What does true love really mean? How does it endure in space and time? What happens when the various circumstances of life challenge the rules of predestination? Love comes in many forms, and none less valid, told us Celine Song last year in Karlovy Vary, reflecting on the love triangle in her film.

With a Sundance premiere followed by a highly successful festival circuit, culminating in two 2024 Academy Award nominations (Best Picture and Best Screenplay), Past Lives unravels a complicated love story between two childhood sweethearts, Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae-sung (Teo Yoo), who reunite in New York after 24 years. Yet in New York Nora is married – and happily so – to Arthur (John Magaro). This ambiguous relationship between the three characters is the mystery of the film, points out the director, a relationship where the “what-could-be” of ideal love meets the “what we have” of mature love.

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You have worked consistently in theatre. As a first-time film-director, how did it feel making the change? Were there things that came to you more easily because of your work in theatre?

With Past Lives, the things that I am very confident about are the characters and story, the dialogue, the blocking and knowing what a scene needs to be. That was easiest to do because those are things that I actually have a lot of experience with from theatre. The part of it that you usually aren’t that confident about is the very practical making of the movie, and the things that you don’t have control over, when you want to control everything.

I talk about being a director as being a ‘professional passionate person’, where you just have to believe, harder than everybody else, that the film is going to be great. And sometimes, of course, you have doubts, but you have to show on your face that all is going to be ok. Aside from that, what I always knew is that if I say what matters most about a scene, what’s going to make the scene work, over and over again, everybody is going to understand. That was the process – asking what a scene is about. Is it a scene about the way Hae-sung is going to say hi to Arthur? Then we can make the whole project about making that scene feel right. 

Having worked in theatre for a long time, I also know what a live audience is like. I have a good idea what the audience connects to, how much patience they have, what they are interested in and what they are going to be watching. And I know, at the end of the day, what they are going to be watching is the actors’ faces. What that means to me is that there’s going to be a lot of performance. 

The beginning of the film sees the three main characters, Nora, Arthur and Hae-sung, sitting together in a bar. We’re watching them from far away, and we hear these strangers who are commenting on the situation, trying to figure out what the relationship between Arthur, Nora and Hae-sung is. The scene is also based on real life, on something that has also happened to you. How did you approach this opening scene?

With the beginning, I wanted to involve the audience and make them feel like they were part of the story. I wanted them to feel welcome – that’s why Nora looks at the camera in that scene. I wanted to welcome them into the mystery of the movie, which is ‘who are these people to each other?’. By the time we are back into that scene again, we know the answer to that, because they’ve started talking openly about who they are to each other, but also because we’ve lived through their lives together. This was a structure that I figured out first, and once I figured it out I knew how to write the whole movie. The same did happen in real life, though. When I was sitting there with my childhood sweetheart and my husband, I saw people looking at us, trying to figure out who we were to each other. 

The same did happen in real life, though. When I was sitting there with my childhood sweetheart and my husband, I saw people looking at us, trying to figure out who we were to each other.

Aside from the main love triangle with Nora, Hae-sung and Arthur, there is, in a way, another love triangle which would be Nora-Hae-sung-Korea. Nora leaves Korea for Canada, and then she ends up in the US. Sometimes when the topic of immigration comes up on film, the love interest is used as a proxy to talk about a love or fond memories from a country. Do you see Hae-sung as a link to Korea or is it more of a situation where she’s not missing a country, but the actual person?

My focus was to make these characters fully-fledged characters that can sort of exist on their own. And so my intent was always to have Hae-sung be a person that she misses.  But who is Hae-sung and where has he lived all his life? Where we live shapes who we are. I’ve lived in New York for over 10 years now and I feel it’s shaped me as a person. You can’t take New York out of me. Maybe only if I go away from New York for decades will I no longer feel that I am from there. It’s similar with Hae-sung, from Nora’s perspective, you can’t take away the part of him that is Seoul. The same applies to Arthur. For Nora, Arthur is New York. So, for a part, I think the love triangle is actually Nora-Hae-sung-New York. I don’t know if she will leave New York – she has her dream there, her work and her career and her husband. Why would she leave New York?

