Interview: Celine Song and Greta Lee who can recall their ‘Past Lives’

In Korean culture ‘in-yun’ is defined as the ties between two people over the course of their lives. Where their paths have crossed, even if briefly, and how that bond remains across decades, languages and continents.

It was a clear but chilly afternoon in April when I sat down with first time feature director Celine Song and actress Greta Lee to talk about their film Past Lives, which was set to screen at the SFFILM Festival at the historic Castro Theatre later that evening after a stellar festival run that included a Sundance bow and appearance at Berlin.

Song, whose real-life husband is screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes (the upcoming Challengers, directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist), found the perfect stand-in with John Magaro (a Kelly Reichardt regular) and Teo Yoo as Hae Song, the adult version of her childhood romance in Korea, to portray the men who Nora finds herself torn between. But it’s not simply a romantic entanglement, it’s an attachment to how we romanticize the past and how it impacts our present and our future selves.

While Past Lives is Lee’s first major lead in a feature, she’s been anything but in the background. She’s been an integral part of stellar ensembles in series’ like Netflix’s Russian Doll and Apple’s The Morning Show, the latter of which earned her a Screen Actors Guild Award Ensemble nomination. She voices LYLA in the #1 film at the U.S. box office right now, Spider-Man: Across the Universe, and will be seen later this year in Julio Torres’ Problemista opposite Torres and Tilda Swinton.

In our conversation, we talked about the meaning of a story this personal for the filmmaker, Lee’s breaking out and branching out, what in-yun means to them both and the creation of a Celine Song Multiverse.

Erik Anderson: Welcome to San Francisco. Have you guys been here before or much?

Celine Song: First time, I know…

Greta Lee: I am weirdly very connected to this city because one of my first professional jobs was Broadway play, had a sit down at the Post Street Theater. And then years after that, I was working here filming while pregnant with my first son. And now I’m here with this movie. Ah, that’s premiering at the Castro. It feels like just, oh my gosh!

EA: I am so excited then for you to get to go to the Castro [Theatre] for this because it’s so iconic.

GL: Yes.

CS: Historical amazing theater. I can’t wait. I’ve never been, so I’m just like, ah! Except that I heard so much.

EA: Congratulations on the festival run, which is really exciting; it is a really beautiful film.

GL: Oh, thanks. Thank you so much.

EA: It’s been living with me.

GL: Uh, you’re welcome? (all laugh) No, but we love that, genuinely.

EA: It’s really something special. Celine, even though it’s so much of your personal life, where did you allow yourself to color outside the lines to make it cinematic?

CS: Well, I think at the end of the day the thing at the center of making this movie is about the story that I’m trying to tell, and these characters that I’m finding with amazing Greta and also the rest of the cast. So much of it is actually about what is the best way to tell this story in this way, in a way that is the most true to what the story is. As opposed to anything factual or anything like that, it was so much more about the truth of living as an existing, and being loved as somebody who is me, who it feels like me, than the actualities of facts about what literally happened.

EA: That opening scene, which is the thing that establishes, is really something in the way that it observes, not you so much, but the people watching you. Because how they are regarding this trio is, I want to say that it’s really, it’s microaggression dialogue of how they see an Asian person, not as an American, but as just ‘Asian people’ and a ‘white guy.’ I think it’s a fantastic jumping off point that we can recognize.

CS: Well, part of it’s about the implication or immersion of the audience more than anything, right?

EA: Very much so.

CS: So, part of it is about welcoming the audience to play the game as well before we are transported back to their childhood and then to really live through them. And when they come back to that scene by the end of the film, I know that everybody is understanding, and love and respect for this character has to have deepened just because they experienced their love story with them, right?

EA: Yeah, very much so. I just talked to Benjamin Millepied recently. He has Carmen coming out this weekend.

GL: Oh, yeah.

EA: Gorgeous by the way, absolutely stunning. And that’s his first film as well, and it made me think, since I was coming to talk to you, you’re both already successful and from another field that isn’t filmmaking. So what about your playwriting and that experience got to inform you for how you were going to do a film?

CS: I found that my experience in theater, which is as a writer, has been about the things that really build this movie, which is our story and character and working with actors, and playing on a scene, and making decisions about the characters that is about the characters in their lives and their choices. So to me it was kind of a really natural transference of experience and skills to filmmaking, and it really felt like ultimately a very smooth transition into it because of that.

What I really felt was a very smooth transition was, honestly, editing, because being a writer, you’re always, editing is just such a fundamental part of writing that when I walked into the editing room, I think I really felt like, oh this I have quite literally done before in a way that even the production or the pre-production, those things that I was like, oh it is the first time but I have all these abilities that I’m bringing into this, experience that I’m bringing into this. But when it comes to editing, it really did feel like I quite literally have them, because every so often, part of writing is editing.

EA: Yeah, very much. I think one of the film’s greatest successes is you, Greta.

GL: Oh, God, thank God.

EA: I think your work is just exquisite here.

GL: Oh, thanks.

EA: And you’ve had a really fantastic career in television that I love, and is funny and full of some really arc characters. This is very different for you. Where did you connect with Nora in this script?

GL: Well, yes. First of all, I have felt lucky in that I’ve been able to play a wide range of quirky and multifaceted women. And this is certainly a continuation of that in that sense. But, and, this was just radically different in so many ways. From the moment I laid eyes on this script, and as you, I explained this as I had ‘in-yun’ with the script. The first time I read her, the way she fleshed out this character, this world, her ability, her singular vision and what she wanted to accomplish, and her determination in executing that and bringing us all on board in executing her vision was just so thrilling and very fresh and just felt very radical. And we were inventing something that goes way beyond convention in terms of what is a romantic drama, what is a conventional love triangle? And the ability, like all of that was there.

