Little Schmidt Productions Archive
Materialists
Feature Film · 2025
When love becomes a calculation, what can never be measured matters most.
The Production
Overview
The Story
Materialists places the language of modern dating — income, height, age, appearance, status and compatibility — against something far less measurable: the emotional risk of actually loving another person.
Lucy is a successful New York City matchmaker whose professional life depends on turning romance into criteria. Her clients arrive with lists of requirements and expectations, and Lucy has learned to assess people with the efficiency of someone working in a market where everyone is simultaneously choosing and being chosen. A24's official film record identifies Celine Song as writer-director and Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal as the principal trio at the centre of that premise.
At a client’s wedding she meets Harry, a wealthy, sophisticated financier who appears to satisfy the qualities that the matchmaking world treats as exceptionally valuable. He is confident, financially secure and seemingly uncomplicated — the kind of partner who looks ideal when translated into the language Lucy uses every day at work.
The same wedding also brings Lucy back into contact with John, her former boyfriend. John is an actor still struggling financially, working catering jobs between auditions and living a life that represents almost everything Lucy has trained herself to regard as impractical. Their relationship failed partly because love did not erase the pressure created by money.
What initially resembles a familiar romantic triangle gradually becomes an examination of value. Lucy can describe why Harry makes sense. She can also describe exactly why John does not. But the film keeps asking whether the qualities that make someone desirable on paper are the same qualities that make intimacy possible.
The matchmaking business gives the story a contemporary framework for older questions about marriage and social mobility. Clients speak openly about partners as combinations of assets and liabilities, while the film repeatedly returns to the uncomfortable fact that people have always considered wealth, beauty, family and security when choosing whom to marry.
Celine Song grounds those ideas in a recognisable New York rather than turning them into an abstract argument. Restaurants, offices, weddings, apartments, streets and service entrances become part of the class geography surrounding Lucy, Harry and John. The city allows radically different lifestyles to exist within a few blocks of one another.
The result is a romantic film in which the central conflict is not simply which man Lucy will choose. It is whether a person who has become exceptionally skilled at quantifying other people can accept that the most important part of her own life may resist calculation.
The Film's Central Idea
What is a person worth in the marketplace of love?
The film's production choices repeatedly turn an emotional question into something physical. Apartments reveal economic position. Clothes signal professional confidence. Restaurants and wedding venues suggest access. Even movement through New York quietly separates the life Lucy can imagine from the life she once lived.
Love as a Market
Matchmaking gives the film a vocabulary of preferences, scarcity and perceived value — language normally associated with economics applied directly to intimacy.
Money as Geography
New York allows wealth and financial insecurity to occupy the same frame, making class visible through where characters live, work, eat and wait.
Romance Without Fantasy
The film uses the shape of a romantic comedy while refusing to pretend that rent, work, ambition and social expectations disappear when two people fall in love.
The Ensemble
Main Cast
A deliberately concentrated ensemble keeps the film close to Lucy's work and personal life, with the central triangle surrounded by clients, colleagues and New Yorkers confronting their own expectations of partnership.
Dakota Johnson
LucyA successful New York matchmaker who understands the dating market with professional precision. Lucy can identify what her clients want and what society considers desirable, but her own relationships force her to question whether love can be evaluated by the same rules.
Chris Evans
JohnLucy's former boyfriend, an actor whose financial instability helped expose the practical limits of their earlier relationship. His return confronts Lucy with a form of intimacy that is emotionally familiar but materially uncertain.
Pedro Pascal
Harry CastilloA wealthy financier who appears to be an exceptional match by the standards Lucy encounters professionally. His confidence, status and security make him seem almost impossible to fault on paper.
Zoe Winters
SophieOne of Lucy's matchmaking clients. Sophie's experience moves the film beyond the central romantic triangle and exposes the emotional responsibility hidden behind a business built around finding partners.
Marin Ireland
VioletA senior figure in Lucy's professional world, representing the polished business infrastructure surrounding the deeply personal and unpredictable process of matchmaking.
Louisa Jacobson
DaisyPart of the wider New York ensemble through which the film explores contemporary dating culture, social expectations and the language people use when evaluating potential partners.
Behind the Production
New York
without disguise.
Materialists does not need to invent a fantasy world. Its production challenge is almost the opposite: to make familiar New York locations reveal invisible differences in money, aspiration, work and romantic possibility.
The city functions as part of the relationship.
Principal photography began in April 2024 and was concentrated in New York, including Manhattan and Brooklyn. The production uses the city not merely as an establishing backdrop but as the physical environment in which the characters' economic realities become visible.
Lucy can move between elegant professional spaces and John's less secure working life in a matter of minutes. That proximity is essential: different versions of adulthood coexist inside the same city.
A contemporary story photographed with texture.
Director of photography Shabier Kirchner, reuniting with Celine Song after Past Lives, photographed the film on 35mm using Kodak film stocks and Panavision anamorphic lenses.
The choice gives offices, restaurants, apartments and New York exteriors a tactile quality. The images can feel elegant without turning the characters' lives into glossy advertising.
Class is communicated before anyone discusses money.
Anthony Gasparro's production design has an unusually important narrative job. Lucy, Harry and John occupy different economic positions, so interiors, workplaces and social spaces can communicate information before the screenplay makes it explicit. In Variety's production-design feature, Gasparro and set decorator Amy Silver explain how neighbourhoods and apartments were deliberately calibrated to each character's class position.
