Celine Song on How Making ‘Past Lives’ Led Her to Fall “So Hard in Love With Filmmaking”

Celine Song’s feature directing debut Past Lives has been showered with glowing reviews and much audience love ever since it premiered at Sundance. It has been no different at the 57th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

“Playwright Celine Song makes a stunning move into features with this decades-spanning romantic drama,” THR‘s review summarized.

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The film stars Greta Lee (Russian Doll, The Morning Show) as Nora whose family moves from South Korea to Canada, with her later moving to New York City, mirroring the moves Song has gone through in real life. The movie also stars Korean star Teo Yoo (Decision to Leave) as Hae Sung, Nora’s Korean childhood soulmate, and John Magaro (The Big Short, Carol) as her U.S. husband Arthur.

In Karlovy Vary, Song explained to THR how her theater background helps her with writing dialogue, why her story is so universal and her request for people who go see the film.

Judging from the strong audience reactions here in Karlovy Vary and at other festivals, Past Lives is one of those personal stories with universal appeal. Did you set out with that goal in mind?

My professor once said that if you make something that you yourself are so excited and enthusiastic about or something that you love yourself so much, that you believe in and you think is true, because you’re a person and not an alien, there are going to be other people who also connect to it as fellow humans. And I think that’s ultimately the thing that guides me through everything that I make. At the end of the day, I know that my standard for what is bullshit and what is true is going to be higher when it comes to the things that I make. There’s no critic who could be better at knowing when I’m bullshitting. So, in that sense, the only thing that I’m pursuing is something that I can be interested in or I can think is honest. Once you do that, you just hope that other people also see that and see that it’s not just a story of one person, but it’s also a story that can exist in their own lives, too. That’s what I can do as an artist.

How much of the story is based on your own real experience or the experiences of others?

There’s a bar in the East Village that I ended up in because I was living around there. And I was sitting there with my childhood sweetheart who flew in from Korea, now he is a friend, who only really speaks Korean, and my American husband who only really speaks English. And I was sitting there trying to translate these two guys trying to communicate, and I felt like something really special was going on. I was sort of becoming a bridge or a portal between these two men and also, in some ways, these two worlds of language and culture. Something about that moment really sparked something, and then it made me really feel like maybe this could be a movie. So it started from a pretty real thing that happened to me. But then, of course, in making the movie, it comes from a subjective experience that sparks this whole story into an object, which is a script, and then from there, the movie.

Since I used to live in New York, I must ask you which bar in the East Village you went to?

Please Don’t Tell. (The writer says: “I know it!”) You know about it!? With the phone booth. But the scene is actually shot at the Holiday Cocktail Lounge on 8th Street. You may have just walked by it, it looks like nothing from the outside.

The opening scene in that bar shows the three main characters sitting in the bar and someone is wondering about their relationship to each other, which is the kind of conversation I have had with friends before. How do you craft dialogue that feels so natural and authentic?

I think that comes from theater. I worked in theater for a long time. It’s really the only thing in theater you can rely on. Because in theater, you don’t really have the set design, there’s nothing to really help you. All you have is dialogue and actors. So to me, I came in as a veteran, I knew how to do that.

There are scenes where you can really feel the awkwardness, for example, in the scene when the two men meet for the first time. How did you achieve that as a director?

I’m not going to do any fireworks or do some VFX or something to improve what’s going on in the actors’ faces. What that means is the whole movie has to live in the actors’ faces. So there are a couple of things that I did.

I kept the two male actors apart in the preparation of the movie until we shot that scene where the two of them see each other for the first time. That required a little bit of logistics, but the two guys were apart. And also, I asked Greta, who plays Nora, in her rehearsals with each guy to tell the guy that she was having a rehearsal with the other guy. So they were both forming ideas of who the other guy is and created expectations for what that is. And then of course, when they meet for the first time, we were rolling. Because we wanted to be rolling when they met for the first time — the actors as well as the characters. And when that happened, that shot is in the movie, the first shot of them looking at each other is in the movie. And it was amazing because they could just feel all their expectations collapse, right? But also, they had to take each other in and try to understand. Because it’s also so much about what’s our idea of another person. I’m sure you’ve seen photos of me before. And, of course, meeting me in person is a completely different thing in a way.

This also matters in the movie because it is a movie about extraordinary hellos and extraordinary goodbyes. I don’t think every movie needs to play games like that. But I think this movie did because it was just going to be helpful for the actors to craft the really special hellos and really special goodbyes.

