Céline Song on Materialists, the arithmetic of dating, and refusing the biopic
The first thing Céline Song wants to clear up, ten minutes into our conversation, is that she does not, in fact, have a notebook of aphorisms about love. "I have a notebook of questions," she says. "Mostly unanswered ones." We are sitting in the editing loft she keeps in Tribeca, three weeks before the release of Materialists, her second feature after Past Lives. The room smells faintly of cold espresso. A corkboard behind her is pinned with index cards and small Polaroids, the way editors' rooms always are in films about editors' rooms.
"I don't write a film because I have a position. I write one because there is a question I can't stop asking, and the only way I know how to answer it is by making a movie."
What follows is a 90-minute conversation about the arithmetic of dating apps, why she turned down a third project that everyone assumed she would take, and what it actually costs a first-time director to refuse the biopic. Song is precise, dry and unusually willing to be wrong on the record — three qualities our editors have come to expect from the 47 staff critics who conduct these interviews for Filmxa.
On the script that didn't get made
The project she said no to, she tells me, was not a bad script. "It was a perfectly fine script. It had a great role. The money was real. And the moment I sat down to rewrite the third act, I knew I was going to make the film because I was afraid to say no, not because I had anything to say about it." She pauses. "That's not a good reason to spend two years of your life."
What she had to say, she had already written — twice. Past Lives was the first draft. Materialists is the second. The third, she says, is still a question mark. Read the Filmxa review of Materialists →
