Celine Song and Past Lives actor Greta Lee. Photo / Jon Pack
Paula Morris talks to film-maker Celine Song about the evolution of Past Lives
“It drives me crazy when I see New York City apartments in movies,” says Celine Song. “They’re like palaces. When I was looking for a location, I remember going to this horrible, horrible little apartment and being like, ‘This is perfect.’ Then my camera department said, ‘We can’t fit the camera in here.’ But I wanted the film to feel authentic.”
The film is Past Lives, the 35-year-old Song’s debut feature as both screenwriter and director. It’s an ode to lost loves, former selves and to the two cities that formed her – Seoul and New York. A poignant and often funny film, Past Lives draws on Song’s own life story. Like Nora, the film’s central character – played by Korean American actor Greta Lee – Song immigrated to Canada at the age of 12 and moved to New York a decade later. Nora follows Song’s path, both professionally and personally: a “suburban growing-up kind of a thing” in Ontario, a Master in Fine Arts from Columbia, a career as a playwright, marriage to a novelist.
Song’s diasporic characters embrace both re-invention and loss. “If you leave something behind,” Nora’s mother says early in the film, “you gain something too”. Nora gains freedom to fulfil her ambitions as an artist, albeit one living in a tiny rental in New York’s East Village. But lost is her first love, Hae Sung, abandoned when she immigrates. Twelve years later they reconnect – thanks to social media and Skype – but their lives are on different tracks. For Hae Sung it’s military service and long hours studying, then working as an engineer, wearing a suit to work, drinking soju with his friends and living with his parents.
Another 12 years pass and Hae Sung comes to New York on a so-called vacation to meet, at last, the grown-up and beautiful Nora. Tall, handsome and soulful, Hae Sung, played by Korean actor Teo Yoo, rattles both Nora and her nebbish husband Arthur – not least when Nora describes her first love as “really masculine in a Korean way”. Will Nora leave the devoted Arthur and her new-world life? Or is it impossible to turn back time?
“The villain of the movie is 24 years and the Pacific Ocean,” Song says. The film explores “the painful part of modern life, where we actually leave parts of ourselves throughout our lives, moving through time and space, moving to a new place.” Nora meets Arthur on an artist’s residency: he’s another writer. She “wants to be a singular standout in this city full of people who all want to be standouts”, but Hae Sung tells her he’s an ordinary person with an ordinary job. They “live such completely different lives”, Song says. “Who else is going to get her the way that Arthur does?”
Song was raised in a family of artists. Her father, Song Neung-han, is a film-maker and her mother is a visual artist; her younger sister became a video game designer. “I grew up in a creative household, watching movies with my mom every day. My parents were proud of me as a playwright and now they’re proud of me as a film-maker. For them, it’s about the work, not external success.”
The title of Past Lives refers to the Korean concept of in-yeon, which connects people through the ages. A chance encounter in one lifetime may lead to a deeper relationship in another; what doesn’t work out in this life may be fulfilled in the next. “Notions of destiny in Western philosophy,” Song says, are about “go out and seize the day. In much of Eastern philosophy, destiny walks in the door. It’s up to you if you want to accept it or reject it, but it’s going to come to you, and you’re not going to be able to stop it.”
Song describes the film as a movie of “three goodbyes”. The first goodbye is in Seoul, when the young Nora and Hae Sung “don’t fully understand” how deep the separation will be. The second is long-distance, with Hae Sung in Seoul and Nora in the US. The third is at the end of Hae Sung’s visit to New York, where he’s a visitor in a dreary rain-drenched city and, also, for Nora, an emissary from a lost world. Song wanted the city Nora loves to feel human-scale and ordinary, but couldn’t resist including a ferry ride. “I don’t think that every movie that is set in New York should include the Statue of Liberty. But I felt like this one should, because the two people who go there are a tourist and an immigrant.”
Most of the film locations are on a smaller scale, including the Holiday Cocktail Lounge in the East Village where Past Lives opens. “The rest of the places are like Madison Square Park, or East 1st Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues,” Song says. “This is the way I think New Yorkers would experience the city – like, just a street you walk by to get a cup of coffee.”
Because of Covid restrictions, all the New York scenes were shot first, and the Korea scenes in one intense trip. “We had to prep there from scratch then shoot for 10 days,” Song remembers. This meant “reverse engineering” the film, scouting for locations that worked with the New York footage. Her return to Seoul to film Past Lives was “the first time I was not just there to spend time with family”. Like other members of a diaspora returning “home”, Song felt “like you’re a stranger and like it’s an old friend”.
I ask her about the film’s use of Seoul’s hilly lanes and steep flights of steps. Was she, like Bong Joon-ho in Parasite, using stairs as a metaphor for class, influenced by classic Korean films like The Housemaid (1960)? “The first Korean films I watched were my father’s,” Song says. The “third goodbye” involves the stoop of Nora and Arthur’s apartment, so in Seoul she looked for steps as well, for “the place they say goodbye as children. It’s a mundane place but it’s also extraordinary and stunning.”
After 10 years as a playwright, Song’s experience creating Past Lives has convinced her to make more films. “I’m in the honeymoon phase with film-making,” she admits. “But it pushed me beyond what I thought I could be. Every day on set, I realised I could handle more. I didn’t know I could be so patient. During the second week of shooting, I remember feeling, ‘Man – I could be a parent!’”
Past Lives is in cinemas from August 31.
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