1/7/2024 0 Comments Past lives a24When I was working on the subtitles, it was important when they show up and when they don’t, and which words are on which images. I actually wrote the script in two languages, I have a bilingual script. Translation is at the heart of what the story is. So much of the tension in Past Lives has to do with language and translation. But I’m curious how you think this extends to translation. They’re going to have their own thoughts about and solutions to the mystery.Ĭoming from a writing background, I know words (and how they’re used to communicate, message, and signal) are important to you. And when we come back to that scene later, the audience, because they went through these lives with these characters, are going to see the three of them completely differently. I sometimes talk about this movie as a “mystery film”-not as a whodunit, but as a mystery of who these three people are to each other. That scene had to be confrontational, but also warm and welcoming. It was the first scene that I wrote, and that’s when I knew that I could write the movie. Did you always want to kick the film off like this? The film opens on our central trio, yet the voices we hear are from two unseen people trying to figure out their connection. But when he smiles, there’s something that’s so warm, he straight-up looks six years old. When he isn’t smiling, he can feel a little aloof or dry. But she’ll look like a strong, professional, woman in one moment, and in the next, like an insecure kid. It really wasn’t about replicating people. The thing that I was looking for is a soul match to the character. I don’t have action sequences and CGI to cover up whatever might be lacking, so has to be the most cutting-edge thing. This whole movie lives and dies with the face of the actor. It’s an objectifying experience of a subjective feeling. I talk about it as an adaptation, like I’m adapting my own source material. I didn’t really find it that difficult, because I wasn’t trying to transcribe or recreate something. How did it feel to excavate these very intimate details? With Past Lives, she shows that these feelings can ring just as true on the screen as they do on the stage. Through her acclaimed plays, Song has exhibited a knack for capturing raw human emotion with unrelentingly striking clarity. Instead, as Hae Sung stumbles into Nora’s orbit twelve years after their separation (and again, twelve years after that), the decades-spanning Past Lives morphs into a meditation on relocation and assimilation, an examination of the tension that exists between our pasts and presents, and an ode to the connections that irrevocably define us. What from certain angles looks like a traditional love-triangle story-where New York-based playwright Nora (a brilliant Greta Lee) is torn between Arthur (John Magaro), her white American husband, and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), the crush she left behind in Seoul when she immigrated as a child-reveals itself to be anything but. The experience sparked something for Song, who used it as inspiration for her stunning directorial debut, Past Lives. My husband knows me as an adult, but has no idea what I was like as a kid.” My childhood friend only knows me as a kid, and doesn’t really know me as an adult. “I can actually communicate and have a unique relationship with these two guys because they actually can’t do anything for me that the other person can do. “I remember sitting there and feeling that something special was passing through us,” the playwright recalls on a recent Zoom call. Though Song, who was born in South Korea before moving to Canada at 12, speaks both English and Korean, her seatmates were separated by a language barrier, pushing Song into the role of translator for the night. Five years ago, Celine Song was at East Village bar Please Don’t Tell, sitting between two men: her “white American husband” and her “childhood sweetheart” from South Korea.
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