The latest entry into A24’s screenplay books collection examines the creation and impact of Celine Song‘s feature directorial debut “Past Lives.” The beloved feature was IndieWire’s favorite film of 2023 and earned Song a Best Original Screenplay nomination at the 2024 Oscars.
“Past Lives” is a record of the film’s creation, split into five chapters. The 86-page book opens with an introduction by playwright Lynn Nottage. The first section features Celine Song’s original screenplay, presented in both English and Korean. Section Two presents film stills shot by cinematographer Shabier Kirchner. “Someone Who Knew Me When,” an essay by New York Times bestselling author Sloane Crosley, looks at that deceptively simple question: What might have been? while “Marriage Plot, Interrupted” by New Yorker staff writer Doreen St. Félix considers how the film escapes the strictures of the domestic drama.
The final chapter — available exclusively on IndieWire — features a wide-ranging conversation between Song and author Andrew H. Miller. You can read it in full below. The book is out today.
SECTION V
“True Love Leaves No Traces”
A Conversation Between Celine Song and Andrew H. Miller
“Past Lives” asks a deceptively simple question: What might have been? Of course, there’s no such thing as a simple interrogation into the other lives we might have led—which is what prompted Andrew H. Miller to write an entire book on the topic. “On Not Being Someone Else” (Harvard University Press, 2022) explores the way we view the roads not taken, whether it’s the person we didn’t marry, the job we didn’t take, or simply the grocery store line we skipped (that’s suddenly moving much faster). Miller sat down with Celine Song to talk about all that might have been, and what could still be.
Andrew H. Miller: “Past Lives” is a movie that’s full of regret and full of relief, some jealousy, some envy. But the dominant feeling for me is this heartbreaking beauty. How does beauty matter? What role does it play for you?
Celine Song: Well, there’s nothing more heartbreaking in life than beauty. And so much of that beauty stems from the longing we feel by living the life we live. We’re always in pursuit of it on some level, even just those small, really beautiful moments. It doesn’t always have to be an aesthetic achievement or something tangible, it can just be a beautiful feeling. You can have a beautiful feeling in a very unattractive mall, for example. Or maybe you’re in a really dark and awful place, or a horrible room, or in a space where there’s a lot of violence and something terrifying is happening, but maybe the words you say to another person there can contain so much beauty. I really believe that beauty makes life worth living.
The clichés and the sayings about beauty are usually true, like how people say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For Hae Sung and Nora, they’re both still children in each other’s eyes. There’s beauty in being able to see someone that way. In the final scene in the film, for example, the street that I was looking for was meant to be the most beautiful street in all of New York in the eyes of the beholders, the eyes of Nora and Hae Sung.
AM: Right, so much of the movie is both terrifically ordinary and terrifically beautiful. You get this very ordinary street in New York, but it’s also exquisitely beautiful at the same time.
CS: And it is only beautiful because something very beautiful has happened there.
AM: It’s beautiful for us. Is it beautiful for Nora and for Hae Sung?
CS: It is very beautiful for Nora and Hae Sung, and it’s even beautiful for Arthur. To me, the corners of the city that we live in or the places we walk by, the more ordinary they are, the more completely beautiful they can be. Somebody else is walking along the same street, and it’s not going to mean anything to them, but the same corner is going to hold so much meaning and so much beauty for Nora and Hae Sung. That spot, in front of a garage, where they’re waiting for an Uber, is a spot that they’re going to think of and feel something about for the rest of their lives. There’s a total beauty there.
AM: It will be beautiful for them. At that very moment, even, they’re holding back tears. They’re feeling so much—
CS: Yes, I think they experience all those feelings as something beautiful. But different people talk about regret very differently. I usually find when sharing “Past Lives” with an audience member—and I mean an individual audience member—that the film very much works as a mirror to where that person is in their life and what they have gone through because, depending on where they are in their life, they can think of that one moment as one that’s filled with regret, or they can think of that moment as one that’s filled with a lot of peace. It really does depend on who is watching it. Again, it’s about the eye of the beholder. I’ve heard every reaction: I’ve heard everything from “I would’ve gotten in that Uber” to “Thank God she stayed.” Both of those reactions are true—you can feel different things depending on where you are. So, when you said to me earlier in this conversation that this film is filled with regret, I thought, “Well, what does this say about Andrew and where he is in his life?”
