Fist-time writer/director Celine Song was only just beginning to make her name as a playwright when the pandemic shut down the New York run of her celebrated play Endlings just days after it premiered. She was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and a semifinalist for the American Playwriting Foundation's Relentless Award, and she’d even written on the first season of Amazon’s series Wheel of Time. The one thing she'd never done before writing the screenplay for her debut feature Past Lives was go to film school, or make a short film, or a commercial or a music video, or whatever it is that up-and-coming filmmakers produce before diving into their first feature. And I don’t mean any of that in a critical way. She relied on and listened to her team after A24 bought her deeply personal screenplay, and the result is one of the most artful and profoundly moving films of the year so far.
Past Lives show us three moments in time between two people who always seem on the verge of a relationship that never quite comes together. Seoul-born Nora and Hae Sung meet as primary school classmates, and it seems this young love is going to build into something more, but it ends suddenly when Nora’s parents move to Canada. Twelve years later, Nora (now living in New York City, studying writing, and played by Greta Lee) finds out from her father that Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) has been trying to find her online, and the two reconnect and maintain a virtual relationship via Skype for quite a while before Nora grows frustrated and abruptly ends the correspondence. Another dozen years pass, and now Nora is happily married to another writer (John Magaro), when Hae Sung reaches out again, just before a planned trip to New York.
What follows is one of the most unique yet quite relatable love stories I’ve ever seen. This is a couple that keeps missing ideal times to be together. There’s no danger of Nora leaving her husband, and the husband doesn’t seem all that jealous about Hae Sung coming to visit, which doesn’t mean he feels included when the three of them go out for dinner and drinks. Nora takes her old friend around the city, but he’s too polite and respectful of her current life to complicate things with declarations of love or any kind of begging. He himself has a girlfriend, but he may have ended things with her before the trip—even he’s not entirely sure.
Past Lives also deals with issues of identity, fate, and the Korean notion of destiny as connected to two people’s past lives (In Yun). I’m guessing the character you find yourself identifying with in this scenario will depend on the baggage you bring to the film, but it’s a delicate, inspiring, and desperately beautiful and moving experience. I was fortunate enough to speak with Song twice when she was in Chicago recently, once for a post-screening Q&A after a sold-out screening of the film during the Chicago Critics Film Festival, and again the next day for the following interview. Please enjoy our conversation and check out Past Lives, which is now playing in theaters in Chicago.
In preparing to film this, to put it bluntly: how did you learn to direct? What did you do to prep for this new experience?
The main prep was actually during the hard-prep process of the thing. You’re really learning how to do it on the job in the right way. But there are things about the movie that I just knew. I feel like I knew how I wanted to do the first scene, for example. Some things I just knew for sure, and other things I learned or discovered or talked to the head of a particular department as we were going. To my DP, I’d say “For this scene, I don’t know how I would want to shoot it. Give me a bunch of ideas.” And it was like discovering it anyway you can.
Directing feels like a couple things, but one of them is being a professional passion person, and knowing what the vision is and believing in it, and making sure everyone on set sees it as clearly as you to the best of your ability, and making sure they believe in it too, even on days when I have a hard time believing in it. But no one can know that . The other key thing is having answers for a million questions that come to you every day, and you try to answer as many as you can. And the ones you can’t, you’d then ask for grace. Part of it is admitting you don’t know and asking someone to help you find the answer. When you welcome people into your process like that, I’ve found that it’s very easy to find an answer that I get to have.
Do you think moving forward, all of those things you weren’t sure about, you’ll be more sure about? Next time, you’ll have all the answers and not just most of them.
Oh yeah. That was true for every day of work on the film. Every day, I could feel like I was better at it. And of course there would be days when things were hard, and I’d think that if I’d had that hard a day two weeks ago, I would have handled it a lot worse. Also, I shot in New York for a month, and then we went to Korea, prepped in Korea and then shot for 10 days there, and in the process, I felt like I’d gotten so much better in that time. And in between, during that prep period, I was editing, and when you edit, you learn as well. I felt so on top of everything during the time I was in Korea.
