The Awesome Arrival of Past Lives Director Celine Song

A rainy morning in Manhattan’s East Village. Celine Song, the director behind the celebrated A24 drama Past Lives, shows up wearing loose black slacks, a heather gray T-shirt, and a heavy black raincoat—a quintessential New York City uniform. As we settle onto a bench in Tompkins Square Park, an aggressive flock of pigeons suddenly swarms us like we’re day-old bagels. We sit there for a moment, frozen, before bursting into laughter. “It’s fully Hitchcock!” she says.

Song loves New York and all its bizarre unpredictability. Its undercurrent of creative energy, which she first tapped into after moving here well over a decade ago. “The way that I love this city is not the same as the way that a tourist might like it,” Song says. “The way I love it is as somebody who lives here with the rats and the lanternflies.”

Her film Past Lives is, in many ways, a love letter to the city and its funny possibilities, as specific and true to life as Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing or Woody Allen’s Manhattan. Since its Sundance premiere in January, the film has grown into a global art house hit, playing everywhere from Singapore to Serbia. In an entertainment industry obsessed with blockbuster IP, Song’s surprise breakout is a rarity: a human-scale story about quiet adult emotions that’s nonetheless expected to contend for best picture at next year’s Academy Awards. Already, Past Lives has won major honors at precursors like the Gotham Awards and the New York Film Critics Circle Awards.

It’s a heady arrival for a first-time filmmaker. Song, 35, had spent years writing plays and scripts—she was a staff writer on the Amazon Prime fantasy series The Wheel of Time—but being at the helm of a movie production was an entirely new experience. “She had to learn what a call sheet was,” says John Magaro, who plays Arthur, the white husband in the film. Greta Lee, who stars as Song’s stand-in, Nora, says she often found herself in awe of the rookie director’s confidence. “It’s like getting to witness someone step into their gift,” says Lee. “It is for me, as an observer, a once-in-a-lifetime kind of a situation.”

Past Lives takes place over a few decades. It initially presents itself as a love story between Lee’s Nora, a Korean playwright who immigrated to Canada before settling down in New York City, and her childhood sweetheart Hae Sung (played by Teo Yoo), whom she reconnects with over Skype and Facebook. But halfway through, the film reveals itself to be about something grander and more universal: learning to make peace with the life you’ve built for yourself. “It gives me confirmation,” Song says of the critical response to the film, “that what I believed about the world and about people is true.”

It’s one thing for the ideas in a film to strike a chord with a large audience, but the comparatively rarer thing that Past Lives has done is make an unlikely star out of Song. She’s popped up everywhere from the Writers Guild’s immigrant picket at Rockefeller Center (where she was invited to speak) to New York Fashion Week. The personal lives of Song and her husband, the director Justin Kuritzkes, have even become a niche point of interest for Letterboxd nerds: When Film Twitter realized that Luca Guadagnino’s steamy threesome drama Challengers was written by Kuritzkes, some fans openly wondered about what really went down with the Past Lives love triangle. (Song laughs this one off.)

Fans of Past Lives might have been primed to expect life influencing art. After all, the broad strokes of the film mirror Song’s own life. She moved from Korea to Canada as a child before migrating again to New York City to become a playwright. Like Nora, she married a white writer, and then reconnected with her childhood sweetheart. And again, like Nora, Song’s father, Song Neung-han, is a respected filmmaker back in Korea. (“I’m a nepo baby in one country,” Song jokes.) Her influences are as global as they are geeky, ranging from James Ivory to the German playwright Bertolt Brecht to Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa.

When she set out to write Past Lives, in 2018, Song wrote the script in Korean and then in English. She would also direct in two languages—Korean for Yoo and Lee; English for Magaro and Lee—creating language barriers that heightened the film’s central tensions. Take, for example, the widely discussed bar scene in which Nora and Hae Sung gaze at each other while reminiscing in Korean about their past, all while Nora’s husband, Arthur, sits quietly beside them, unable to follow the conversation. To some men, I tell Song, it almost plays out like Arthur is being cucked.