AM: It is revealing.
CS: Right. We’re all living a life. We all have so much in common, but we’re each going through our time and space in a way that’s unique in the world.
AM: We’re all living one life.
CS: Yes. Yes. Exactly.
AM: Each of us dreams in our own language. One of the things that a film can do is say: There’s a body here, and there’s a body here, and they’re separate.
CS: Completely. Even at the deepest level of intimacy you’re still going to know a language that’s unique to you—the language of your life. You have a very specific language because you’re living the one life. In fact, no other human being can know what that is, and therefore there’s no other human being who can actually judge it for what it is either.
AM: One of the wonderful things about cinema is that it needn’t make heavy weather of that. It’s a deep existential truth we’re talking about here, and you could describe it in language that is very heavy, but your film is saying: No, no. Here’s a person. Here’s a person. They’re together.
CS: Completely.
AM: They’re in the same city at the same time, but they’re separate. They’re together, and they’re separate.
CS: I feel like there’s that little gap between Nora and Hae Sung that speaks to the way we connect to everyone. Yes, friends. Yes, lovers. Yes, every other human being, too. There is something that is in the distance between those two characters that, throughout the film, we all understand. It’s a completely unknown space because we actually don’t know what it’s going to be like to cross it. That is the possibility—the alternate universe or living the life that these two people are living, because Nora and Hae Sung are not going to cross that space to go toward each other. In this life, they’re going to remain at arm’s length.
AM: Yes.
CS: Only broken at times by a hug.
AM: Yes. Right. By one hug that she initiates and then one hug that he initiates.
CS: Exactly.
AM: “Past Lives” has been put in a lineage with the films of Yasujirō Ozu and with Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love” (2000). You’ve said that it’s been an honor to be put in that lineage, but that each of those movies defies comparison, as “Past Lives” defies comparison. I found myself thinking of Mike Leigh’s “Another Year” (2010), and the way that he elicits the kind of acting where you really feel the presence of the actor. You think: This actor is right here, right now. There’s an absolute specificity to his characters. I was wondering if Mike Leigh matters to you—
CS: Oh, so much. He matters so much to me.
AM: How so?
CS: He means so much to me because I feel like the heart of his work is so connected to what I believe fundamentally, which is that there is nothing bigger in scale than the human life that everybody in the audience can connect to, captured on screen as it is. We can talk about the scale of a film and how cinema is about living in different worlds than the ones we live in currently, and I get very excited about those things, too. I’m a huge fan of sci-fi and a huge fan of fantasy. But Mike Leigh is so interested in capturing the totally extraordinary feelings that can happen in an entirely mundane experience. After watching a Mike Leigh film, I feel like my life is so much more significant and filled with more beauty, complexity, darkness, and perfection than I thought. It’s always life-affirming.
AM: It’s such a gift. Such a gift to the audience.
CS: It’s a gift. I feel very loved and very seen by his films, if that makes sense. In the way that it’s in the eye of the beholder, I feel very beautiful because of the way that his films see my very ordinary life. So much of what I find purposeful about cinema or making art is going to always come down to love. It’s a cliché, but they say love is the greatest thing in life. Well, a part of that is being able to talk about love, and I don’t just mean romantic love, I mean love that we just experience in life. Even if it’s from a friend, from a parent, from someone you work with, whatever it may be, whatever the feeling of being seen and understood, I think that alone is worth depicting because in life it is unfortunately more rare than it should be.
AM: The psychologist Adam Phillips once said, “The death of God is the death of someone who knows who you are.”