You mentioned shooting in two different parts of the world. How much of the film is about culture. I feel like Nora feels more comfortable in the big city, and maybe you do too, but this old flame of hers is very much a product of Korea, and that’s where he wants to live.
I think it’s a part of all of us, culture. The culture of LA and New York is dramatically different too. Two people have a culture within their intimate relationship, no matter the nature, that other people don’t have access to. If you’re in a relationship for a long time, you two form a culture of communication or language that nobody else has access to. Similarly, I think culture is a tremendously important part of the film, because of how different their culture is. And it’s definitely about language and country and time zones, but it’s also the fact that he’s an engineer and he has different kind of lifestyle, he goes more 9 to 5, and Nora is not. Nora goes to rehearsals and has a relationship with another writer, both of them are connecting in that culture. They have friends together: other writers, other artists, and that a separate culture within New York. Marriage is its own culture, marriage between two artists that’s an even smaller culture. Hae Sung would have more in common with another engineer in New York City or someone else who works 9 to 5; they’d have more to talk about.
That’s the interesting thing about the bar scene. We get used to seeing adult Nora as a New Yorker, but in that bar scene, we’re reminded that she’s also that person, speaking Korean, and she hasn’t had many opportunities to be that person, and she lights up.
It’s also that she’s discovering that too. When they first see each other for the first time in 24 years in Madison Square Park, I don’t think either of them know what that’s going to be like. Part of working with the actors in those scenes is pushing them so that they’re comfortable not knowing. Of course, it’s scary being on set with crew looking at you and I’m looking at them, to feel like “I don’t know what this is.” But that is actually a fundamental part of what it is for Nora and Hae Sung; they don’t know what this is going to feel like. They don’t have a culture yet; they’re forming the culture between the two of them. They are trying to figure out the language that they speak, now that they’re adults.
Before that, when they were talking over Skype, they had formed a certain rhythm together, and 12 years later, it’s brand new and she’s married, things have changed. They are older, and now they’re physically together, so there is a funny thing where every time, it’s a discovery, for us too. Just like for you and me: it’s a discovery for us too. When we first met and were talking, that was one thing, and just over the few conversations, I know our culture is already forming and now we know the best way for us to communicate. The bar scene is where the three of them are learning to communicate as well, and Nora discovering what it’s like to communicate with Hae Sung in the presence of her husband.
In anyone else’s hands, I think Arthur would have been just insecure enough to become not so nice, and I love that you never let him head in that direction. You don’t give Nora any reason to dislike him; this isn’t about her thinking she made the wrong choice or possibly leaving her husband for Hae Sung. Although I do love that, no matter how she looks at either of these men and however they look at her, it has no impact on how she sees herself. She has her own identity, she’s very strong in that regard. This is an empowerment film.
I completely agree. The way that Nora feels is about finding herself throughout the film. When we meet her, she’s a little girl who has a lot of ego and wants and desires and ambition, but it’s burgeoning in a way and it’s not very caring of little Hae Sung, who is about to lose a friend. Then the second time they meet, it’s the same thing. She’s still a little bit too young in her ambition and needs, so it’s a bit of a growing-up thing for her. But when we see her at the bar, that’s when she feels the weight of what it has been like for her to be here having left herself, her little girl, behind. And she can only realize that because of these two men; they’re there for her. They aren’t saying that her ambition is a little too much; both of hem know her that way, that’s part of the person that they love, and they love her in such different ways, but it is the same person that they love. They know the heart of her, they love her strength. To me, that’s the amazing thing about these relationships.
And yes, Arthur could have easily been somebody who is insecure and uncomfortable, but it always felt like that would be so easy.
I think he is those things; he just doesn’t let it destroy him.
