Introducing A Rabbit's Foot 360—with Celine Song
The Materialists' director—and former matchmaker—discusses love in the city
A Rabbit’s Foot 360 is a new, digital-first extension from the team at A Rabbit’s Foot. Each month, we present an exclusive cover feature that spotlights and celebrates an artist at the forefront of culture. Through high-quality photography, film and an in-depth print interview, A Rabbit’s Foot 360 tells their story, gaining insights into their creative process, personality and world-building. #ARF360
First up… Celine Song!
Luke Georgiades joined the Past Lives director on her home turf in New York for a conversation about finding love in the city, the elitism of modern dating, and her star-studded new romance Materialists, starring Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans, which hits cinemas in the UK from July 13th.
“You shut the fuck up! I’m gonna fuck you up!” a man screams into his phone, blustering past the filmmaker Celine Song, who is deep in a monologue about the nature of love. Caught off guard, Song, dressed casually in a Pink Floyd band tee, tries futilely to relocate her train of thought, before bursting into laughter. “Did you get all that?” she asks me. “Very New York, ya know?”
We’re sitting at a sidewalk table outside NoHo’s local Two Hands, where the sounds of New York City are unfiltered and relentless: electric tools from a nearby construction site screech tirelessly, a choir of car horns blare in unison, and chatter from passers-by gets increasingly loud as the city rubs the previous night from its eyes. Among it all, you get the feeling that the famously buzzy metropolis could swallow you up in a heartbeat. And that’s exactly how Song likes it.
“New York is romantic because you have to accept that your life is very, very small,” she says, when I ask why she chose the concrete jungle as the setting for her films Past Lives (2023) and, her most recent, Materialists (2025). “We’re all here pursuing a dream. It’s not easy to live here. The quality of living is so low that the only reason why you would live here is because you have a dream.” She laughs. “You have to be a romantic. You have to believe that you’re going to make it in the jungle. But you also have to be a survivalist—dog-eat-dog. New York brings together a contradiction of romance and cynicism. It’s an impossible dilemma, but a romantic one, to think that we’re all here because we believe in ourselves, and in the middle of all this surviving, we might still find love?”