to these women describe them as worthless people they do not want to meet, even though I ascribe so much worth to them because they are creative and brilliant and amazing.”
That tension lies at the heart of Song’s new rom-com, “Materialists,” which stars Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a New York City matchmaker with an enviable track record of steering single women toward successful men. But when Lucy meets the handsome and rich Harry (Pedro Pascal), who’d prefer to woo Lucy instead of her clients, she must decide if the material things he can offer are more valuable than the deeper connection she feels with John (Chris Evans), her broke ex-boyfriend.
Song wrote the screenplay for “Materialists” in 2022 as she awaited the release of “Past Lives,” about a South Korean immigrant reunited with the childhood friend who still carries a torch for her. When I met Song last month over drinks at a West Hollywood hotel, she spoke candidly about love and longing as a creative through line in her work.
“When I talk to people who are really, really smart, who seem to know everything, if you start asking them about their romantic life, everything falls apart,” she said. “They’ll just admit that they don’t know things about love, or they’ll be like, ‘I don’t know, she makes me feel like a kid.’ They’ll say things that are not becoming of the put-together, intelligent people they are, because love is a mystery.”
Song, 33, who is married to the screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes (“Challengers”), hopes that more filmmakers will embrace the romantic-comedy genre. She pointed to movies like “Broadcast News” and “When Harry Met Sally” as examples of how rom-coms can offer sharp insight into human relationships.
“Why is it that we no longer talk about it as a serious genre about things that actually affect us and our society and our life?” she asked. “I genuinely ask, ‘What is more important than love?’”
Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.
How did you regard love before you first experienced it yourself? Were there movies or TV shows that taught you what to think of it?
Actually, the first movie I watched where I felt that is “A Knight’s Tale.” I had just immigrated and I didn’t really speak English that well — I think I was Grade 8 — and they put on “A Knight’s Tale” at school because it’s a little bit historical, Chaucer’s in it. And I remember just sitting there being like, “Oh, this is what love looks like.”
Heath Ledger and Shannyn Sossamon are gorgeous in that film.
Also, she had that really cool hair! I really related to her, because not always do you see girls onscreen and go, “Oh, that’s me,” right? When you’re young and you haven’t fallen in love yet, you really think of it as, “I just want to be desired.” You want to be popular, you want a boy to like you. So when someone is saying, “I want a guy who is 6 feet tall and makes this much money,” it’s because it would make you feel really valuable and important if somebody like that desired you.
Value is a big theme in “Materialists.” You really boil it down: People want a mate who makes them feel like a more valuable commodity.
Oh, yeah. And part of the frustration is, “With everything else, I can get the higher version because I can pay for it. So why not my partner?” You can upgrade a car, you can renovate a home, but people are people and they’re going to show up as they are. It’s a complete mystery why you’re going to connect with somebody.
And I feel like people reject mystery these days.
That’s what I was so interested in with this. Of course, the movie has a relationship to movies in the ’80s and ’90s, those romantic films from Nora Ephron and [James L.] Brooks. But I do think that the movie is so interested in what’s going on right now with us spiritually and romantically. Like, you might be 5-4. Why does your boyfriend need to be 6 feet tall?
So what is the answer to that?
Well, maybe there’s a friend’s wedding coming up. You want to walk in with somebody who is 6 feet tall because everybody’s going to look at you, and in that moment, instantly, your value is going to be assessed.
Though that’s always been true, it does feel like right now, we’re in a more presentational era than ever before.
Of course. This is why the language around going to the gym, self-improvement, there’s so much language about enhancing your value. We’re all just trying to develop our product, and you’re the product, right? And hopefully, you can develop your product to such a high value that you’re going to then maybe land a mate of another value.
When the first trailer for this film came out, some people on social media expressed surprise that a glossy-looking romantic comedy would be your follow-up to “Past Lives.”
When we see trailers for a movie like this, people just start calling it a chick flick — there’s a very easy way that you can dismiss it. I’m really interested in directly addressing the way that we completely dismiss matters of the heart. Not a single one of us actually can escape this problem, which is love. Why is it that it’s the one thing we’re considering as not important in movies?
It does feel like the genre has been devalued in recent years.
I respect it so much because it’s a genre where every single person can walk into it and feel connected. You must relate because love is a drama that you are in. You cannot go through life without any relationship to love whatsoever.
Many of our biggest actresses now, like Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone, don’t typically make romantic comedies.
