‘Everybody’s starved of affection’: Past Lives director Celine Song on the brutal dating scene and her realistic new romcom

The writer-director’s debut film earned critical acclaim and Oscar nods for its portrayal of loves lost and rekindled. Her follow-up stars Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans in a romance about dating across the class divide‘Our financial literacy is so fucked,” says Celine Song. We’re having breakfast in Manhattan on a sunny Saturday in early July, a few weeks after her new film, Materialists, has opened in New York City. She’s wearing a charmingly ironic outfit: a T-shirt that says “HOWDY” and a baseball cap that says “Big” (she’s petite, 5ft 4in, for the record) – but she speaks with almost disarming earnestness.She’s frustrated, she tells me, that people have described one of the characters in her film, a private equity manager with a $12m apartment, as a “billionaire”. “If you’re a billionaire, your big apartment is not $12m!” she exclaims. “The average income of an American adult is $35,000. What that means is half of America makes less than $35,000. Three times that is $100,000. Ten of that is $1m. And a billion dollars is not a hundred of that. No, it’s a thousand of that.” Continue reading...

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