Materialists Director Celine Song on the Brutal Math of Modern Dating & Why She’s Optimistic About Love

Celine Song has a gift for telling love stories shaped by longing and difficult choices. Her 2023 debut Past Lives, starring Greta Lee, earned Oscar nods for Best Picture and Screenplay thanks to its quietly devastating exploration of the pull between an unrealized past and the practical present. With her much-anticipated follow-up, Materialists, Song once again takes on a romantic triangle, this time diving into the gap between the fantasy of idealized love and the messy contours of the real thing.

The film stars Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a stylish, 30-something New York matchmaker who earns $80K a year and has a sharp eye for dating “math”—all those stats that one finds listed on a dating app that don’t actually say much about who a person is. Pragmatic, bordering on jaded, Lucy coaches her clients through their delusions and dilemmas while navigating those of her own.

Inspired by her own stint as a matchmaker, the film updates what Song sees as an age-old dynamic. “The dating marketplace has existed forever,” she tells W. “We’re treating ourselves like merchandise, and we all want to be a luxury good.” But real love, she insists, remains something ancient and unquantifiable—a deeper connection like what she says she found with her husband, Challengers and Queer screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes.

Much like Nora, Greta Lee’s character in Past Lives, Lucy must make a choice between two men: her sweet but broke ex, John (Chris Evans), or Harry (Pedro Pascal), a rich, confident finance guy with a multi-million dollar apartment and who, by matchmaking standards, is a total “unicorn.” Like the actors who play them, all three characters are endlessly charming (Dakota is a “soul match” for Lucy, Song says), and Song’s script is a reminder of her talent for capturing the downbeats as well as the high notes of a complicated love story.

Why did you want to write a film about dating?

I worked as a matchmaker in the 2010s. I learned more about people in those six months than at any other time in my life. I learned that the way we talk about dating, which is in numbers—height, weight, income, lifestyle, hairline—directly contradicts what it actually feels like to be in love. We have to walk into love having completely surrendered. You don't have a way to control it.

A lot of the film’s language feels pulled straight from this era of X, dating apps, and Reddit incel forums on Reddit talking about looksmaxxing and what makes a man or woman “high value.”

This is a forever thing. A character in my film says, "I'm not merchandise, I’m a person." Victorian romances are always about the way a woman is trying to say exactly that. They’re about the drawing room, the salon, and garden parties, but it’s the same commodification. One thing that has changed is that women are now able to have a job and make a living. The other is social media. Now, the dating marketplace is global, not just a sleepy town in England. The garden parties are on our phones. You open Instagram, and everybody seems to be higher in the market than you. The objectification isn’t new, but the way that it’s so pervasive is. That’s the fundamental thing about the film: how are any of the things that people are saying online about what they want in their partner going to hold up when it actually comes to standing in front of another person?

Did you see Tinder just added a feature to filter by height?

It's very timely. I am genuinely concerned about that being a part of that app. The average man’s height in America is, I think, 5’9”, so if all you can accept is six feet or taller, which was a consistent ask for me as a matchmaker, you're filtering out more than half of men. It's awful. I don't think Tinder should do it. Also, all men are going to lie. Otherwise, you're not going to show up in anybody's feed.

Younger people are starting to move away from the apps—do you think that’s a positive?

Yes. It's wonderful to try to fall in love as animals, as a person who's just facing another person. Even at the height of dating apps, that was true. You still wouldn't know anything until you're in the room with that person.

Materialists gets into the nitty gritty of finances in a way we don’t often see on-screen. Why was that important to you?

There are things being made on TV and film about money, but it's never about what it's like to figure out your budget for the year. The people who are being depicted are beyond rich—the 0.01%. In this film, it was really important for me to speak the actual numbers. In everyday situations, when you talk to your friends about dating, these very material, practical concerns are going to be at the forefront. We talk about it all the time. So why is it that when romance is depicted on screen, those things are suddenly irrelevant? Without question, those things are relevant.

People were freaking about the film’s trailer being a nod to early aughts rom-coms. Which of those films influenced you?

My favorite rom-coms are talking about something. Each of Nora Ephron’s movies: You've Got Mail is really about the internet. It's about gentrification, too. When Harry Met Sally is about the line between love and friendship, and is very scathing about gender at that time. The Apartment is directly about class, and how the rent is too damn high. Those are the movies that I was looking at as the lineage I wanted to make Materialists in.

Despite the obvious cynicism, the film is also very hopeful. Does that reflect how you feel?

Of course. It’s easy to fantasize about a man who has a $12 million apartment and a certain height and job. But the greatest fantasy is that you grow old with someone, and you change their diaper. Why are we so concerned about six feet tall? By the time we’re 90, we’re all going to shrink anyway. And by the way, what if the love of your life loses their job? That’s the ‘in sickness and in health’ part. The question is, with all this pain of dating, is it even going to be worth it? And because I'm in love and because I'm married, I can say, absolutely. It is worth dreaming about, even though it's really hard.