Celine Song’s Masterclass
As one of the guests of honor at the 2025 Champs-Élysées Film Festival, Celine Song’s masterclass took place at Le Balzac cinema on June 22 in Paris. Moderated by Emmanuelle Spadacenta, Editor-in-Chief of Cinemateaser Magazine.
It’s no secret that Celine Song’s Materialists is one of the most anticipated releases of 2025. After taking both the public and critics by storm with her directorial debut, Past Lives, in 2023, she returns with another gripping New York story. Materialists boasts a stellar cast, including Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal. Although I wasn’t able to secure a ticket to the film, I did have the chance to attend her masterclass before the premiere. Seeing Song in person is an experience in itself—she is one of the most humble and insightful artists I’ve ever encountered. She answered every question with sincerity and a touch of humor. So let me share some highlights from the evening: her reflections on her work, her identity as a writer-director, her creative process, and her advice for aspiring filmmakers.
Some quotes are slightly edited for clarity purposes.
When asked what it was like to work on a second film, Song explained that it was easier in terms of production and meeting her cast because people trusted her more. That’s when our moderator, Emmanuelle Spadacenta, asked whether it was also easier to find inspiration for Materialists. Song revealed that she had started working on the film before Past Lives’ premiere at the Sundance Film Festival back in 2022, when she had a six-month gap in between.
“And I knew that I was a filmmaker, but nobody else in the world knew. So it was a secret I had, and it was driving me a little bit crazy,” she said.
In her 20s, living as a young aspiring writer in New York City, the city of dream chasers, Song, too, struggled to find a job to pay rent.
“So I tried to be a bartender, and they were like, ‘No, you need ten years of bartending experience.’‘Can I work in retail?’ And they were like, ‘No, you need eight years of retail experience.’” The room was filled with ambitious young dreamchasers trying to survive in Paris, so we couldn’t help but laugh with her.
After coincidentally meeting someone at a party who worked as a matchmaker, Song decided to give it a try herself. For six months, that became her day job. She had always wanted to write about it, so during that six-month gap, she began the script. Time passed, Past Lives happened—then the Oscars—the next day, she flew back from L.A. to New York. And the day after that? She was already in a scout van for the Materialists.
Spadacenta asked whether the seed of the new film had been planted in Song’s debut feature. In response, Song emphasized her identity as a filmmaker and her ongoing exploration of love—a universal theme—alongside the material concerns that shape our lives. Rather than one film. informing the other, both films are aligned in their underlying philosophy.
“[…] it's about love as an intangible and an immaterial mystery, a great ancient mystery, while our bodies, our life, the mortality of it, and of course, our material needs, money. So the thing is, while we're trying to navigate everything from paying rent and getting food, and trying to make a living. I feel like in the middle of all that, there is something intangible, such as love.”
She remarked that this is presented as In-Yun in Past Lives, and it persists in Materialists. As she was releasing Materialists, Song realized that almost no romance films were being made in America, especially not for commercial release. This led to an interesting conversation with the studio about how to market and sell a romance film. She remarked that in France, cinema is love, and that here, people understand love as a universal theme worthy of the big screen.
Spadacenta asked whether Song’s modern approach was an attempt to deconstruct the rom-com genre. I recalled the wave of excitement over the so-called return of the classic rom-com when the Materialists trailer was released.
Song let out a small laugh and explained that she hadn’t been thinking about genre while making the film. It wasn’t until someone else pointed out that it might be considered a rom-com that she even thought about it in those terms. So, no—she hadn’t been trying to deconstruct anything. But, she added, making a romance film in 2025—in the lineage of Nora Ephron, James L. Brooks, and Billy Wilder, whom she admired—was how she approached it. “And it will be funny,” she said. Maybe not with underwear jokes or pratfalls, but with a kind of humor that comes simply from telling the truth.
“ I think that what I was really interested in is telling the truth and trying to be as honest as I can about the way love and life feel to me right now and the way dating looks right now.”
Reflecting on the male characters in her film, Spadacenta highlighted that Song had offered a very modern and truthful depiction of them, with no artificial rivalry. To which Song added that her guiding principle had been to depict masculinity in a way that resonated with her—masculinity, she could fall in love with. It was something she had considered for both films, and rather than presenting it as a kind of posturing or violence, she focused on its deeper aspects.
“I feel like the joy of watching characters on screen is that we get to love them and understand them deeply, because it doesn't mean that I'm going to create, like not flawed men, but you can be flawed, and you can still be very, very beautiful. And I think that's the kind of man that I want to be on my screen because I know them.”
Pascal and Evans are often recognized for their big blockbuster roles. “What happens when you offer these kinds of roles to actors? Do you feel like you're bringing them something they’re not necessarily used to?” asked Spadacenta.
