‘Materialists’ Director Celine Song on How the Past Informs Her Modern Rom-Dramedy and Her Filmmaking Ambitions [VIDEO]

It may have come as a surprise to film lovers when Celine Song announced that her sophomore feature would be a romantic comedy.

After all, the Canadian filmmaker’s debut, Past Lives, set the entertainment world on fire and received two Oscar nominations, partially because it razed people’s souls through its observations on soulmates and lost-then-found connections. What would it be like to laugh while watching a Celine Song film? Would you feel the same gut-punch, except the source would be a well-timed joke versus a well-timed piece of dialogue about unrequited love? Would it be weird, or would it be exciting? And how does a filmmaker even reconcile such a shift in tone and convention, especially in a genre so rigidly defined by them?

“I wish that I could say, ‘Well, I really want to do this genre, and I really want to do it in this one way,’ but the truth is, I just end up telling stories that I end up telling, and that’s the only way I can do it,” Song explained to me. “I didn’t even fully know [Materialists] was a rom com as a genre until I finished writing it.”

The film, arguably one of the most hotly anticipated sophomore films in recent memory, was born from, funnily enough, Past Lives and her own “past life.” After she completed Past Lives, she had a six-month break before it would premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2024. “Going a little crazy” with the excitement of unveiling her debut feature, where she introduced herself to the world as a filmmaker, Song filled the time by going back to work on her next project. For that script, she returned to one of her roots: matchmaking. She worked as a matchmaker in her 20s for roughly six months, and after she left the profession, she committed to writing about the experience one day.

That day arrived with Materialists. The film follows Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a matchmaker in her 30s who re-evaluates her perspective on love, romance, and self-worth as she embarks on a whirlwind relationship with a prospective client, the fabulously wealthy Harry (Pedro Pascal). On paper, Harry is everything Lucy is looking for, even more than what she thinks she can attain. (On one of their dates, she explains to him that he is a “unicorn.”) However, what she’s looking for and what she truly wants is upended by her client Sophie (Zoe Winters) and her ex-boyfriend, who stumbles back into her life, the down-on-his-luck theatre actor John (Chris Evans). 

“This film is about the way class actually plays a part in the way we still date,” Song said about Materialists. “It used to feel like it was something that only really happens in Victorian romances, but the truth is that, because of the way the world is and the dating market works now, so much is about the objectification and the commodification of the self and of each other. And also, it all happens on your phone now. It doesn’t just happen in a salon, it’s happening on Instagram.”

Indeed, Materialists’ script is shaped by language that maps romance to financial and technological jargon. Early in the film, Lucy says that Sophie is “not competitive on the market.” She and her colleague discuss a growing trend of men getting leg surgery to increase their height, noting that six inches could double a man’s value. On one of her dates with Harry, Lucy directly references a concept that is normally relegated to Regency-era entertainment like Bridgerton: “I have no dowry. The math doesn’t add up.” What wins Lucy over is Harry repeating similar words that Lucy shared at his brother’s wedding to his skittish now-sister-in-law: “You are valuable.”

“It’s a story set in 2025, but how far are we from the days when we were talking about our property and our income?” Song said about her film’s exploration of love and worth. “And of course, height, weight, and everything else, too.”

While the film mines plenty of humor from the New York social scene’s antiquated discussions of romance and value, Materialists ultimately zeroes in on the self, specifically how one’s self-worth informs their perspective on love. Lucy’s struggles with how she values herself walk hand-in-hand-in-hand with her distant, vaguely cynical approach to her profession and its end product, and her fledgling relationships with Harry and John. In a genre that can tend to boil characters down to easy and palatable archetypes, Lucy’s suitors resist easy categorization that might make her inevitable choice easier. Harry is obscenely wealthy, but he isn’t arrogant or cold at the perfect plot-ready moment. Meanwhile, John is frustrated by his persistent poverty and inability to give Lucy what she wants, but he is gentle and vulnerable in a way that’s rarely afforded to modern rom-com men. 

Those nuances were by design, according to Song, and something she wanted to actively toy with regarding the classic “love triangle.”

“I wanted it to be more about the way this woman is making her way through life,” Song explained. “These are not just choices about this guy or that guy, but it’s actually more about what does she actually want in her life? What does she actually want in her life?”

Of course, a successful love triangle relies heavily on its corners, in this case Dakota Johnson and her two co-stars, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal. All three actors are in top form in the film, sinking into the nuances of their characters to unveil new facets of their skill, whether it be effortless charm (Pascal), subtle insecurity (Johnson), or raw vulnerability (Evans). 

In a film about how practical concerns affect emotional commitment, Song reveres her actors’ unerring commitment to their characters and her story. “There’s a line: ‘I’m not merchandise; I’m a person.’ And I think about that in terms of what actors have to do. They’re not merchandise; they’re people. I know they had such a personal connection to the story and personal relationships to the characters. It was such a beautiful thing to get to work with them on something that they were burning to achieve. They were just so in love with the characters and obsessed with the story.”

Materialists may surprise audiences who expected a more straightforward tearjerker than a complex romantic dramedy about the messy relationship between love and worth. However, it is a continuation and evolution of Song’s ambitions as a filmmaker, where she aims to boil heady concepts down to their rawest, emotionally revealing essentials. “With Past Lives, I wasn’t a filmmaker yet,” Song explained about the evolution of her filmmaking. “I had just written a script. I was imagining what it could be, but I didn’t have an idea of knowing if I could pull it off. When it comes to Materialists, I was thinking about, ‘I can’t wait to do that. I wonder how we’ll shoot that. I want to shoot it like that.’ I think those things were really helpful in writing it. I feel like I ended up becoming very specifically and technically ambitious, even in the writing of it. It honestly became so much more about, as a filmmaker, what I wanted to pull off.”

A24 will release Materialists in theaters on June 13.