‘Past Lives’ director Celine Song: ‘Different times coexist in us’

Celine Song’s Past Lives is about two characters stuck in a moment they can’t get out of, like the U2 song. As 12-year-old classmates, Nora (Rebecca Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) have a bond that could have developed into a romantic relationship had Nora’s family not emigrated to Canada. Nora and Hae Sung meet virtually 12 years later and in person another 12 years after that. Both characters re-assess their memories and attempt to address the complicated emotions they now share as adults.

Song, a playwright who lives and works in New York City, is herself a Korean immigrant. Past Lives marks her debut as a director. The film has a third character, Arthur (John Magaro), who is married to Nora and who begins to wonder about the exact nature of her feelings for Hae Sung, is the third character in what is essentially a two-hander.

Past Lives explores immigration, the tricks played by memory, and the difficulties in revisiting attachments formed in another time and place. The Korean-English drama will be released in India through PVR Inox Pictures on July 7. Past Lives has the potential to resonate among Indian audiences because of its themes, Song told Scroll in an interview. Here are excerpts.

How did your experience in theatre inform the structure of your debut feature?
The dramatic structure of a story has [elements] in common with both theatre and film. What I know about structure in theatre is sort of what spoke to the structure of this film.

The first scene sort of dictates the structure of the rest of the movie. It’s introducing the movie as a bit of a mystery. When we come back to that scene later in the film, we’re suddenly able to see it differently. That’s the first thing I figured out.

The flashback is not as common in theatre because so much theatre is about language, the figurative space. But I think that the flashback, if you’re using it perfectly and doing it in the right way and it’s not sentimental, can really work, but only in a really significant moment. We can jump time, skip time across time and space in our lives, in our everyday lives, and really be transported back to our childhood to different times in our lives just by meeting someone – that’s actually what the movie is about. So it felt important for us to really be able to see that visually.

How autobiographical is Past Lives?
It really started with that scene that ended up being my very first scene and also the near-the-last scene in the bar with the three of them. That is something that happened to me personally. That started my pursuit of writing and making this movie.

I am navigating what is actually right for the character and what makes sense for this to be a personal movie, but it’s not all exactly how it is. For example, all the dialogue I wrote, it’s not transcription. It’s not like a documentary or a recreation. It’s a movie that I wrote and directed.

I didn’t want the actors to be like me. I wasn’t trying to find an actor that looked like me. It was more about objectifying the spirit or the experience itself.

The actors had to find the characters on their own and become characters on their own. I didn’t do any improvisation. It’s my first movie, so maybe, I thought I would be interested in improvisation and then I realised that no, I’m a playwright? So I thought that every word should be exactly as it’s written.

What does the film say about memory and nostalgia, which are deeply subjective?
The way that time works on us was always going to be contradictory. It’s a part of Eastern philosophy. I’m really excited the movie is going to India. Those of us that have at least some access to Eastern philosophy, we know that everything has a contradictory part of it. That’s part of how the world works and life works.

I was thinking about it in terms of what time does to us. In one way, I’m still the little girl that I was when I was 12, but on the other way, I am 34. How is it that I have both of those things inside of me? I also have a part of me instead of me.

I wanted Nora and Hae Sung to sort of see each other both as 12 year-olds that they remember but also as grown-ups. It’s really about the way that different times coexist in us. I think about it less as nostalgia, because it’s funny to be nostalgic about yourself when you’re like 25 or 24 because that isn’t necessarily home, right? It’s more about reconciling the part of you who that existed before, and also to meet someone who only knows you by that time. For that person, you’re a silo that time. For Hae Sung, Nora is siloed as a 12 year- old. That’s all he knows. Of course, Arthur doesn’t know because Arthur couldn’t know.