Right now, the Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Celine Song is in the “techy” final stages of making her new film Materialists, the story of a prolific matchmaker torn between two handsome men in modern New York City. At the same time, as the film gets ready for release this summer via A24, she’s had the opportunity to reflect upon what came before it: that studio, and Song, have created a book based on her 2023 debut Past Lives, a film about connection, personal history, and what happens when someone you thought you might have forgotten about reenters the equation of your life.
From the moment the film had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, the word “special” was being used to describe it, in lieu of the usual platitudinous descriptors for films people love (“brilliant”, “excellent”, “a masterpiece”, though it’s arguably all of those too). It meant something to people: Writers and critics had become wrapped up in the story of Nora, a Korean-born New York-living playwright who reconnects with Hae Sung, a man she knew in childhood, after decades and thousands of miles apart. In turn, it became ripe for excavation: writers started finding parts of themselves in it.
“There are a few pieces that came out from that time that I feel very connected to,” Song says, speaking on a call from New York, “because it was written by somebody who completely understands the film and therefore understands me, even if we’re strangers.” People she knew, who she had close connections to, would send them to her: This writer seems to really get you, they’d say.
That was the starting point when it came to finding the writers who’d contribute essays to A24’s Past Lives book. There were some she knew already, like The New Yorker’s Doreen St. Félix, who offers up a sharp piece of writing on how the film plays with the parameters of stories about marriage and relationships. “Ask the 30-somethings drinking coffees in cosmopolitan cities what they thought of Past Lives, and they will put the cup down, mess with their hair nervously, give you an uncertain look. Believe me, I am a part of that cohort,” she writes. Lynn Nottage, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, writes the introduction, dwelling too upon the sticky way romance plays out in New York City, and in-yun, the touching Korean concept––one that coddles Past Lives so beautifully––that our present interactions have been shaped by the people we were before.
Friends or strangers, Song “knew [some of these writers] through the way that they have talked about the film before.” Some hadn’t, but there was an instinctual part of her that knew they’d have something interesting to say about it: “Another part of it is that it’s always a leap of faith to entrust somebody to write something about the art you made.” The results, she thinks, are beautiful.
The common thread through all of these A24 books (Under the Skin, Lady Bird and Midsommar have received similar treatment) is the presence of the screenwriter’s script. Song is a playwright by creative origin, someone with a tender understanding of how to make a spectacle out of people and little else. With the words of the film laid out on the page, sometimes in English and Korean, you get a greater appreciation of the slickness of her pen.
Nestled between the words are 24 images lifted from the film by its cinematographer Shabier Kirchner, each marked by a timestamp. Song calls these “little paintings” that capture the film’s spirit. “What I love and respect so much about Shabier is that he’s a storyteller first,” she says. “He’s never going to be pursuing an image that means nothing just because it’s beautiful.” Such is true of the images chosen: threaded together, they feel less like a greatest hits of Past Lives’ prettiest shots (the recognisable image of the film’s two protagonists with Jane’s Carousel in the background isn’t even one of the 24), and more like a strip of photographs that, even if you had never seen the film, would help you understand what it was about. “We work in a way that I would always call a romantic collaboration, because it is kind of coming from not two people who are exactly the same, [but] we speak each other’s language,” Song says of Kirchner. “Our collaboration is one of the most special things that I discovered in Past Lives.” They worked together again on Materialists too.
Whenever a film finishes shooting, cast and crew members grab talismans to hold onto, a keepsake that will remind them of how special the experience was. “In the few months that we’re together, we build something, and then we all take it apart,” Song says. “[Past Lives] is about the permanence and the transience of life, which is so connected to the permanence and transience of making a movie too.” These books try to replicate that feeling of having something to hold onto for a wider audience, I say, though I wonder what Song has held onto from the making of Past Lives. She has many “personal souvenirs” or “physical remnants from the time” as she calls them: little fabric flowers made by the costume department; in-yun patches from the sound team; badges featuring a bird on a branch (“Maybe we were just a bird and the branch it sat on one morning”) by the props department. Alongside Kircher, a number of the people who worked on Past Lives have come to work on Materialists too: “We had the same sound team, and the same camera team… [when we started shooting Materialists] those in-yun patches from Past Lives were still on the sound cards.”
“We trade those things to each other, and it becomes a bit of an inside joke we all have, right?” she adds. “It’s not just an object––it’s an object that holds meaning beyond what the object is.” All of a sudden, Song is back in the mode she hasn’t been in while making Materialists: reminiscing upon the connection of her Past Lives protagonists, on in-yun and how it’s still stuck with her since the film transitioned into cinema’s history rather than occupying its present. She’s on to new things now, but at least, with this book, she has a constant reminder of the journey Past Lives had, and the impact it makes on those who see it.
The Past Lives book from A24 is available to pre-order now from A24.com.