CS: That’s wonderful.
AM: There’s such a powerful, powerful desire to be known. So if a film can convey that or suggest that—
CS: There’s nothing holier… There’s a holiness to Leigh’s films because of that. I always feel so seen by his films even though of course I don’t maybe share the same background or… It’s not about representation.
AM: I’m not Korean…
CS: Yeah, exactly. It’s not about being seen in a literal way. It’s about being seen in your soul.
AM: There is that extraordinary moment at the beginning of “Past Lives” where we have our proxy voices as viewers there—the couple who’s watching this film that’s starting, and they’re saying, “Who are these people? Who are they to each other?” Then Greta [Lee] looks right at us, and we think: Oh my God, I’m being seen.
CS: Totally. Well, you’re being asked to see her, because that’s what the truth is. It starts with the mystery of who she is and what her life is, and what she’s asking in that moment is to be seen. This is one of the scenes that I talked to Greta about the most. When she has to break the fourth wall and look at the camera, she has to be both totally open and totally mysterious. It’s supposed to be a Mona Lisa thing of: I defy your attempt to know me, and I’m also going to welcome you into actually getting to know me. That’s very different from: Yeah, here is a list of the things that I am. What she’s telling us is: I’m going to let you—and I mean the audience whose proxy is these voices—I’m going to let you actually live through my life, through this movie… and then at the end of it, you’re going to see me. That’s a very different thing than if she were to just describe herself more literally as, say, Korean American. She can say a lot of words to describe who she is, but, in fact, what she’s saying is, “No, actually, I’m going to let you into a part of my life, not all of it, but part of my life, and at the end of it you’re going to see me. And the next time you are back in this scene, the next time you’re back in this moment, in this film, you’re not just going to look at me, you’re going to see me, and you’re going to love me, and you’re going to love these two people you don’t know.” What I mean by love… it’s not about likeability, it’s about understanding—
AM: Recognizing somebody’s particular humanity?
CS: Yes.
AM: That’s remarkable that you say that because she is so… authoritative isn’t the right word, but she controls so much in the movie from the beginning. For instance, the moment where she says to Arthur, “We say In-Yun to seduce you.”
CS: Yeah. Well, it’s a story about her life—insofar as she can control her own life, the way that we are authors of our own life. I certainly don’t think that’s possible for everyone all the time, which is where all kinds of dehumanization is happening in the world. But in Nora’s situation, she’s living a very happy life, and therefore she has a great deal of authority in her life. But there is a funny wrinkle in her otherwise relentless control and power over her own life, which is Hae Sung coming to visit. It’s so innocuous. It feels like it should not disrupt a single thing.
AM: She says, “Why did you do that?”
CS: Yeah. “Why’d you come?”
AM: Movies and novels and poems that are about lives we could have lived but didn’t tend to fall in patterns. Marriage. “Oh, if I had married this person instead of that person.” Career. Children. I could have had children—I didn’t have children. Emigrating. “If only we stayed in Seoul…” In “Past Lives,” the marriage is under question in a way, or she’s thinking about alternative possibilities, or the movie’s thinking about presenting alternative possibilities, or at least Hae Sung is presenting alternative possibilities. She even says, “You think I’m going to throw away my life? You think I’m going to give up my rehearsals for you?”
CS: I’m not sure how disparate these things are. What I mean is that they’re so connected. Why does Nora live in New York? She lives in New York because of her career and her career is so connected to who she is. She’s married to this person she is in love with because her life in New York makes it possible to marry him. I don’t know if you can separate one thing from the other. And then, of course, she is not somebody who is in any way compatible with who Hae Sung is. Someone would have to give up their life for the two of them to be together. He has a particular job, a particular life, language, country… I would not recommend that these two people get together. To me, that’s the crux of it.
AM: You did what you could to prevent it, as a matter of fact, very successfully.