Think about the superstar actresses of that time where romantic comedies ruled, like Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock. They themselves had power alone — it didn’t matter who the male leads were, the audience would show up for it. [The decline of romantic comedies] is also diminishing the role of an actress.
So why do you think that genre has fallen on hard times?
You have to be stupid to be in love. That’s very difficult, and it exasperates even the smartest people. Of course it exasperates some very smart filmmakers.
What was your dating life like when you were younger?
I was 24 when I met my husband. I was so into intimacy and desire and drama because I wasn’t a writer, so I didn’t have a way to be professional with it, to make a living with it. So I was a pretty dramatic, intense, very-obsessed-with-intimacy kind of dater. And now you can see in my work how interested I am in that.
Where do you think that interest comes from, if you had to drill down?
I think I got addicted to the feeling of going deep with someone. Once you’ve been there, why would you ever have any experience that is not that deep? You want to live on the edge and feel connected as much as you can, and there is a very funny fearlessness about it: You’re like, “Oh, it hurts, I cried all night,” but there’s kind of a fun to it, right?
Were you susceptible to those feelings or just good at diagnosing them in others?
I think I was always too addicted to the intimacy to be interested in that. To me, it would be more interesting that someone who is not physically attractive at all inspired feelings in me. I would be really into that.
Which is also a rom-com staple, where characters aren’t into each other at first.
You’re like, “What the hell can you do?” So, I like that Dakota in certain heels is as tall as Chris. It’s so funny because I’m like, “Why don’t we talk about the fact that a romantic lead is naturally 6 feet tall in movies?” That’s the No. 1 thing everybody would talk about when it comes to matchmaking, you know? I don’t think that in other films I’d be thinking about an actress’s height as much, but in this film, I have to, just like I have to think about how much everybody’s rent is and what they make.
In one scene, Lucy discusses her matchmaker salary …
… Eighty grand a year. We don’t actually talk about money as openly as I want to because there’s a really weird thing where everybody goes, “It’s not polite.” And I’m like, “Well, it’s not polite to rich people.” Let’s be realistic about that: It’s not polite to people who don’t want you to know how much money they have. There’s a scene where Lucy says to Harry, “This is how much money I make. Do you make more than this?” And he goes, “More.”
The women in my screening all audibly reacted to that.
People just respond to numbers, don’t they?
Did you purposefully want to engage with all the escapist trappings of this genre?
There is an inherent beautiful escapism in any story about love, because it presumes that there is love. You’re going to be Dakota Johnson with Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal. It’s already an amazing fantasy land that we’re all walking into.
It’s a scene on the poster.
Exactly, you get to walk into the poster. Just like how in the cinema you might be able to go to another planet, you are able to go into a place with love. You can either use that opportunity to say absolutely nothing or you can take that opportunity to talk about something.
My hope is for you to walk out feeling like, “Now I’m thinking about my ex, or the person I’m dating, or the person I hope to date.” I assume that some people are going to get on Tinder and some people are going to get off Tinder. Just like how it was for “Past Lives,” some people broke up and some people got together because of that movie.
What would a pragmatic character like Lucy make of the final scene in “Past Lives,” where the lead must decide whether to stay with her husband or get in the car with her childhood love?
She’d be like, “Well, isn’t he going back to Korea? I’m glad she didn’t get in the car.” I bet that’s what she’d say. That was always true about the final scene in “Past Lives”: You can tell exactly where people are in their love life by how they respond to it. There’d be some people who say, “I would have gotten in the car” and there are people who say, “Thank God she didn’t get in the car.” It’s very exposing.
Some people do treat love as a math problem to be solved. But can you really control something so mysterious?
It’s a very good question. Every day you’re jumping off a cliff when you’re with someone. You’re deciding, “I’m going to tell you that I’m going to love you today and tomorrow I’m going to tell you I’m going to love you again.” At the end of it, you’re going to be on your deathbed and the fantasy is that you’re going to look at that person and you’ll be like, “Wow, I can’t believe it, but we still love each other.”
Do you really believe in that, till death do us part?
Of course. I don’t know if anybody who signs a marriage certificate believes that this contract is going to get ripped one day.
In the back of their minds, I think many do. At least, these days.
Of course, because the divorce rate is so wildly high. But I do think that there is something very romantic about the idea of watching each other age, of being buried somewhere and next to something. That’s so material!
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times.
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