Past Lives opens with a scene set at a bustling, low-lit little bar in the East Village, where three people—a woman, with a man sitting on each side of her—are having a quiet conversation. The viewer wonders: Who are they and what’s their story?
Writer-director Celine Song was living that exact moment—sitting in a bar with her American husband on one side of her, her childhood sweetheart from Korea on the other—when she realized how strange this scene could look to an outsider. “Sitting there, I felt very empowered, or I felt something special was passing through the three of us,” Song tells Little Gold Men. “And I was sort of looking around the bar, and seeing how the people who work there and the other patrons of that bar looked at us and I just realized that they were all wondering who we were to each other.”
That moment became the starting point for Past Lives, Song’s feature directorial debut about Nora (Greta Lee), a young woman who grew up in Korea and now lives in New York with her husband, Arthur (John Magaro). Their lives are disrupted, and ultimately transformed, when Nora’s childhood crush, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), comes to visit her after 20 years. The fluid and tender love story was the breakout of the Sundance Film Festival, with much praise being lavished on Song, a playwright, for her confident story that pulses with longing. As A24 begins opening Past Lives in theaters this week, Song spoke with Vanity Fair about crafting this very personal story based on her own life, and how her directorial debut made her fall in love with filmmaking just as her relationship with the stage was crumbling. “It’s a truth of something that happened to me. It’s more about the existential crisis that I was going through,” she says. “But it’s not really a transcription of my life. It’s more like an inspired bio and adaptation of what it’s been like to be myself.”
Jon Pack/Twenty Years Rights/A24 Films
Like Nora, the protagonist of Past Lives, Song was born in South Korea, and moved with her family to Canada when she was 12. Like Nora, she emigrated again as a young adult, this time to New York to attend college. Like Nora, she became a playwright, setting up a home in the city with her American husband.
In 2019, her play Endlings, about three older Korean women and a Korean Canadian writer living in New York, premiered at the American Repertory Theater. When its run was cut short due to the pandemic, Song pivoted in a fascinating way, directing a live production of Chekhov’s The Seagull using The Sims 4 on Twitch. But a more substantial break with theater was still to come. “I think that the theater that I fell in love with was the theater from the ’80s in New York, which was a pretty experimental time,” she says. “When I got to New York, something that I realized is that because of real estate, because of the way that New York has changed, that theater was actually very difficult to find, and the space that that kind of theater existed was shrinking daily.”
When you’re a young, wide-eyed writer, Song adds, you think maybe you can be the one to save theater. But those illusions dimmed eventually. “I think there had to be a moment, like any relationship, where you have to say, ‘Well, I cannot actually save this person. This person has to save itself. I can’t do this for them.’ And you have to break up,” she says.
Her new relationship, as it were, began with the script for Past Lives. Song insists it was the strength of the script that allowed her to ask if she could also direct the film, despite having no experience in the field. “I was open to the heartbreak of not being able to direct it,” says Song, whose father is also a filmmaker.
But A24 agreed that she should direct the film for a story that’s so personal to her. Song implemented some unusual filmmaking techniques in order to cultivate the tension between her characters. While Lee and Yoo had conversations over Zoom ahead of filming, Song told them they were not allowed to hug or physically touch each other before their first scene together, where Nora meets Hae Sung in Madison Square Park after being apart for 20 years. “From that feeling of not really knowing what the other person really feels like to hug or even shake hands, from there they were able to build their chemistry,” says Song.
Celine Song (left) on set with Greta Lee.
Jon Pack/Twenty Years Rights/A24 Films
Similarly, she kept Yoo away from Magaro, who plays Nora’s American husband, until their first scene together. She told Lee to tell each of the men that she was rehearsing with the other, so that their only impressions of each other came through Lee. “When they saw each other for the first time, there was so much buildup to it that that buildup itself was able to help with the necessary tension,” she says.
As for the real-life characters the actors are playing, Song says her husband, who is also a writer, has always been the first person to read her scripts. “So how does he feel about it? He loves it. He’s so proud,” says Song. Her relationship with her childhood sweetheart remains “very platonic,” though that’s as much as Song is willing to reveal about him. “He has his own personal life. He knows, we’ve talked about it, but it’s really an adaptation or inspired by a certain event more than reflective of our relationship,” she says.
Despite her insistence that Past Lives is more inspired by a moment than the real relationships with the one who got away, Song, who is already working on her next script, knows she’ll always imbue her stories with her own truth. She says, “Every single thing that I’ve written, regardless of it being about immigration or being in love or being married or reconnecting with your first love, regardless of what it is, it is always going to be about what feels true to me as a person.”
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