There’s a moment where Nora and Arthur are in bed and they’re having this self-aware commentary about the story that we’ve seen so far. It’s a funny, but sad bit where Arthur says that, if this was the usual romantic story, he should be the ‘evil white guy’ that the returning lover needs to defeat in the quest for true love. How do you see the contribution of Arthur to the love story? The hug at the end, after everything that has been said, feels like an immense act of love and understanding.

In a way, when making the movie, I was most concerned about Arthur. Because of the image of the three of them sitting together, you know he is bound to show up at some point, and when he first shows up in Montauk, I don’t expect the audience to be excited or happy. There is a feeling of ‘Oh no, here he comes’ – just as he says, he is the guy in the way. What’s true about him is that, because he loves Nora so much and because he cares so much, he is able to be brave. I see that in terms of masculinity, too. Often masculinity is something that we talk about externally, as a show of strength. What Arthur is doing is that he has the strength not to put all his own insecurities, his jealousy first. He’s putting them second – because it’s not true that Arthur doesn’t care, or that he’s not worried that Nora will leave him. He feels all those things, but he has the strength to put those things aside because he knows that she needs it. It’s just as with why he’s learned Korean, because he knows there’s a place inside of her that he can’t go to, but he would like to go, because he loves her. 

And there is the same depth of love that Nora feels for him, too. Part of it and of the life that they have together is that they have a good marriage.

What is it about Nora and Arthur’s marriage that makes it ‘good’?

There are a lot of bad marriages on screen; I really wanted to depict a good one. But it’s not the kind of marriage that is good because everything is fine, it’s a great marriage because it’s real. A marriage can always survive anything if it’s built on understanding and acceptance. I think that’s true even if you don’t have a partner that comes from a different culture. It’s true for any relationship. There’s always going to be a part of the person you’re in an intimate relationship with that you’re never going to know. Acknowledging that is really difficult and it’s heart-breaking to realise that this person you love more than anyone else, you will never know them 100%, but 99,9%. It’s heart-breaking, it’s lonely. 

Arthur and Nora’s marriage is good because they can accept that, but also because they can keep trying, loving each other through it. And all the problems don’t mean that something is lacking, but rather that’s what it’s like to have something real with someone. It was especially important for me that they had a great relationship and that Nora is happy in it– and how can you not be happy when someone is learning a new language for you? When they want to know you and when they make room for you so that you can find yourself, in Nora’s case finding that little girl she left behind. 

It’s not the kind of marriage that is good because everything is fine, it’s a great marriage because it’s real. A marriage can always survive anything if it’s built on understanding and acceptance.

Would you, then, say that there are different forms of love that the film makes a comparison between? We have this love with Arthur that feels like a mature love, like a sustainable kind of love, a love that survives. But with Hae-sung, there’s more of an idealised love, a fantasy, a would-be.

Part of it is that the second one is just not practical – Nora lives in New York. But when I was scouting Nora and Arthur’s apartment in New York, I was thinking that the most truly romantic conversations that I’ve ever had were never actually in any spectacular, beautiful places. The deepest conversation of a relationship usually happens in a shitty bedroom, or, you know, in a bar. It happens in the places where we actually live – you’re not going to have a romantic conversation at the Statue of Liberty, even if that is technically a romantic place. Looking up the apartment for Nora and Arthur, I thought it has to be a really crappy apartment, but where they actually live in and where they’d cuddle under poor lighting or something. 

And yet that doesn’t mean the relationship that Nora has with Hae-sung is not real or lesser. I don’t think there is a hierarchy. It’s about the way that different connections endure differently. In some ways, I would say that Hae-sung and Nora’s relationship is enduring for a really long time, too – they’re even talking about the next life! So, certainly, there’s no hierarchy, it’s just about different kinds of endurance over time.

Read a review of the film: (You’ll (not) be over it by the time you’re married – Past Lives

This interview, which was conducted during the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, appeared originally in Films in Frame#3 as part of a section dedicated to film festival correspondence from the magazine’s contributors and editors.

Dora Leu

Graduated with a BA in film directing and a MA in film studies from UNATC; she's also studied history of art. Also collaborates with the Acoperisul de Sticla film magazine and is a former coordinator of FILM MENU. She's dedicated herself to '60-'70s Japanese cinema and Irish post-punk music bands. Still keeps a picture of Leslie Cheung in her wallet.