CS: Yeah, of course. But that’s not really the point of their connection, because love does not necessarily need to have a practical end or a happy ending that is legible or tangible. There is a song that I was thinking about so much, the Leonard Cohen song he made with Phil Spector called “True Love Leaves No Traces.” I think about that song as the heart of this particular film because it’s about the way that Hae Sung and Nora’s connection has nothing tangible in it. There’s nothing practical in it—there’s not even a very proper path through it. When they split at the fork in the road, their love story stopped. In fact, that’s why, when their flashback happens, they’re right back in that spot, as though they’ve been waiting at that corner for 24 years.
AM: Right, at the very end?
CS: Yes, and because they have been waiting in that corner for 24 years, all they need is to get this proper goodbye—and once that happens the film can end. I think there’s a danger in what we do as modern people, which is to evaluate different connections and then assign importance: “They’re just a friend,” or, “They’re just a childhood friend, and you’re my boyfriend,” or, “You were just a boyfriend—now you’re my husband.” We tend to assign different meanings and values to certain relationships, which then flattens the connections we might have. But the truth is that the heart of every connection is its very own thing. You can’t ask Arthur, for example, to have the connection that Nora has with Hae Sung, and you can’t ask Hae Sung to have the kind of connection that Nora and Arthur have. Every single one of their conversations is going to be different, and it’s heartbreaking that Nora won’t get to have the millions and millions of conversations that she could have with Hae Sung in this particular life. But in their place, she’s able to have those kinds of conversations with Arthur, which would be different than with Hae Sung–not better or worse, but different because he is a different person and their love is unique to the two of them.
AM: And her mom says, “When you leave something behind, you get something,” or something like that.
CS: Exactly. To me, it’s like he’s offering an option here. I’m like, “What option? Her life is what it is.” And by the way, the movie could have posed a different question: “Is there something missing in her life that she’s trying to solve by running away with somebody else?” But that’s not the point of the film.
AM: It’s simpler than that. This is just the way life works.
CS: This is the way life is, and this is the life that Nora is living. It doesn’t mean that the feeling she gets when she sees somebody who reminds her of herself as a little girl, who she probably didn’t really think was important, who she never got to say a proper goodbye to, and somebody who is still in love with that little girl… that’s such a powerful feeling. You can always say to her, “How could you do this? You’re married.” You can say a million different things to turn that relationship or turn that connection into something that everybody can understand. But the truth is it’s as simple as the feeling she gets when the two of them are looking at each other, which is: Oh, I remember you when you were a kid, and we were so in love as children. It can be as simple as that. There’s nothing else that you can ask of that, and you can’t expect that connection to become something more than what it was.
AM: That’s such a powerful insight about love.
CS: That’s the thing about love in the movie—it’s not about “romance” in the way that we think about it. It’s about something else entirely. It’s about the universality of love, how it’s about recognizing someone’s humanity and understanding their particularity.
AM: To think about other possibilities is human.
CS: It’s completely human. Even in the grocery line, you think, “I’d have been out of here five minutes ago if I had gotten in the other line.” It’s part of the human imagination. There’s nothing you can do about it, but it’s a very powerful thing, too, because it allows us to empathize with the person who got in the right grocery line. If you take that further, maybe somebody has gone through a certain experience that I don’t know anything about but that I can connect to through cinema. The ability to have empathy is so connected to our ability to think about the lives that we do not live. Part of why “Past Lives” has resonated with people from so many different countries is the universality of its core concept. As I was sharing the movie with the global audience, I got to hear people in all different countries pronounce the word In-Yun in their own accent. An Italian interviewer or fan of the film will want to talk to me about In-Yun, but will say the word with an Italian accent. Or a Japanese accent. There are so many different ways that you can say that word in the world, but we all know what that word is universally. This film connected with people who have not exactly lived the way that Nora has or even made choices that she has, and that is a very special thing I feel so lucky to have experienced on my first film.
AM: I’ve been wondering about the ideals you have about your work and what you think about when it’s finished. Susan Sontag has this line—
CS: Oh, geez. I know it.
