Celine Song Is Hopelessly Devoted to Writing

Celine Song first let us into her personal history and meditations on love with the universally poignant, critically-acclaimed Past Lives. On the eve of her sophomore film, the romantic Materialists, being released, Vogue Philippines is introduced to her first love—writing.

Writing first found Celine Song, as it does most of us, in the classroom. Barely five or six years old at the time, she wrote a poem about a spider consuming a butterfly. “About how awful it is that a spider is eating a butterfly and the butterfly gets eaten,” she recalls. Describing, remarkably, life’s quiet tragedies before she was barely old enough to have experienced them. “But also, a spider has to eat.”

It may be considered by some to have been inevitable that the playwright, screenwriter and film director would have this level of devotion to her art. Celine, now 36, is the only child born of an undeniably creative household, her father a filmmaker, and mother a graphic designer. At the age of twelve the family moved to Ontario, Canada, where she remained throughout her schooling years, eventually attaining an undergraduate degree in psychology with a minor in philosophy. Celine would go on to attend Columbia University, earning an MFA in playwriting and has stayed in New York—the set and supporting character of all her most notable works—ever since.

She notes that in a way, she continues to write that very first poem today; still mining the necessary contradictions of life three decades later, albeit for a much larger audience. “Like life is a process, right? Life is not a result. Life is the process itself. So in that way, writing is a process for me too,” she explains. “From the first time I wrote that poem until now, it’s a thing that I’m always longing to do, something I’m constantly doing and that I will always do.”

Celine’s writing first found her success in theatre. Her play Endlings—about a Korean-Canadian playwright living in New York and three elderly haenyeos or female Korean free-divers who spend their dying days harvesting seafood— introduced audiences to Celine’s meditations on diaspora and identity; about existence in that space between belonging to both an inherited Korean heritage and adopted Western life. 

The play’s run at the New York Theatre Workshop was sadly cut short by COVID, but the project still gave much to her developing voice. “‘Finding myself’ would be the way I think about [that period of my career], because so much of that time was discovery of myself as a storyteller,” she says. And Past Lives? “Past Lives would be ‘meeting the love of my life’,” she says, with a laugh, referring to her move into filmmaking. “Like love at first sight.”

Two years ago, Celine’s screenwriting and directorial debut Past Lives, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival (to a double standing ovation, no less) and almost immediately found devoted audiences everywhere. Both Celine and Past Lives received numerous prestigious nominations in ensuing months, including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards, establishing Celine as one of the most exciting filmmakers active today. 

The semi-autobiographical film, about in-yun or fated connections, follows main character Nora Moon (played by Greta Lee) as she navigates her understanding of past and present selves upon the reappearance of her childhood sweetheart Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and their relationship in proximity to her marriage with husband Arthur (John Magaro). “I know what in-yun sounds like in Czech, I know what in-yun sounds like in Italian,” she says, referencing the many different languages that Past Lives has been translated for. It would be a mistake to describe Past Lives as telling a singular story. “Because it’s a universal theme.” 

As the release date for her sophomore film nears, global audience anticipation is high. Between this conversation and the time this issue reaches readers, artist-of-the-moment Charli XCX will bring her Coachella set to a climactic close, performing before tens of thousands on the ground and countless more tuning in online. As she does, ‘Celine Song Summer’—alongside other notable names in the arts—will light up the towering screens behind her, cementing Celine’s place and her upcoming film in the cultural zeitgeist. 

However, despite the acclaim, Celine is exactly as you hope the architect of one of the most poignant, romantic films in recent memory to be, with no ego detected. Sincere, devoted and joyful, as one should be when in love.

“The project becomes my whole life, it’s the only thing I think about,” she says. Resistant to taking vacations from projects, Celine professes to being completely committed to seeing a project from concept to fruition without respite. “So to do that, it always has to be something that I feel completely in love with. I have to wake up every day feeling so lucky and happy to be working on it.” 

“That to me is the criteria,” she says, smiling. “I wish that the criteria for it was a little bit more mathematical or that there were a formula, but there is no formula. It’s simply do I feel in love enough to be devoted to it for years and years and years.”

That latest devotion is to Materialists, a romantic film that follows professional matchmaker Lucy (played by Dakota Johnson), whose expertise for matching clients with partners are in stark contrast to her conflicted feelings towards former partner John (Chris Evans) a struggling actor and cater water, and Harry (Pedro Pescal), a perfect match on paper. “I was just so happy that these characters that I wrote all found their owners,” she says of the cast with whom she has entrusted this story. “I figured out the right person for each role and it’s such a pleasure to get to see these characters come to life in such a full and complete way, and to see them go through the journey that I hoped that they would go through.”

Written in the breath before Past Lives’ release, the romantic film is not, as it may appear at first, a departure from the autobiographical influences in her first film that so deeply resonated with audiences. 

For six months in the 2010s, Celine had worked as a professional matchmaker, and from that time period of sitting across from clients, unabashedly and candidly sharing what they were looking for in a partner, the filmmaker believes that she learned more about people than almost any other time in her life. 

“What I realised at that time, is that the way that all of us talk about this person that’s meant to be the love of your life, that you’re supposed to marry, is in terms of numbers. Height, weight, income—there’s so many different things that have nothing to do with the way love actually works,” she says. “This amazing, mysterious thing. When it comes to dating, people just start talking about another human being like they’re just made up of a bunch of numbers.”

“Dating is very difficult and love can feel very difficult as well, but I think that there is such bravery in having hope in living with true love in spite of everything.” she says. She deliberates whether going as far as to suggest that audiences should still believe in love, but laughing, concludes she can’t make them do anything. Instead, she offers: “I believe in it…I feel like maybe the film is an argument for believing in it too.”

The tension between the transactional nature of modern dating, and the ancient nature of love—“The only thing that matters in life, as they say, right? That’s the old cliche”—is, Celine believes, something we all instinctively understand. “Because we have all loved once, or at least we want to one day. So I think that is something that concerns all of us; in that way, [the story] is of epic proportions.” Though spiders and butterflies are small, the stakes of their encounters are everything to them.

Materialist is in Philippine cinemas August 6, 2025.