By the time Olivia Wilde sat down with the press at Locarno, her latest film The Invite had already supplied the answer to one of the questions hanging over its release.
The marital chamber comedy premiered at Sundance, opened in American theaters through A24 in June, and arrived in Switzerland for an 8,000-seat Piazza Grande screening. For a film built from four people, one apartment, and an increasingly volatile dinner, the scale of that final room was almost comically disproportionate.
Wilde’s third feature as director is adapted by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack from Cesc Gay’s Sentimental, itself drawn from his stage play. Seth Rogen and Wilde play Joe and Angela, a married couple whose mutual irritation has hardened into a domestic climate. Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton are Piña and Hawk, the apparently freer neighbors invited downstairs for an evening that pulls desire and self-deception into the open. The material has crossed languages because its central problem travels easily.
At Locarno, however, the most revealing conversation was not about whether the couples survive. It was about the conditions that allow an adult comedy to remain unruly, beautiful and public. Wilde’s account amounted to a useful case study for filmmakers. Protect the audience experience early, prepare hard enough to improvise, give actors real authorship, and build a team capable of carrying the frame when the director steps inside it.
The theatrical question came first because Wilde believes comedy has been quietly downgraded. “There’s no genre that benefits from the communal experience more than comedy,” she said.
Human beings have gathered to tell stories and laugh together for millennia, yet contemporary distribution has treated comedy as if it loses nothing on a smaller screen. Laughter changes timing, pressure and permission inside a room. The audience becomes part of the apparatus.
She first tested that conviction at Sundance, where the film’s contact with a crowd produced what she called a “chemical reaction.” The response persuaded her that theatrical was not an ornamental release window but the form in which the movie completed itself. At Locarno, she described hearing viewers laugh at divorce, shame and parental fear as a kind of burden-sharing. Private failure becomes briefly survivable when strangers carry it together.
Then came the industry reality. “They bribe you to not take theatrical,” Wilde said. “You get paid more, not me, not the filmmaker. The financiers will get a lot more money to go to streaming.”
The provocation is useful because it names the decision clearly. A platform premium may be rational and may rescue an investor. It is not automatically the best creative outcome. In this case, Wilde said, the financier allowed her to choose the lower theatrical offer, A24 backed the release and FilmNation arranged theatrical partners internationally.
Her passion mattered because somebody with contractual power agreed to act on it. “I could have been passionate about it alone and it wouldn’t have meant anything,” Wilde said. “I was passionate about it with a lot of support.”
That distinction is the first lesson for independents. A release ambition is not protected by taste alone. It must be embedded in financing, sales and approval rights before the movie becomes a completed asset. Not every film needs a cinema-first plan, and many filmmakers cannot afford to reject the largest offer. But if collective viewing is part of the work’s design, the producer has to negotiate for it while leverage still exists.
Wilde made the same argument during production by insisting on 35mm. She had not previously directed on film and decided this was the project on which to fight for it.
The resistance carried an implicit hierarchy. As she recalls it, the reaction suggested that comedies did not deserve to look that beautiful. Shooting celluloid became an aesthetic claim about faces, texture and the dignity of the genre, but also a productive constraint on a film with extensive improvisation. A finite, costly medium required the room to arrive prepared.
The transferable move is to identify the one formal priority that changes behavior across the set. For The Invite, 35mm raised attention and suited a story that studies four faces for nearly two hours.
Preparation was what made looseness possible. Before shooting, Wilde, the four actors and the screenwriters spent two weeks workshopping the script, then continued reshaping it during production. The actors did more than deliver polished versions of fixed characters. Cruz supplied Piña with memory and specificity, Norton transformed Hawk’s dimensions, Rogen found a balance of vulnerability and what Wilde called “sad rage,” keeping Joe maddening and lovable in the same beat. Cast members sent ideas at night and arrived with new propositions in the morning.
Wilde compared the ensemble to a jazz quartet. Different instruments discovering a shared rhythm. The metaphor can sound like the usual alchemy myth, but her schedule made the collaboration concrete. The Invite was shot sequentially, allowing accumulated behavior to become usable information. The actors knew what their characters had just risked. Wilde could feel when earnest drama needed an irreverent puncture; the screenplay could respond to what the bodies in the room were revealing.
Sequential shooting is expensive and unavailable to many productions, especially when locations, cast availability and light dictate a fragmented schedule. The underlying practice is more portable, preserve continuity where the emotional turn is hardest to manufacture. A filmmaker might shoot one crucial sequence in order, schedule rehearsal immediately before it or maintain a living record of physical and emotional states.
Wilde’s advantage was not chronology by itself. It was a feedback loop short enough for discovery to change the next day’s work. “The film was telling us what it wanted to be,” she said. “It was such an honor to feel like the shepherd of this living story.”
Wilde described directing actors as a multilingual job, each actor arrives with a different training, history and vocabulary, and the director must speak in the language that lets that person work. Her acting career is not simply an advantage because she knows performance in the abstract. It gives her empathy for the exposure involved and a diagnostic sense of which note will clarify an intention rather than close a performer down.
Wilde had not planned to play Angela; Cruz, Norton and Rogen pushed her toward the part. Once inside the scenes, she found advantages that a monitor could not provide. She could make a fool of herself first, lowering the social cost for everybody else. She could set tone from within a take. Most usefully, she could see tiny choices her scene partners made outside the camera’s current field and ask cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra to come around and capture them. Performance became another camera position.
The risk is equally clear. An actor-director can lose the outside view, exhaust attention or make co-stars responsible for the director’s confidence. Wilde said the arrangement worked only because Newport-Berra and the crew were fully locked in with her. That is the practical takeaway: Doubling roles requires adding trust elsewhere.
Devonté Hynes built the score around cello, with music functioning as a disproportionately dramatic Greek chorus. Wilde imagined the bow “literally playing our nerves,” externalizing what the couples cannot say. She cited Ruben Östlund’s use of Vivaldi in Force Majeure as a model for music that is simultaneously sincere and playful. The choice was risky precisely because it did not explain itself on paper, Wilde believes a studio process might have normalized it before viewers could feel its function.
The most personal formal decision concerned Wilde’s own face. She recalled being told since she was young to be less expressive, an instruction tied to a superficial idea of beauty and familiar to generations of actresses. Directing herself allowed her to reject the smoothing instinct.
Angela works desperately to conceal anxiety, desire and pain, but Wilde wanted the concealment to remain visibly thin, “like you can see her heart beating.” “So many actresses, so many women, probably people in general, [are told], ‘Be less, be less,’” Wilde said. “Part of getting older is getting rid of that.”
Image courtesy of Lcoarno Film Festival / Ti-Press