She laughs, and considers the interpretation. “If you are somebody who likes masculinity and likes men, it’s really hard to see that as a sign of weakness,” she counters. “Because my thing is, Arthur sitting there is a sign of strength…. To me, there’s nothing hotter than that. That’s nothing more masculine and ooh”—here she feigns fanning herself—“than someone who’s able to not make that moment about themselves.”

This clarity about her characters, and the situations that she wanted to use them to explore, was something that jumped out to the producers who gave the untested filmmaker her shot. Christine Vachon, Pamela Koffler, and David Hinojosa—a powerhouse production trio with films like Larry Clark’s Kids and Paul Schrader’s First Reformed in their collective filmographies—knew they were taking a risk, but saw in Song glimmers of a remarkable talent. “She knew the story she wanted to tell,” Vachon tells me. “In some ways that’s the only way you can get a real sense of whether or not a director can pull it off.” On set, the film’s cinematographer, Shabier Kirchner, a collaborator of veteran director Steve McQueen, was surprised by how quickly Song found her footing. “Celine immediately knew what she didn’t know and learned incredibly fast,” says Kirchner. “I had never seen anything like that before. By the end of the whole thing, Celine ended up teaching me how to make this movie.”

After the park, Song and I settle into a nearby café she loves. We start talking about comparisons critics have made, likening Past Lives to seminal work by the likes of Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach, and Richard Linklater. I tell her that her film reminded me of something else: Peter Chan’s 1996 film Comrades: Almost a Love Story, a drama that was a huge hit all across Asia. It’s a tortured romance about a pair of immigrants who move from China to Hong Kong and then New York, and stars a pre–In the Mood for Love Maggie Cheung, dripping with movie star charisma. Song lights up at the comparison. “I love that film!” she says. “If you asked me what movie Past Lives was the most close to, it would be that.”

Though Past Lives is part of the lineage of great New York films, it’s also a new kind of New York film—and an additive one to the Western canon. Cinematically, Manhattan is still a place where pretty blond women can traipse through the West Village in Manolo Blahniks. But now it’s also a place where Korean Canadian creative types can fall in love, lose their shit on the sidewalk, and hold real power over the men in their lives. Past Lives is the kind of bilingual hit that, just a few years ago, probably wouldn’t have been possible. Song theorizes that the best picture Oscar win for Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite opened the door for something like this to get made. (“That film was able to make everybody feel unbelievably comfortable with subtitles,” she jokes.)

Soon, Song will begin production on her follow-up feature, a movie called The Materialists, backed again by A24, Vachon, Koffler, and Hinojosa. While the team is stingy with details, Vachon offers a hint of what we can expect: “It feels like she makes a different movie every time, that she’s going to be the kind of a filmmaker who doesn’t make the same movie twice.”

For now, though, Song continues to enjoy the glow of her debut film, and the adjustment to the sometimes surreal life it has opened up for her. For example, in September, she found herself sitting with Greta Lee in the front row for Peter Do’s Helmut Lang show. There, amid a crowd that counted It girls like Indya Moore and Hari Nef, it was Song, the first-time filmmaker, who became an unlikely center of attention. “There was a swarm of people, so many people, who were excited to see her, and meet her, and just shower her with praise,” Lee remembers. Song wasn’t even wearing fashion. She was dressed ultra-casually, in a T-shirt, sneakers, and a baseball cap promoting her husband’s forthcoming film, Challengers.

“You can bring Celine to whatever corner of the universe,” says Lee, laughing, “and she would still be exactly Celine.”

Raymond Ang is GQ’s associate director of editorial operations.

A version of this story originally appeared in the 2023 GQ Men of the Year issue with the title “The Awesome Arrival of Past Lives Director Celine Song”

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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Justin Leveritt
Styled by Haley Gilbreath
Hair by Kiyonori Sudo using Bumble and Bumble
Makeup by Ai Yokomizo using La Mer
Tailoring by Carlos Sanchez for Lars Nord Studio

Originally Appeared on GQ