“When I write a script, I don't think about the actors who are going to play the roles,” said Song. As it turns out, once the script is finished, she considers herself something of a “matchmaker.” When the right person walks into the room, she simply knows. Without spoiling the film, Song quoted a line: “I'm not merchandise, I'm a person.” She noted that, just like the quote, one can choose to see actors either as merchandise or as people.
At the time, with Past Lives still celebrating its success, many actors wanted to meet Song. It was during her meetings with Johnson and Evans, she instinctively knew within the first five minutes of conversation that they were right for the roles. She saw the characters in their souls.
“I don't believe in love at first sight, but I believe in love at first conversation.” Pedro Pascal, on the other hand, was already her friend, met through Past Lives. During one of their conversations, love came up on the table. Song couldn’t help but ask by the end, “Pedro, would you like to read my script?” Thus was how the three casts came to be.
Spadacenta mentioned that both films featured love triangles. (Song actually caught the word “triangle” in French, which made her worried about the upcoming question.) This is something that exists a lot in the theater world. She asked if Song was using this same setup to explore its different outcomes—almost like a stylistic exercise along the same lines. (Song was much relieved after the interpreter explained, which made the room laugh, and she proceeded to answer the question.)
“It’s a very natural and easily dramatic form of storytelling, one of the most powerful forms in all drama,” Song continued. Any story about romance—or really, stories that focus so much more on a woman making a choice—has a central theme about this woman driving the story. This woman goes through her life and the choices she makes throughout the film, and those choices reveal much more about what’s going on with the lead character than anything else.
One could tell that Song had a background in writing when watching Past Lives; she had a way with words, phrased in such a natural and sensitive manner. Spadacenta remarked that there was less dialogue in Past Lives than in Materialists before posing the question: “How much do you enjoy writing dialogue?”
“So much pleasure,” answered Song, with sparkles in her eyes. “Sooo much pleasure.”
She agreed that the silences were the most memorable moments in Past Lives, especially the two minutes of silence while they were waiting for the Uber. But she reminded us that silence could not exist without the dialogue that came before—that is, all that was spoken in the bar when they worked everything out. This paved the way for the silence. The reason the audience could be there for that silence was because we understood what was going on between those two people. We knew what they could be thinking about, and we could think with them. “I always think that silence can exist without clarity. So the dialogue is there to always provide clarity.”
The same applied to Materialists, even though it was a “chattier film” because it was about a job. Still, all of those words had to pay off in the silent moments.
When it came to the crafting of dialogue, Spadacenta asked about her process. Does she leave room for improvisation?
“No improvisation,” whispered Song into the microphone humorously, with a determined look that cracked up the room. “But they are allowed to pitch me ideas.”
She wanted to tell us some funny moments, but suddenly remembered, again, that no one in the crowd had seen the film there yet. So she left us with an easter egg: Dakota Johnson had actually pitched her several great jokes, which she promised to tell us more in one of her future interviews, so watch out.
Back to her process: she would read the script out loud with a group of her writer friends. Not actors, because they would make it sound better. Writers were great first-draft readers because they were really good at understanding the meaning of the line, without performing it. So she got to listen and see what worked, what didn’t work, and what needed more. This was the majority of her editing process. When rehearsals came, she didn’t actually read the lines with the actors; instead, they talked about every single line together. During this process, the questions they asked would lead to adjustments. “Sometimes I’ll be like, oh, because of the way you’re thinking about that, I can cut that line.”
We returned to the recurring city of New York, which was very present in her films and her personal life. As she had said before, “New York City, everybody's there trying to achieve their dream.”
Song compared New York to Paris because of the living conditions: “The rent is so high that you have to be a romantic to live here,” which amazed her. It was “to achieve my dreams, to dream,” said Song in an aspiring, childlike voice.
“It's a romantic notion because it's not convenient. So it must be romantic,” added Song. To survive in a city like New York—which she imagined to be like Paris—you needed to have a very healthy amount of cynicism and a strong survivalist mindset, which was not romantic. This was why she chose New York City as the backdrop: because cynicism and romance had to coexist. They must coexist in a person to continue choosing to live in this city where “the rent is too damn high.”
“Was there any attempt to renew the diction of New York?” questioned Spadacenta, noting that Materialists took place in more bourgeois neighborhoods than Past Lives. Song replied that another interesting aspect of the city was that it was ever-changing. So whenever it was filmed, it also became a kind of historical document. She also found a romantic aspect in this: Ephron’s New York was not the same as today’s. Unlike Past Lives, Materialists focused more on class. For the former, it only had to make sense that two writers could afford to rent there. In the latter, as suggested by the title, the price of everything became far more important.
