“I wrote that ‘Coke and beer’ thing, and then I knew that I could write this movie”: Celine Song on Materialists

Celine Song returns with her second feature, Materialists – a stylish, razor-edged portrait of love, money and modern entanglements in New York. Premiering at Picturehouse Central, the very same theatre where she introduced Past Lives a year ago, the occasion carried a quiet resonance. “To come back here with my second movie, it’s such an honour,” she said ahead of the post-screening Q&A. 

The origins of Materialists lie in a six-month stretch Song spent in her 20s working as a professional matchmaker in Manhattan. “I needed to pay rent, and it was the only day job I could get,” she revealed, explaining she lacked the experience for retail or service work, and a chance meeting with someone in the matchmaking industry opened a door. She recalls, “I interviewed for the job, I got the job, and then I worked for about six months, and as I was leaving that job, I was thinking, ‘one day I’m going to tell a story about it’.”

The idea took root quietly, before her debut feature had even reached cinemas. “I knew that I was a filmmaker, but nobody else in the world knew,” she said, recalling the period after Past Lives premiered at Sundance. “I was like, ‘what am I going to do? What should I do next?’” It was in this space of creative limbo that her time as a matchmaker re-emerged with new clarity. “I had never cracked the story, and in those six months, I cracked the story.”

The breakthrough, as she tells it, came with a specific and unexpected detail: a recurring motif in the film that centres around an unusual beverage pairing. “The thing that helped me crack this story is the ‘Coke and beer’ thing – I wrote that ‘Coke and beer’ thing, and then I knew that I could write this movie.”

At the emotional core of her work lies a preoccupation with intimacy and connection. “I think all of us are deeply obsessed with and interested in love,” she says. “Love is the only cure for loneliness, and all of us human beings are born into a sea of loneliness.” It’s a sentiment that has long guided her writing. “I was writing for all my life,” she reflects, remembering an early piece. “When I was six, I wrote a poem about a spider eating a butterfly, how it was sad for the butterfly, but the spider has to eat – I consider that my first work.”

While her films feel organic and emotionally precise, Song maintains a strict formal control over her scripts. “I don’t really do any improvisation in my films; it really is as scripted,” she explains. That said, she leaves space for actors to explore moments that elude straightforward direction. Reflecting on a scene in Materialists – a quiet exchange between Chris Evans’s and Dakota Johnson’s characters beside a storage unit – she describes a detail from the script that proved suggestive but abstract. “In that scene, there are certain things that they are doing with their hands and their eyes that were in the script – just an unactable suggestion of what it should be. I think I wrote something like, ‘She’s pointing to him, as if she’s tracing a constellation or something,’ which is not actable.” The actors, she adds, found their own rhythm. “Dakota and Chris came up with something perfect.”

Christina Yang

Materialists is released nationwide on 15^th August 2025.

Watch the trailer for Materialists here: