When writer-director Celine Song broke down in tears one day on the set of Past Lives, the crew assumed it was because the scene, eerily close to her own childhood experience, was overwhelming her. They were in South Korea, filming the flashback moment when the 12-year-old protagonist of Past Lives, Nora, says goodbye to her childhood best friend, Hae Sung, as she and her family prepare to emigrate to Canada.

In reality, it was the sun that got to Song. Unable to get the light she was hoping for, she was upset not about her past but about her present: the pressure she felt to get her very first movie right. “This film is unbelievably personal to me, of course, in the conception of it, but it is unbelievably personal to me because it is a discovery for me as an artist,” says Song. “This is what I’ve always been meant to do. I just feel at home here.”

It’s fitting that Song, who previously found success as a playwright in New York, uses the word home to describe her directorial debut. Past Lives is about what home is, in so many ways. Song’s script, inspired by her own life, follows Nora, a writer living in New York whose childhood sweetheart comes to visit her, opening her up to a tense exploration of her past, her identity as an adult, and the meaning of love.

Intimate yet sweeping, Past Lives was the breakout of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, drawing praise not just for Song’s distinctive storytelling and visuals, but for the performances from stars Greta Lee, John Magaro, and Teo Yoo. “The fact that all these audiences globally are responding to it, and it’s a personal conversation they’re having with the film, is really amazing,” says Song. “This makes me feel less lonely, and that’s what you dream of as an artist: that your work, when it’s in the hands of the world, makes yourself feel less lonely.”

Song talks about love a lot—and not just because Past Lives is a modern take on the classic love triangle. In our conversations she’s quick to use love as a metaphor for many things, including her romance of more than 10 years with the city of New York and her recent breakup with the theater world.

Song moved to New York from Ontario to attend Columbia University, where she earned her MFA in playwriting in 2014. The daughter of artists (her mother is an illustrator and graphic designer and her father a filmmaker), she says she always knew she wanted to be a writer and remembers writing a poem about a spider eating a butterfly while she was still living in Korea—“I think it was before I emigrated, so it was before I was 12,” she says. She considered being a copywriter or something else in journalism but zeroed in on dramatic writing while in New York.

The city plays a prevalent role in Past Lives, as Nora (Lee) takes Hae Sung (Yoo) around the city, from the Statue of Liberty to Jane’s Carousel to Madison Square Park. For Nora, Hae Sung represents a home left behind and a life (and love) that could have been, but it’s also clear that New York—and her husband (Magaro)—are now home. Song seems to feel the same about the city, despite its flaws. “There are rats in the streets and lantern flies are everywhere and it’s flooding, so it’s really hard to imagine that you can love New York that much,” she tells me, breaking into a smile. “But sometimes you just feel like New York loves you because it’s really just a feeling, just a certain sunlight going through the buildings. But you know that New York wouldn’t give a shit if you left. So it’s this amazing thing of being loved by somebody who doesn’t need you at all.”

New York is also where she first found success—in theater. Her play Endlings—a story of a Korean Canadian playwright living in New York (see a pattern here?) and three older Korean female divers—premiered in 2019 at the American Repertory Theater to strong reviews, but its off-Broadway run at the New York Theatre Workshop was cut short due to COVID-19. By then, she felt herself moving away from the stage and toward cinema. “I worry because I feel like there’s not enough spaces in the city for experimental theater,” she says. “And I think there had to be a moment, like any relationship, where you have to say, ‘Well, I cannot actually save this person. This person has to save itself. I can’t do this for them,’ and you have to break up.”

And so she wrote the script for Past Lives, inspired by a moment in her real life when she found herself sitting in a dimly lit New York bar with her white American husband and her Korean childhood sweetheart. As she translated for the two of them, she felt as if she were watching the incident take place from outside of herself. “I felt something special passing through the three of us,” she remembers. “I was looking around the bar and seeing how the people who work there and the other patrons of that bar looked at us, and I just realized that they were all wondering who we were to each other.”

Past Lives is a story set in New York, but it’s also a bilingual story of a Korean immigrant. When Song sat down to write the script in 2019, she discovered that her screenwriting program had limited abilities to even write in the Korean language. She worried that there might not be space in Hollywood at all for a story like hers. “This might mean that no one’s going to want to be interested in a bilingual script where you can’t immediately think of a movie star to stick in it,” she says. “I don’t know if [Hollywood would] want to do this movie, because structurally it is telling me that it doesn’t.”

But A24 quickly hopped on board with Song as both writer and director, even though she had never made a feature film. She got sage advice from fellow A24 directors Bo Burnham and Ari Aster, and tagged along with The Bear creator Christopher Storer, who invited her to visit the set of the Hulu and A24 series Ramy, where he was an executive producer. Her biggest lesson? “You need to have confidence in the story that you want to tell, and you’re the expert in the story that you want to tell,” she says. “No amount of technical knowledge or lack of knowledge can solve the problem of story. So it’s really a matter of ‘Well, do I have answers to every single question that’s going to come up about the story and character?’ And the answer is yes. So because of that, I knew I could show up on set and I would know how to do my job.”

When it was her turn to direct her stars, she employed some unusual techniques to build up the tension between the characters, based on her experience in the theater’s repetitive nature of performance. “The hardest part of theater acting is to do the same lines and do the same actions and do the same cues and hit every mark as though it’s the first time anybody had ever done it,” she says. So she forbade Lee and Yoo from physically touching each other when they met and during rehearsals, so that their first awkward hug would be in character, in front of the cameras. She also kept Yoo and Magaro apart until the first day they were filming their scene together. She says, “I knew that in film you could take advantage of it actually being the first time. You can capture the aliveness a lot more easily.”

Although Past Lives is deeply personal and inspired by her own experiences, Song says it’s not a carbon copy of her own life. She insists her real-life childhood sweetheart was only ever a platonic friend. Her husband, writer Justin Kuritzkes, is the first to read any of her work, including Past Lives, and she says he is “so proud.”

But being on that set in Korea, watching the actors playing her parents as they make the choice to leave their home, gave her a new perspective on what they must have gone through when they uprooted their lives. “I got to experience it from the perspective of an adult, and I think it makes the adult sequences feel more vivid, because you just got to experience it as the children too, in a way that it is really hard to do,” she says. “I think of it less as a reliving or something, more as a new experience.”

Past Lives centers on the Korean concept of In-Yun, which suggests that the connection between two people in this life is tied to their interactions in other lives. But because of Past Lives, Song had discovered a new life for herself. “I’m making a movie about this moment of self-discovery, and I was going through my own self-discovery while I’m doing the motions of turning this into a movie,” she says. “It felt so epic.”

As she traverses another new chapter of this new filmmaking career, the Oscar promotional campaign—“I don’t even know totally what that is,” she says to me with a laugh—she’s already very sure of what story she’ll be taking on next. I hint at the idea that maybe a big studio has come calling, or maybe there’s been offers for her to helm a franchise film of some sort. But Song is holding on to telling her own stories. In 2022, while she was waiting and hoping Past Lives would see the light of day, she wrote her next script, which she’s set to direct for A24.

She won’t say what it’s about, but it will certainly be personal. And just one more time in our conversation, Song brings up the L-word. “It has to be something that I’m in love with. It has to feel like only I can do it. I’m the only person who can really pull this off,” she says. “It has to be something that can make me cry in a corner.”