Celine Song (‘Past Lives’ writer-director) reveals ‘intense emotional work’ and ‘extraordinary’ shots in Seoul and New York City [Exclusive Video Interview]
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“Any kind of a first encounter with something is out to make an impact,” reflects Celine Song about the power of first love. The subject lies at the heart of the writer-director’s first feature film, “Past Lives,” in which two people from Korea who had once formed a close relationship when they were 12 reunite in person in New York City after 24 years apart. The screenwriter believes the feelings between characters Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) are especially strong, even after over two decades, because Nora “effectively disappeared” when she immigrated with her family to the United States and “in that way, it’s almost as though she’s passed.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
Song has a background in playwriting, but when she had the idea for “Past Lives,” she “knew that it needed to be told cinematically because of the way that time and space works in the film.” The screenwriter reveals, “It actually is important for Seoul and New York and the 12-year-old kid and the 40-year-old adults, for all of them to coexist, literally” in a way that could only be accomplished figuratively on stage. As a first-time director, she confesses to having “a little chip” on her shoulder about “the movie having a language of its own.” She balanced her process of finding her own unique voice as a filmmaker, on one hand, with drawing on other films for inspiration, on the other, because a script is a “book of problems” and “often, you can find a solution in other people’s movies.” The director cites films including “Breaking the Waves,” “My Dinner with Andre,” and “Like Father, Like Son” as reference points for particular scenes in “Past Lives.”
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One of the most powerful and lasting images in the film is a shot in which young Hae Sung and Na Young — who later takes the name Nora upon immigrating to the United States — say goodbye to one another at a literal fork in the road in Seoul, the former heading left and the latter ascending a long pathway of steps. Song and her team were “vaguely looking for a fork in the road” on location in Korea when her cinematographer Shabier Kirchner stumbled upon the spot that they would use. The director had by that point already shot all of the New York-based scenes in the film and knew the last shot of Nora in the movie would be of her ascending the steps of her apartment building after bidding a painful farewell to Hae Sung, so she “had to find something that matches it.” “We wanted it to feel like it’s in direct conversation and holding hands with that particular image,” she explains, adding that the site in Korea had an “ephemeral” quality and she “couldn’t describe to you why that fork works, but we all know it does.”
Both that street and the block for Nora and Hae Sung’s final goodbye in New York City were incredibly difficult locations to scout. Song confesses that she needed those sites to have “contradictory” attributes. Both had to be “ordinary, very everyday, totally mundane” spaces that “only a New Yorker or a Seoulite would know,” but they simultaneously needed to be “extraordinary, beautiful,” and had to “contain the whole movie. We have to be heartbroken just looking at it.” Cinematographer Kirchner found both of those locations, and the director says that they work because “at the end of the day, it does come down to story and character.”
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Another scene that truly encapsulates the heart of the film features Nora and Hae Sung sitting in front of Jane’s Carousel in Brooklyn. The director knew the film had to include this particular New York City landmark because it “speaks to exactly where Hae Sung and Nora are in that moment.” The two characters’ “child selves are playing in their minds, but they’re not the reality.” Additionally, the carousel is located right alongside the East River and has a glass enclosure to protect it from the wind and water, a facet of the site that the director appreciated because “there is something really delicate about this glass enclosure. It’s caged in there, it’s not quite free and floating.”
Song is most proud of the two scenes that close the film. She discusses how challenging the final goodbye between Nora and Hae Sung was to shoot, calling it “miraculous” that the crew pulled it off. To get those tracking shots of the two characters walking to an Uber and Nora’s walk back to her apartment alone involved “clearing all those buildings and laying 150 feet of track in the middle of a New York City road,” aspects that caused her “uncertainty and terror” but that ultimately came together in a spectacular manner. The writer also mentions the scene of Nora, Hae Sung, and Nora’s husband Arthur (John Magaro) at the bar on Hae Sung’s last night in New York, which required “two nights of really intense emotional work” from the three actors and was thus a “culmination of all the work” everybody contributed. “That’s my favorite scene,” she admits.
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