Before Celine Song was an Oscar-nominated filmmaker, she was a playwright in New York who needed day jobs to pay the rent. That is how she found herself as a professional matchmaker.
What may have begun as a purely transactional gig, a way for her to keep making her art in an expensive city, taught her more about people’s wants and needs and the true contents of their hearts than she could have ever imagined.
“I always wanted to write something about it because there seemed to be a story in it that is massive and very epic in proportion,” Song said. “It affects every human being on Earth.”
And while waiting for her breakout film Past Lives to debut, she did. That film is Materialists, a modern-day New York love story starring Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans that is heading to cinemas on June 13.
Johnson is the matchmaker presented with two different types of man for herself – and the internet has already started drawing battle lines. But, just as Past Lives was not really about a love triangle, Materialists is about something more than who she ends up with.