As Song was writing the film back in 2022, she included the rent prices and the cost of each item directly in the script. Her location manager then went scouting for apartments in neighborhoods that made sense for each character. But between 2022 and the actual filming in 2024, the rent increased so dramatically that she had to go back and rewrite those numbers. Even though the characters lived in bourgeois neighborhoods, they did not belong to the same class, and that was a very important part of the storytelling.
Only two films into her career, Song had already lit a path for herself through her stories. “Do you feel like it's possible to build an entire career making personal films?” Spadacenta inquired.
Song replied thoughtfully that even though the work didn’t have to be based on personal experience—it could be someone else’s story—there still had to be some kind of personal stakes involved.
“I think it always has to be, I'm the only human being on earth who can make this movie.” Materialists was a tremendously personal story to her. It wasn’t as much an autofiction as Past Lives, still, in Materialists, she tried to be honest about the way she loved. She remarked that “personal” could mean many different things. It could be based on personal history, or it could mean having such a deep understanding of a relationship or character that it felt almost like her own. In this way, she planned to continue making personal films forever.
For Spadacenta’s final question, she pivoted to a more lighthearted, crowd-favorite topic. “So online, there's a lot of chatter about an upcoming esports series. Could you tell us about the personal dimension of that project?”
“Well, I'm a… gamer,” teased Song with a grin. “That’s all I'll say.” You could feel the surprise ripple through the room. I, myself, had not expected this at all. “If you ask what I do when I'm not making a movie or writing something, I usually play video games.”
Now the mic was passed to the crowd, made up of young adults who had been taking notes throughout the discourse.
Someone asked if she ever envisioned acting in her own films, to which she replied, "Noooo" with a horrified look that had everyone laughing. "I'm a very bad actor," she added, explaining that she would give herself notes in her head before even finishing the line.
The second part of the question was how she worked with actors on set. She explained that it was important to develop a unique and individual relationship—a shared language—with each actor. Most of her job, she said, was to be a flexible collaborator, working to find the best approach for each of them. All of this preparation was in service of achieving the best result on the day of the shoot.
It was now the turn of a young gentleman at the back, who asked, “How do you think differently when you're writing a play or if you're writing a film, and vice versa, what do you bring to both medias that make you a complete writer of today?”
For Song, the biggest difference was that she had to think about the camera, which was very versatile in its depiction. “When it comes to story and drama, it's the same. I think dramatically, when it comes to the actual building of drama, all the logic from theater I could just bring to the cinema.”
Now came the million-dollar question from a slightly stressed young gentleman from Italy: “What advice could you give to young aspiring writers/directors, who don’t necessarily have the resources or the degree? How could one tell stories like you and be more like you?”
She took her time and answered with sincerity. To her, the easiest way was to write a script that somebody wanted to do. There are so many great scripts, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are the ones people want to make. If it is a script you want to see, usually, there is going to be somebody else who wants to see or do it too. She explained that, even though her path to directing was through writing, that wasn’t the only way. Many directors came from a design or camera background, and each had their own language in cinema. There exists a path toward becoming a director, no matter what your starting point is.
The important thing, she said, was: “You have to finish the thing that you're doing, whether it's a short film or a script. For me, it was a script. So whatever it is, you actually have to finish the thing. Talking about the thing is just a way to procrastinate doing the thing.”
She acknowledged that there is a whole language around it, like going to meetings or pitching, but this mustn't prevent you from finishing the thing.
“Because people who can give you money to make things often don't have imagination. So, the only way for them to know that it's gonna be great is for you to show them. That's our job, right? […] You have to show them something that's a proof, proof of concept, proof of something, whether it's a script or film, or whatever. […] You have to show them and leave as little to imagination as possible. You have to have already imagined it and give it to them.”
She couldn’t help but exclaim, “What a pleasure, what an amazing gift that I get to be in charge of imagination.”
“It’s very hard. […] But you don’t have a chance if you don’t have a great script, or a short film, or something, to be like, hey, I know how to do this. You don't have to use your imagination. Here it is.”
The room filled with applause. Considering that the majority of the audience were aspiring creators, we were all deeply touched by her heartfelt advice. I have met many artists because of my major and personal interests, but rarely have I seen someone answer this question with such depth.
We knew at that moment that not only had she answered the question, but she had done so with respect and sincerity. Rather than offering something vague or reserved for a privileged few, she gave us concrete advice and encouragement we could apply. There was no doubt that the words she shared would continue to inspire all the young dreamers in the room on their upcoming journeys.
This was Celine Song’s masterclass. As I share these words, I hope they inspire you in some way, as they did for the room of dream chasers.
Materialists was released in theatres on June 13th, 2025, across the U.S. and is set to be released on July 2 in France.
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