When Olivia Wilde started filming The Invite, her latest directorial effort that she also stars in, she didn’t know exactly how it would end. And this was by design.
Wilde wanted to try what she describes as an “experiment” where she would spend several weeks in the lead-up to the film’s 23-day shoot workshopping the story with her actors and writers Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. After this, she planned to shoot the film sequentially, completely in order, to allow for further conversation and changes to be made as the cast worked their way through the story.
“I think we’ve accepted this kind of paradigm of the way movies have to happen,” Wilde tells The Hollywood Reporter in her first interview about the feature ahead of its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. “They have to shoot them out of order. You can’t have a rehearsal. There are all these rules that are quite arbitrary, that we’ve all accepted. When the performers are setting the expectations, it changes the way that the structure of the film works.”
She adds, “There is a necessary hierarchy built into the structure of filmmaking just for efficiency. The best films come out of that workshopping spirit.”
Joining Wilde for her experiment are Seth Rogen, Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz, all of whom share the screen for the near entirety of the 107-minute runtime of the film, which almost entirely takes place in a single location. The Invite, a remake of the Spanish language movie Sentimental, centers on a couple (Wilde and Rogen) whose relationship is on the brink of collapse and have an ill-timed dinner party with their enigmatic neighbors (Norton and Cruz), whose relationship seems to have the passion and open communication that the former’s is sorely missing.
Wilde first heard of The Invite years ago when she was approached about the film to potentially star. “As happens in this business, it floated away into the ether and I didn’t hear about it again,” remembers Wilde. By the time the script did circle back, Wilde had embarked on a career in directing with the films Booksmart and Don’t Worry Darling. This time around, she attached to The Invite as director.
She quickly got to work assembling her cast. Wilde had recently worked with Rogen on Apple series The Studio (coincidentally playing a gonzo version herself as the unhinged director of one of the film’s movies-within-a-TV-show), when she sent him the script. “She was someone I was a big fan of even before we had her on the show,” says Rogen, who adds that he remembers considering Wilde for the role opposite him in his breakout 2007 comedy Knocked Up.
The filmmaker had initially planned to focus just on directing, but then the actress cast as the film’s fourth lead had to drop out. The rest of the cast convinced Wilde to take the role as the final member of the quartet. Remembers Rogen, “I was a big advocate for her being in it. She kept talking about all these other actors, and I was just like, ‘I truly don’t understand. You should be in this movie.’”
Wilde acquiesced and joined her fellow cast and the writers on an empty soundstage at the Sunset Las Palmas Studios, ready to dig in.
Says Cruz, “If [Olivia] asks you a question, she doesn’t want to hear whatever is going to be convenient for her. It’s very easy as a director to get obsessed — ‘This has to be exactly like I’m seeing it!’ She really asks you questions in a way where, if you are honest, it is maybe going to dismantle the plan.”
Norton adds, “It can be a nervy thing to allow an open process of discovery and to allow actors to invent and even write their characters, but I think she had such confidence in what kind of story she wanted to explore that she was happy for it to be shaped around the actual chemistry and instincts of the four of us.”
Wilde happily points out that the soundstage was where the pilot of I Love Lucy was filmed. It was a happy accident to be workshopping and rehearsing a comedy centered on the tumults of adult relationships, where the quintessential marriage sitcom got its own start.
“The reason that I wanted to make this film is because it was a chance to have real conversations about relationships and love,” says Wilde. And who better to have conversations about relationships and love with than Esther Perel, the bestselling author and psychotherapist behind the Where Should We Begin? podcast, who acted as a consultant on the film.
Wilde says Perel’s work has allowed her “to think about relationships differently than the way we were all necessarily raised on by Disney movies.” She and Cruz would consult the therapist during lunch breaks about character and story.
The Invite is Wilde’s first time in the director’s chair since Don’t Worry Darling, a big-budget original studio swing. Given the parameters of how Wilde wanted to shoot The Invite — in Los Angeles, in sequence and with a lot of rehearsal time — this film was done outside of the studio system. The Invite sees Wilde re-teaming with her Booksmart producer-financier, Megan Ellison. “She had just as much faith in me when I had nothing to show for it [on Booksmart],” says Wilde of Ellison.
During filming, the actors worked their way through the story, shooting 12 hours a day and constantly reassessing the fate of their characters. Says Wilde of the film’s ending, “We were obsessed with making it feel authentic.”
“There was a lot of active debate throughout the film as to exactly how the movie should end,” remembers Rogen, with Norton adding, “[Olivia] called it ‘stitching the parachute on the way down.’” Rogen says ultimately the ending “was within a few degrees of itself. But there were different options on the table.”
Audiences will get a first glimpse of how The Invite couples ultimately fare on Saturday night at Sundance. Wilde, Norton and Rogen will be on hand at the fest, where the film is seeking distribution, with Cruz unable to attend as she is currently filming in Spain. The movie — a smart, talky comedy that explores mature themes of sex, love, marriage and monogamy — comes at a time when many decry that traditional Hollywood has stopped making films geared towards the adult audience. Says Wilde, “We didn’t want to underestimate the intelligence of the audience.”
As for the filmmaker, she says that her work as both an actor and director has enabled her to complete a project like The Invite on her own terms. She says, “It was the kind of experience I’ve been dreaming of my whole career — a movie that would just allow a group of creative people to come together and actually, truly collaborate. And this film was ripe for that.”
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