The contrast is strongest when the film moves directly from polished environments into spaces shaped by compromise, work or limited means.
Little Schmidt Productions
Production
Contribution.
Location-led films depend on environments that do more than look attractive. They need to support character, camera movement, crew access and the social geography of the screenplay. Little Schmidt Productions' production contribution sits within that practical layer of location and production support.
Finding spaces that already contain the story.
For a film rooted in contemporary reality, the right location can communicate wealth, aspiration, intimacy or financial pressure without requiring explanatory dialogue. Location work therefore begins with story rather than simply appearance.
New York energy comes with practical complexity.
Urban filmmaking requires the creative image to coexist with access, movement, equipment, schedules and the normal activity of a working city. Production coordination helps turn real environments into controlled screen geography.
Different lifestyles, one coherent New York.
The film moves between dramatically different economic spaces. Production support helps those environments remain practical for the crew while allowing design and cinematography to preserve the distinctions the story needs.
The location should disappear into the character.
The strongest contemporary location work rarely announces itself. A room, street or restaurant feels inevitable for the person occupying it, allowing the audience to absorb information about that character almost unconsciously.
Inside the Production
How do you
photograph value?
The film's most interesting production idea is hiding in plain sight. Almost every major creative department is dealing with the same question as Lucy: how do people decide what something — or someone — is worth?
Materialists turns apartments, clothes, restaurants, weddings and even physical appearance into a visual language of perceived value — then asks whether any of it can explain love.
Romance becomes a professional system.
Lucy's workplace gives emotional uncertainty the appearance of organisation. Conversations about attraction become data: height, salary, age, lifestyle and future expectations can be discussed with the vocabulary of a commercial transaction.
That clean professional environment is important because it makes Lucy's expertise believable. She is not cynical from the outside; she is exceptionally good at operating inside the system.
The triangle is also a contrast in production design.
Harry and John represent more than two personalities. Their environments communicate two materially different futures. Harry's world offers security and polish; John's life carries compromise, unstable work and the memory of financial strain.
Production design allows Lucy's dilemma to exist around the characters before she explains it.
The perfect place to begin a film about the economics of marriage.
A wedding brings romance and transaction into the same physical space. It is emotional ritual, social display and significant financial event at once — making it an ideal environment for Lucy to encounter both the man who looks like an ideal match and the former partner who does not.
Clothing helps quantify first impressions.
Katina Danabassis' costume design works inside a story where people constantly assess one another. Lucy's controlled professional appearance, Harry's effortless polish and John's more practical presentation immediately position them within the social marketplace the film is examining.
Costume becomes another form of information — exactly the kind Lucy has trained herself to read.
Distance is measured economically as well as physically.
The production filmed around Manhattan and Brooklyn, including areas such as the West Village, Brooklyn Heights and Sunset Park, with additional New York State locations. These environments allow the film to move through different social textures without leaving the same metropolitan world.
That matters because the story is not about two separate Americas. It is about lives of very different material value occupying the same city.
The modern dating market begins with an ancient proposition.
The film briefly steps outside contemporary New York for its prehistoric framing sequence, filmed in Durango, Mexico. The image strips marriage back to an elemental exchange before the story jumps forward into a world of algorithms, criteria and professional matchmaking.
Placed beside modern New York, the sequence creates a useful production contrast: thousands of years of social development have changed the marketplace around love, but not eliminated the human desire beneath it.
Beyond the Romance
A modern love story
about old questions.
Celine Song uses the recognisable architecture of a romantic comedy to examine a less comfortable idea: choosing a partner has never existed entirely outside economics, status or social expectation. The modern dating market has simply developed new ways to describe those calculations.
You can calculate compatibility. You can calculate income. You can calculate risk. The film asks what happens when the thing that matters refuses to become a number.
Character first, argument second.
Although the film engages directly with class, dating economics and social expectations, its ideas remain attached to Lucy's decisions rather than becoming a lecture. Her professional certainty gives the film somewhere personal to apply its larger questions. Song later recalled in an A24 filmmaker conversation that she went straight from the Past Lives awards period into scouting Materialists in New York, underscoring how closely the new film's development was tied to finding its physical world.
A familiar genre seen through contemporary economics.
New York has a long screen history as the home of romantic comedy. Materialists uses that tradition while making housing, work, money and status impossible to ignore — pressures that older romantic fantasies often pushed beyond the frame.
The argument exists in the environments.
The film's strongest visual contrasts are not spectacle. They are rooms, clothes, jobs and locations. Production design and cinematography turn economic difference into something the viewer can feel before it is discussed.
LSP Editorial
When dating becomes a marketplace.
Materialists uses the mechanics of matchmaking to make an old social bargain newly visible. Lucy's profession gives romantic preference a vocabulary of metrics — income, height, age, status and compatibility — while the production design gives those abstractions physical form through apartments, neighbourhoods, restaurants and workplaces.
The result is more revealing than a conventional love triangle. Harry and John do not simply represent two men; they expose two different ways of assigning value to a life, and force Lucy to confront the limits of the system she understands better than almost anyone.
How Celine Song turns money, status and modern matchmaking into the real machinery behind her New York romance.
Read the feature →