AM: Critics, when they’re talking about works of art, seem to say that a perfect work of art is a work of art in which nothing can be changed. Any change would make it worse. However, the artist knows that it’s dependent on contingency, on chance, on whether or not there’s a fire truck across the street when you’re filming, on whether it’s raining. On the one hand, life is just full of chaos and chance, and who knows what’s going on. But at the aesthetic level, the ideal of a work of art is one in which nothing could be changed, or it would not be as good. Is that a way to think about your artwork, that you want it to be exactly right, that every piece has to be there, that no other piece would do?
CS: I think that is how I feel. But I also know that, again, it’s in the eye of the beholder. I know that it’s going to be completely changeable and mean completely different things to the people who see it.
AM: You can’t control that.
CS: No, I can’t control it because a part of it is like, well, when I lock everything, when I lock the film, and the film is considered finished, it has effectively become an object. It has effectively become a thing that you could watch on your phone. So it has fully become something that is, in a way, a dead thing because I am no longer able to touch it, because it’s now become a film that exists in the world. Hopefully, you’ve encountered it in a beautiful movie theater, but it’s also possible for you to have seen it on an airplane. Whatever this object is, it’s going to remain the object a hundred years from now, and I hope that a hundred years from now people are able to watch the movie and still feel something for it. Who knows, though? In that way, it is to me no longer a living, breathing thing. But I also know that in the audience, it comes back to life. In front of the audience, it does become a living, breathing thing again, and it becomes a part of their life in this way I, as the filmmaker, can only dream of. Again, we’re talking about contradictions. So to me, it is a changeable and contradictory thing. It is always in flux, but it’s also something that I no longer touch.
AM: It’s like what we were saying about characters who, on the one hand, are just one thing. Nora is this person and no one else, but, on the other hand, she could have been all these other people. She could have stayed in Seoul or could have gone to New York in her different lives. She could have been the bird on the branch.
CS: Yes. Exactly.
AM: A lovely line.
CS: Because it’s a depiction of life, every other life that you can imagine for her. “What if she stayed in Seoul?” Which, of course, Hae Sung talks about. Every choice within this movie is one of an infinite number of choices that could have been made as well. But I believe that’s the part of artmaking where you’re trying to capture the thing that is completely alive and turn it into an object that can be approached by everyone. And, as a result, it has to be something that is open to change and to alternate universes and all the things that Nora could have done instead. All of those things have to be in the film, but, again, it’s a contradiction because it has to also be the only thing that Nora could do in the film. Unpredictable yet inevitable. That’s all you’re trying to achieve. For example, you can always make Arthur a horrible person, and then the audience will have to contend with the fact that her life in New York or her marriage doesn’t seem very good. But, in fact, the thing that I’m trying to do is to make sure that Nora does not get in the Uber. You want it to feel completely inevitable because that’s what life feels like. Life is completely inevitable and totally spontaneous.
AM: I want to ask you about Virginia Woolf. Have you read “Mrs. Dalloway”?
CS: I’ve read all the classics. I’m not scared of your English department.
AM: In “Mrs. Dalloway,” a lover comes back and, in a way, makes her think about everything. About her marriage, about her deeply and powerfully unspoken relationship to her husband, who can’t say that he loves her but does. You were a playwright before you were a filmmaker. One of the things I loved about your movie, as I’ve been saying, is its formal refinement, the extraordinary care with which you manage space and time and intensify the viewers’ experiences of space and time through all sorts of formal, technical choices. But then there is the harmony, a series of chord progressions on top of which your language then plays this melody. I don’t want to end without acknowledging the language. How did you think about language in relation to thinking about unled lives? The more particular question is to ask about the translation of the very last line in the movie, when Hae Sung says, in translation, “See you then.” I take it to mean, or possibly mean, “I’ll see you in that future life.” Is that there in the original Korean, too?
