Celine Song
Song Ha-Young･송하영
Celine Song (born Song Ha-Young; Korean: 송하영; born September 19, 1988) is a Canadian, Academy Award-nominated director, playwright, and screenwriter based in the United States. Her directorial film debut, Past Lives (2023), received critical acclaim and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and Original Screenplay. Among her plays are Endlings and The Seagull on The Sims 4 (both 2020).
| Known for | Writing |
|---|---|
| Born | 19 Sep 1988 |
| Place of birth | South Korea |
Favorite films
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Barry Lyndon contains what I believe is at the heart of Kubrick’s work — that people are really, really small in the face of history, time, space. All of the characters are like dust, as if they just might blow away any moment and disappear. … I often pause the film when I’m watching it just so I can look at it as if it were a painting in a museum. It’s my favorite Kubrick.
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High and Low is a masterful thriller. What I admire most in it is the power of Kurosawa’s blocking. It’s magical what he can do with a roomful of men. Just the way the characters are positioned in the frame can shift our perspective on what’s happening.
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… the crushing story of a lazy young man in wartime. … There are no war heroes in the film, only ordinary nobodies whose passions and joys in life are ended brutally by war, without fanfare or a mention in history books. In the film, under the weight of history, human life is snuffed out as if it were a fly’s, and humanity is totally flattened.
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This is my favorite Scorsese film, and it features my favorite performance by Daniel Day-Lewis. The film is about the tension between the practical matters of life and matters of the heart — and it takes this tension very seriously. … The ending, with Daniel Day-Lewis as aged Newland sitting in that courtyard staring up at Ellen’s window, always takes my breath away.
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I immediately loved it very much, but it gave me nightmares for about a month.
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I’m always on the edge of my seat when I watch My Dinner with André. It’s just one long conversation between two people talking about everything from the abstract to the mundane, but you never know when it’s going to take a left turn and suddenly become very deep and intimate and reveal something devastating. … It’s become one of my comfort movies that I watch over and over.
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I saw this movie with a bunch of grad school friends, and when we came out of the screening, my friend Tara Ahmadinejad said: “So we have to quit theater, right?” We all looked at one another like, it’s never going to get better than that, right? … Pina Bausch was a total master. She was to dance what Kubrick was to film. There’s no one like her, no one who could do what she was doing.
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It’s a masterful film by Thomas Vinterberg, and in many ways it’s a Greek tragedy in which the characters are experiencing a divine revelation. … It’s amazing to watch how Vinterberg hides and reveals truth — through the look on someone’s face, or through a spare line of dialogue. And it also has an amazing sense of humor, not unlike what you’d find in a Greek tragedy.
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I most love the lightness with which life and death are treated in this film, its morbid gallows humor. Period romantic comedy is one of my favorite genres of movies. … But the truth is, if you’re interested in humanity and are trying to depict a human life accurately, it would be absurd to dismiss the primary drama that rules people’s lives: where and how are we going to live?
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This was my first real encounter with Spalding Gray. Gray was such a gifted monologist that, while listening to his gentle voice telling stories, without even noticing, you take his hand and go through the woods and into the water, and then eventually you realize you’re drowning in the middle of the ocean. You slip into his language until you’ve gotten completely lost and he’s the only person you’re holding on to.
