At one point in Materialists, Celine Song’s new film about a matchmaker torn between the perfect guy and her struggling ex, Lucy (played by Dakota Johnson) goes to see a play with her new boyfriend (Pedro Pascal). The show, if you catch the flyer hanging outside the small theater, is by Song, too. It begins with a couple on their second date and follows the course of their lives.
As an artist, Song knows her way around a love story. She explored the subject as a young playwright as well in her 2023 Oscar-nominated debut feature, Past Lives, about a married woman living in New York who rekindles a close friendship from her childhood in Korea.
Materialists takes a more pragmatic approach to questions of love than Song’s past work, a perspective sparked during her six-month stint as a matchmaker in 2016. “I needed a day job because I couldn’t pay my rent,” she says, still unable to support herself through writing at the time. Without any experience, she couldn’t get a job in retail or hospitality. Then, at a party, someone encouraged her to apply for matchmaking, and she got hooked. “I’m obsessed with people and intimacy and connections.”
She learned about the great contradiction between how we seek love and how it actually happens. “The way my clients were talking about who they wanted to be with, presumably forever, was: height, weight, income, lifestyle, job. And then, of course, there is the experience of falling in love, which you can’t help. There’s no math involved.”
But months passed and she hadn’t written a single word. “That defeats the purpose of a day job,” she says. She quit, but the experience came in handy years later, for Materialists.
Song has always used writing to explore the big mysteries that interest her, especially those of love. Born in South Korea, she moved to Toronto when she was 13. Her father, a screenwriter and film director, and her mother, an illustrator and graphic designer, gave her a firsthand look at the life of a freelance artist.
Song attended Queen’s University in Ontario and, after considering a career in psychology, decided to become a writer. At 23, she moved to New York to pursue an M.F.A. in playwriting.
Her first paid writing job came 10 years later, in 2021, when she joined the staff of the first season of The Wheel of Time, a series starring Rosamund Pike.
But before then, Song’s personal life was already planting the seeds for future projects. She met her husband, the Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, at an artist residency when she was 24, and married him three years later, in 2016. “We didn’t have money, but when we were in our 20s, it wasn’t something I was thinking about,” she says. Their story inspired Past Lives, which she wrote while working on The Wheel of Time.
Though she had never directed before, doing so became a turning point in her career. “I had an opportunity to direct [Past Lives], and that’s what made me a filmmaker,” she says. A self-professed control freak, Song found that it suited her, allowing her to oversee all aspects of a film.
Since Song’s wedding, her view of love has matured, expanding to include the more practical, material things—such as needing a bigger apartment. “When I fell in love with my husband, that wasn’t at the forefront.”
This piece of the puzzle, though less of a fantasy, is core to so many great romance films. Making Materialists, Song referenced the work of Nora Ephron, James L. Brooks, Jane Austen, and Billy Wilder. You’ve Got Mail is about falling in love with a business rival. The Apartment is, in some ways, about rent. Pride and Prejudice deals with female autonomy in matters of love. All of these stories, Song says, have a materialistic aspect to them. In dismissing them as chick flicks, “we’re failing to recognize how much [the genre] touches all of us.”
A question at the heart of the genre, and one that continues to nag at Song, is: “In the middle of so much commodification, so much materialism, how do we still remain people who are capable of this ancient feeling [of love]? How do I not become a commodity myself?” These issues become her obsessions, leaving her writing projects like Materialists. “At a minimum, you’re making a movie for three years,” she says. “It has to be something that feels worthy of my life. My heart and soul is in it. I can’t really turn that off.”
Materialists is in theaters now
Nadine Zylberberg is a New York–based writer and editor
