Location work is not usually considered one of the “creative” departments on a film. Of course, they work with the director and the production designer to find spaces that will work for specific scenes that can’t or shouldn’t be shot on a set, but theirs is the unsexy work of negotiating contracts with owners, securing all the needed permits, and handling the crew’s impact on locations. Yet director Celine Song credits a great deal of the push-pull yearning of her second feature, “Materialists,” to that location work.
New York City is not the easiest place to shoot, but it was important to Song for the film to reflect the realities of what it’s like to live in New York. The apartments and streets in which the characters fight and make up and make out are characters in and of themselves. “Location management in this film is a creative position. We were talking pretty creatively — my DP, my line producer, my production designer, and my location manager — we’re all trying to solve problems together,” Song told IndieWire on an episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast.
Related Stories
Location manager Joe Mullaney and his team even helped Song realize something about the characters that was embedded in the script, but no one had quite articulated. “Joe was the first to notice — because he has to permit every time a character smokes — that Lucy [Dakota Johnson] never smokes with Harry [Pedro Pascal]. She only smokes with John [Chris Evans]. And of course eventually the actors figured that out, too, but Joe was the first,” Song said. “It’s a very specific perspective.”
The perspective was an extremely important one for “Materialists,” which is so specific to New York and yet contains a much wider historical scope. It begins with and then later checks in on a very early, prehistoric marriage, after all, and Song and Mullaney were delighted to find a corner of Central Park where a bridge could echo the sense of a cave, and visually merge the two storylines at the end. “ It requires Joe’s lifetime, his whole career, of building trust in New York City. He needs to have a good reputation for being somebody who can be trusted to give you their space. So I’m relying so much on his work even before my movies, you know?” Song said.
But something that pervades both of Song’s movies, “Materialists” and “Past Lives” is how living in New York forces the characters to move through the echoes of millions of other people’s lives. Visually, that sense was something no amount of B-Roll or establishing drone footage could create. The characters had to be in and of the city. It’s part of the romance Song wanted to create.
“Public spaces in New York are the most romantic places, because you know that you’re not the first couple to have an argument there. Like, [on] every corner of New York City, someone has peed there, someone has slept there, someone has had a huge argument there, and someone has kissed there,” Song said. “We’re shooting in New York City, which is expensive and difficult — just like living in New York City. But [it’s] romantic and rewarding — just like New York City. We were sort of acknowledging, well, if you’re doing it, you might as well do it.”
That meant going all out on streets and stoops, especially in relation to John. His apartment isn’t exactly conducive to heartfelt conversations, but Lucy’s isn’t that much better, either. And the fact that they can’t be fully comfortable or private in the spaces they live changes how the characters move through the world and desire each other.
“‘Materialists’ is about the way that the cynic and the romantic are in conversation, and in a bit of a tussle,” Song said. “New York City is exactly that. To live in New York City, you have to be a romantic because the quality of living is not high enough for it to be possible for anybody who is not romantic in some way… but on the other hand, part of surviving in New York City is that you have to have a healthy dose of cynicism, too. [The city] just encapsulates that amazing balance. [So] it was always fundamentally a thing that we wanted to shoot in New York City.”
“Materialists” is now playing in theaters. To hear Celine Song’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
