Celine Song follows up her directorial film debut, Past Lives, with Materialists, a romance comedy in theaters June 13. Dakota Johnson stars as a New York City matchmaker torn between two suitors played by Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans. The filmmaker and leading lady preview the film and challenge its categorization as a love triangle story.

In the late 2010s, while carving out her path as a playwright in New York, Celine Song found herself with a somewhat peculiar side hustle. A struggling artist in need of a day job, she supported herself by working as a matchmaker. The revealing experience laid bare the contradictions of modern love and dating.

"In that time, I learned more about people and what's in their hearts than I have in any other period of my life," Song tells Entertainment Weekly. When she would ask clients about their ideal life partner, for instance, "their answer would be height, weight, race, job, net worth — and these are all numbers." But love is not just a numbers game, and it should perhaps come as no surprise that for the filmmaker behind 2023's Past Lives — about the reconnection of two childhood friends and the role destiny plays in who we love — love is not mathematical, but something more profound.

"I was interested in that gap between the way we talk about the partners that one wants and what it's like to actually meet somebody that is a partner for life," she says. Song's brief stint as liaison to lonely hearts informed Materialists, a rom-com that follows a New York City matchmaker, Lucy (Dakota Johnson), who is successful at her job but not so prosperous when it comes to her own love life. She finds herself torn between the perfect suitor, the wealthy and kind finance bachelor Harry (Pedro Pascal), and her imperfect ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans), a struggling actor still finding his way.

On paper, the perfect match might not be difficult to decipher, and Lucy very much looks at the numbers. But an incident at work leaves her unmoored, upending everything she thought she knew about love and her career. Dakota Johnson and Chris Evans in 'Materialists'.

A24 "She's at a very interesting time in her life where she's sort of teetering between two worlds," Johnson says of Lucy. "A lot of what she does is very surface-level stuff. I think for a long time she has been very comfortable in that because it means she doesn't have to actually go inward and look at herself and what she wants for her own life."

Lucy, she says, is "on this journey of trying to figure out whether she wants a life that she thinks will make her happy, or a life that she knows will be extremely challenging, but she will be actually loved." She adds, "Allowing yourself to be loved is scary, and really loving another person is scary. It's a story of bravery, really, and fear.

A woman having the courage to open her heart is what I loved about it." Like Song's directorial feature debut, her follow-up film centers on a woman caught between two loves. But, just as Song had challenged the notion that Past Lives was a film about a love triangle ("If it is a love triangle, it's between Nora and one of her lives and another one"), the filmmaker once again encourages audiences to consider a different perspective.

"I would actually be more interested in it being talked about as a story of Lucy as she navigates not just the love and dating world in her clients' lives, but also her own personal reality and beliefs about love," Song says. "It is really about the transformation of a woman." Want more movie news?

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more. Dakota Johnson in 'Materialists'. A24 Much has been said about the decline of the rom-com genre in recent decades, with titles like Anyone But You, Red, White & Royal Blue, and The Idea of You revitalizing an often underestimated and overlooked genre that's actually more challenging than most to crack.

Both Song and Johnson are passionate about the genre, citing the works of Nora Ephron and Jim Brooks, among others, as deep comforts. "It's one of the most enduring, powerful, beautiful genres," Song says. "There's nothing better," Johnson adds.

Materialists "sits uncomfortably but happily in the genre" while also "pushing against the traditional sense of the genre as it exists," Song says, adding, "Love and dating, even though those are things that men do as well, there is a dismissive feeling of it being called a chick flick or lighter fare. I think there's nothing more hardcore than this thing that we do, which is love someone. Romance is a very hardcore thing because it's one of the most dramatic things that everybody gets to do.

It's one of the biggest dramas of our lives. "I think that requires as much gravity as any other thing that can exist in cinema," Song adds. "Matters of the heart are a very, very serious matter.

I think we would like to pretend like it's not, but I feel like I have to be quite real about it. It's a universal theme and also a universal mystery. I don't know anybody who says that they know everything about love.

Why do you think I make movies about love? It's a mystery to me. I think about it every day.

I think it's one of the great mysteries of life." Materialists is in theaters June 13.