The other thing I did is I actually didn’t let Teo (Yoo) and Greta (Lee), Hae Sung and Greta, touch each other until they meet each other for the first time in the film. They were rehearsing, so they knew each other, but when they actually hug, the actual heat, the physical and everything, it’s just made tangible, it’s made something that you can touch. So I think that is something that you’re trying to craft partly because I don’t have fireworks going off. All you can do is get to see what’s happening in their faces and sometimes that’s going to be enough.

After watching the film, I thought a lot about identity and who we are and can become and what influences and changes us. For example, I grew up in Austria with a Hungarian father and then moved to New York and now live in the U.K. Nora moved from South Korea to Canada and then New York. Could you talk a bit about that theme?

What’s so funny is that when we talk about identity, a part of our talking about identity is a flattening of our human experience into words. If you’d talk about your identity, you’d say: Well, I’m an Austrian with a Hungarian dad, who is a journalist, which isn’t the whole of what’s going on with you. And then once a New Yorker. So everything is about a flattening of your experience. The time that you spent in New York, I don’t think that could be boiled down to [just] a New Yorker, because every day you lived there, you gave that city time and space, right? And every day was being alive in that time. You can’t really talk about that as a flat word. What you can talk about is an experience, or you can think about that as existence. So I think that it is also about existence that is fluid and that also flows through time and space.

It used to be that to move to another town, you’d get on a horse. It used to be a lot harder to be mobile. But now we have become more mobile. And of course, we all have professional pursuits and a lot of our professional pursuits require traveling, or moving to a new place, or changing — changing career or changing company, or whatever it may be. We move from place to place. And that is so much what the movie is about. Absolutely, it is about identity. But I think it is about the way that identity is not flat, but that identity is both spherical and in constant motion. Because right now, I don’t think that you can take New York out of me because I lived in New York for 10 years.

Is Nora the professional working writer person in New York? Yes. Is she also the little girl that she left behind in Korea, only speaks Korean and has all these ambitions and all these issues? Absolutely. I think that we can say that about all of us. I know that you and I sitting here we know that there’s a 12-year-old kid version of us that existed and is kind of in us still. And depending on who you’re talking to you feel that way. I’m sure you’ve heard this before. People sometimes talk about how when they’re spending time with their parents, they’re suddenly back to their teenage days, they feel like a teenager and will then be like: “Mom! Dad!” I think that person exists. So it is really about the many selves that we are. And it’s about both accepting that and reconciling that and letting go of the idea that you’re just one thing.

Have you come up with an idea for a follow-up film yet or do you know if you want to go into a different direction in terms of subject matter?

As an artist, the thing that you want the most for your work is for it to be alive. Every new thing you do has to feel completely alive to you. And what works for me always is that there has to be some part of it that is brand new to me, more or less something that I haven’t done before ever. Something that scares me or something that makes me feel like it is going to teach me something. Something that I think is smarter than me. Those are the things that I really hope for in every single project that I do. So whatever it may be the projects that I want to do are always the things that are going to make me feel alive doing them, because I don’t want to beat a dead horse.

Do you want to go back to theater work or focus on movies?

I am going to make more movies.

You also worked in TV for a bit, right?

I worked as a staff writer on the first season of The Wheel of Time, which I think shoots in this (part of the world), but I never got to shoot the show. But I was in the writers’ room for the first season.

How do you feel about theater at this stage in your career? Is it something that you might still explore more or is that a “past life” at this stage?

Theater may have become a past life. I just fell so hard in love with filmmaking. I just feel I discovered myself. It was a revelation to me that I am a filmmaker, and I enjoy it so much. It’s a bit of a honeymoon phase. But I think I really love it.

What’s the primary appeal of film for you? Is it the additional tools of storytelling or what?

I actually think that it is that I love that I can make so many decisions about it that are completely deliberate and I can hold it. Also, I just love being on set. I love preparing, and I love being in the editing room. The process of those things I really fell in love with. And I really felt like every day on set, I was pushing my own limits a little bit and I was learning about myself. I thought my limit was here. Then every day you get pushed, and it’s amazing to discover yourself as having limits further and further every day. And then that just makes you want to go further. I think that’s what I really love.

I hear you are one of the most sought-after people for interviews here, so I must wrap it up. Is there anything else you would like to share?

One thing I would say is: I hope for the audience to show up to the movie theater with an open heart more than anything else. I don’t expect every audience member to walk away feeling the same way or thinking about the same things because we all come from different walks of life. Because this movie is about people who have different walks of life and the complexity of existence and identity and everything, I don’t expect everyone to have the exact same reaction to the movie. But what I do ask is that they are able to show up with an open heart so that they can let the movie get under their skin and have it leave a mark in their lives the way Hae Sung left a mark on Nora’s life and also Arthur’s life. I hope that at least in the hour and 45 minutes that they’re in the theater, they’re able to connect to the characters and be open to them.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

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