And then this woman at the center of this, Nora, and just feeling like, oh my goodness! She’s so unlike other women I’d seen in romantic dramas where the woman is sort of using another person to fill in certain gaps in terms of her identity. That was not the case at all here. This is a woman who is so steadfast in her belief of what she wants just personally and professionally, and who she loves, and it’s from that place she’s encountering this soulmate from her past.

And that was so endlessly fascinating to me as that challenge. I’ve never seen that before. And I’ve never seen the experience of being bilingual, bi-cultural, or really anyone who’s moved, had to move from home to pursue a different life in the way that Celine was doing. And so, I mean, I really, all of that, I mean, I’m really different from Nora in real life, like I’m as a mother, I have two young children, not embroiled in a burning love triangle, unless you count, I don’t know, the one that exists between me and my kids and my sleep. (all three laugh)

But being able to, with this incredible support, access what that is, just channeling this very universal experience of falling in love, of what that is, that everyone knows, felt like a audacious, very exposing, terrifying, naked challenge, and one that really set the bar very high in terms of what I want now. She’s made it very, she’s ruined it for me.

EA: I’m glad. I’m glad that that bar is there.

CS: Well, Greta, so the task at hand for Greta playing Nora is that she has to be the burning center of the film, and the one who was sort of carrying through many decades. And she is sort of is at the heart of it, at the core of it. So I know that that was something that we can only tell the story that way if Greta is here for it, and Greta will show up for it.

And I think a part of it is about just like it was a discovery for me as a filmmaker, for myself to be, to realize that, to do this for the first time, and then to really feel myself in that. I know that the part of that that really, I think, fueled us together was this feeling that it’s like, it is the first time for us in so many different ways.

GL: Yes, exactly.

CS: And we were, I’m close with all my actors, but I feel like we had a special understanding about that because of the way that we felt like this was very much the first time for us in our different ways, but it was in conversation. Because part of it has to be about myself discovering Nora, and Greta discovering Nora and how those two discoveries have to be one. It can’t just be two envisions of Nora that kind of work. It has to be one single approach to this character. And so much of it have to do with our partnership.

GL: Exactly. Our souls had to merge.

EA: Yeah, and with John and Teo, I mean, its such a-

GL: A lot of souls merging.

EA: It really is. And it doesn’t work without how amazing they are as well. How did you land on each of them, because, obsessed.

CS and GL: (laughing)

EA: This was my first time seeing Teo Yoo, but I’ve loved John Magaro’s work.

GL: Yeah. They’re both incredible.

CS: Well, part of it is, just like everything, the story has to be told around Greta as Nora. And the thing is, Greta, Nora has to build a full world with each of these men. And the world has to be totally different. And when they come together, the chemical reaction to that is sort of where the whole movie lives.

So to me, it was so much about who can connect to Nora in the movie in a way that is so specific to that dynamic. And what was really important to me is that these two men are very, very, very different, not just in who they are, but also just in the culture that they are in, and also the way that they speak to Nora.

GL: And the woman she has to be with each of them.

CS: Exactly.

GL: That really felt like jumping through portals, because it was so distinct and disparate.

CS: And Nora is, and Greta in her Korean, she sounds like a young girl because of the… She does. But it really does. It really does in Korean, it is because of the way Greta’s immigration story happened and because really Nora’s story is, there is a kind of really natural way that Greta ends up, to me in my ears, sounding like a young girl.

And so when she’s talking to Teo, she suddenly sounds like that. And then when she’s speaking to Arthur, who is played by John, it is suddenly this full-grown adult woman who is in English. And to me that just tells the story of the film.

EA: And that’s kind of a classic reality of an immigrant story of living in two worlds all the time anywhere.

GL: Yeah. Yeah. That kind of switching. But even really for anyone, you could be from Alabama and have that experience. And that, in discovering that was really thrilling and exciting now, now that we’re getting to share the movie.

CS: And it’s like our editor is, he’s a Texan, and whenever he talks to his Texan friends, which I’ve heard on the phone, suddenly he’s a full Texan. And I’m like, then that’s the same kind of post, which I know it’s more extreme because the language itself is different, but honestly, that is so vivid for every single person who has many parts to their lives, which I think is everyone.

EA: Yes. And you mentioned the in-yun, which is such a central point and part of this fate and providence. Where do those factors meet in your own lives?

GL: Oh, well I have in-yun with her [points to Song]. Now we have a in-yun with you [points to me].

CS: Yeah!

EA: Oh, I love that.

CS: Because even the smallest encounter is what in-yun is. It doesn’t have to be this big epic thing. It is so much about, if somebody brings you this cup of water, that is also somebody who has in-yun with you. It’s different than, like me and my husband, that’s a very different, and probably a much deeper and a much long-lasting in-yun. But just because we are sitting here for this 20 minutes or whatever, it doesn’t mean that we don’t have this in-yun.

EA: Exactly.

CS: And she and I, we made my first movie together, and to me that’s a union that I have to think that we have at least a many thousands of unions between us. You know what I mean? It’s not 8,000, because we’re not literally married.

GL: Not yet, but…

CS: Definitely many, many thousand, maybe the next one.

GL: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it explains also why she’s so good as a director, because in reality she’s already directed 8,000 people.

EA: Exactly. Yeah.

GL: That’s the only explanation for why she could be this excellent.

EA: It’s the Celine Song Multiverse.

GL: Yes. Thank you. See you get it.

CS: Thank you so much.

GL: This is so nice.

EA: Thank you so much. Have so much fun tonight.

GL: Oh, we will.

EA: Oh my God!

GL: I’m so excited.

CS: Me too.

EA: Dress warm. It is San Francisco cold today.

GL: Yes. Hot tip.

Past Lives is currently in select theaters from A24 and will expand in the coming weeks.