CS: Yes. I would say it’s more specific than even, “See you then.” The more direct translation is, “Geuttae boja / 그때 보자.” It means, “See you at that time.” In that way, it is completely and unambiguously about that.
AM: That’s lovely. I love that.
CS: Yes, and what an amazing promise. And at the end of the film, after the beautiful credit song by Sharon Van Etten ends, there’s a little piece of music that comes back from the film, which is the piece of music from the first moment that Nora and Hae Sung reconnect over Skype. We wanted to play that song there as a way of—
AM: Anticipating.
CS: Revealing what is happening in the next life. Even though you’re just watching the black screen and the credits, you’re hearing Nora and Hae Sung meeting in the next life. They probably don’t know that they’re meeting each other again in this life after they promised to see each other then in that New York City corner in their last life.
AM: Maybe for the 8,000th time. Who knows?
CS: Yes, maybe the 8,000th time. The movie is about this sense we get when we meet certain people. “I’ve known you forever. I don’t know how to describe it, but you and I, we are connected for some reason.” That’s why we chose that piece of music for a post-credit song.
AM: That’s lovely. When her parents decide to move, one of the first things she does is choose her new name. She names herself, and she practices this new language with her sister on the plane, learns this language and enters fully into it. Was having these two languages a resource for you? If you’re thinking, “I want to write a movie about two lovers, about a past lover coming back and a present lover,” that could be done without the bilingual element. You didn’t need to, but you did. So that is to say, how did you think about using the language difference or the two languages to intensify the experience of unled lives or past lives?
CS: I think it suggests, again, that this movie is some kind of a love triangle, but the truth is this movie is not at all about a love triangle. If it is a love triangle, it’s between Nora and one of her lives and another one. To me, it’s really less about language as an element. It’s so fundamental because it’s about a part of her that is very much a literal place, a culture, a language, and a time in her life, and it’s a very vivid space. It’s so much more about somebody from that space coming to remind her of its existence, and the way that space still longs for her. It’s actually not a love triangle with the language barrier, it is fully about language itself…
AM: I understand that it’s not a love triangle, but I don’t understand—
CS: That’s what I’m trying to talk about, which is that this space within her that Hae Sung occupies is the thing that’s coming to visit. I don’t even think of it as a language barrier as opposed to this language that’s coming to visit, and that’s what really poses this existential question of who Nora is, what kind of a life she lives, and what the choices are that led to her life. Hae Sung coming to visit Nora in New York is a challenge to her entire existence. It’s about how this language that she forgot, this language that she doesn’t use, this language that only really exists in a certain part of her life, in her memory of the past, has come to invade her present and ask questions about her future. To me, it’s so much more about the love triangle of the past, the present, and the future sitting in that bar—
AM: Of this one person.
CS: Of this one person. And these two men who each hold a key to parts of her life, and they do not have each other’s keys—they only have one key that unlocks one part of her. The truth is that she gets to be completely unlocked because Hae Sung came to visit with his language and his inability to speak another one. He’s showing up to say, “There is this little basement in your soul I don’t think you’ve thought about or accessed, but I’m still in that basement, I’m still in love with that little girl, I still miss you.” In their encounter, he’s unlocking a part of her that I don’t think she fully recognized as an important part of her until he came along. So at the end of it, she has become a fuller woman and a fuller person as a result of Hae Sung’s visit. It is about her, and it is about these two men who love her differently, different parts of her, but are trying to reconcile how the woman and the girl that these two men know are somehow the same person. To love one is to love the other, and in that way, the men are then being asked to care for each other as well because the men are a part of this one woman who they both love very differently.
AM: We have In-Yun.
CS: Exactly.
AM: At the end, she recognizes her love for Arthur and having this part of her unlocked. At that moment, there’s nothing to do but to cry. To cry—to cry and to hug him.
CS: To grieve. To grieve something.
AM: To grieve while being hugged.
CS: A wonderful thing.
Excerpt from the new book “Past Lives” screenplay book, released by A24.