Of course, that’s the part of the act of loving somebody like her. He knows that it’s both a pleasure and honor, and this is the part that’s hard. He wishes he could be everything for her, but he knows that he can’t. But he also know that that’s okay; it doesn’t mean that she doesn’t love him, and that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love her. That’s why he says, “I’m glad that you came here” to Hae Sung. I know he means it. He knows that him coming to New York was meaningful to Nora, and she’s someone he loves and he wants her to be whole and okay. That is him giving himself and not letting his own insecurities and feelings ruin anything, because he knows this is Nora’s story, and he’s not going to force his own narrative on that.
I think he’s also glad when Hae Sung is leaving.
That’s why he says, “I have a lot of questions but first, when is he leaving again?”
You shot this on film. As a first-time filmmaker, would you not allow yourself to shoot a film unless you actually shot on film?
Oooh, I lIke that. It was actually a couple things. My DP said, “Well when there was only film, first-time filmmakers were always shooting on film.” The other thing, I didn’t just decide that based on a scene; it’s the look of the whole film. So if you make the decision for one scene, it dictates how the rest of the film happens. At the end of the day, the thing that I loved that really got me through it was that my DP believed in it, and I know the process of it is so unique. I wanted to show up every day, watching my camera team work in the process that they love. That was my real first impulse about it, because I didn’t know what it would feel like for me since I’ve never done it before.
But over time, while I was working with film, I started to realize why the process is so special. Part of it is that it’s really impactful for the actors because they have a different relationship when things are rolling. Coming from theaters, where the one performance per night is what happens that night; you don’t get second takes. The weight of every time you call “Action” really suited the way I wanted to work anyway. I also think philosophically, it felt aligned. There’s something important about the tangibility and the risk of it, the way that it could feel timeless or forever or never. At the heart of it, it made sense to shoot on film, for multiple reasons.
How did you find these three actors, because they could not be more perfect for these roles?
They all read for me. What I was looking for was a soul match to the characters. First off, I needed to know that they were great actors, because they have to do a tremendous amount of acting here, so you can’t just show up. You need to have a work ethic and approach to your own craft that I needed to rely on. Every day was a hugely important scene, more than likely. But then the second thing was being the right person. Casting should tell the story of the movie too. It was about meeting them and talking to them and asking how they feel connected to the story. I’m not looking for something on the surface; I’m thinking most Korean actresses would connect to Nora. I’m not talking about that type of connection, but the thing I felt was important was having the ambition and being the burning center of something, that strength and ability to be hold center, somebody who knows they’re the center of this particular story. That kind of centering is what I found in Greta. And the other part of her that I love is that she can be such a kid too. I wanted to make sure she had that, and it’s hard to know if you don’t speak Korean, but her Korean sounds like a kid, because she emigrated a little bit younger. Her language paused at a certain place, and there was a conversation I had with her in the early part of our process where I told her that her it’s important her Korean isn’t so good. It’s okay, actually perfect, that she sounds like a kid. What’s amazing is that we discovered that Hae Sung’s voice, when he’s talking to his friends in Korea, he sounds he’s like one of the guys in Korea. But when he speaks to Nora, he tries to match her Korean, so he starts to sound like a kid too. Before I found Tao, it was a long process, it was about the soulfulness or the way you can tell a story through the expressions or depth of someone.
You’ve already started working on your next film. I know you won’t reveal what it’s about, but will it as be as personal as Past Lives?
I think that everything I do is going to be personal, no matter what it is. To make a movie, it’s years of your life, and if I didn’t feel like I had skin in the game or some personal connection to the story, it would be really difficult to commit to it and go through that. It’s too much of your actual life to say “This isn’t personal; it’s just business.”
But this one feels like you put your diary on film. Do you think you’ll always be that personal?
People who know me who have encountered my next project, I think they would all say it’s more personal, if anything.
That’s great. Thank you so much; best of luck with all of this.
Thank you so much. So nice to meet you.
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