Olivia Wilde Fought for a Theatrical Release for ‘The Invite’ — and Against the Idea That Comedies Belong on Streaming

Wilde tells IndieWire why unspoken tension is so funny, on breaking during Seth Rogen’s dirty improv, passing on Netflix, and why "The Invite" couldn't be a studio film.

Since premiering at the Sundance Film Festival this January, in screening after screening — even in more serious, professional guild and press showings — “The Invite” has consistently had its early audiences audibly laughing. The film’s laughs come from a failed dinner party that brings together two very different couples, neighbors who don’t really know each other, but have unspoken tension stemming from noise issues — Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela’s (Olivia Wilde) renovations, versus Hawk (Edward Norton) and Piña’s (Penélope Cruz) active sex life.

“I love awkward tension. I love it. I think it’s because a lot of my family is British,” said director/star Olivia Wilde during an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast. “The idea of hanging on in quiet desperation and the intensity of unspoken tension, it’s the funniest thing in the world.”

Wilde grounds us in Angela and Joe’s fraught marriage with a fight that erupts before (and over) the dinner party itself. The unresolved friction shifts from yelling to poorly masked silence once their far more emotionally healthy and open guests arrive. While on the podcast, Wilde discussed wanting to make the unspoken punchlines as funny as the spoken ones, finding the humor in the unsaid moments of rage.

“People caring very deeply about something that they can’t say, or speak up about, I find it very funny,” said Wilde. “There’s just something hilarious to me about people trying very hard not to express how they’re really feeling. It always gets me.”

Wilde wants the audience to see themselves in the troubled couple, which she believes elicits the most satisfying laughs, as the cringe gives way to a sense of openness.

“There’s this sense of relief in that laughter, that, ‘Oh, God, I know I’m that person,’ or, ‘I’ve seen that in my relationship.” And I wanted that kind of laughter to be something that is poking fun at ourselves, for being ridiculous human beings,” said Wilde. “There’s some kind of healing effect of releasing the pressure of the shame, all of this tension that we hold in, how we think we’re meant to be in relationships, and if you just prove that we’re all struggling, then their shame is released, and the air is let out of the room. It just feels very good.”

While doing press for “The Invite,” Wilde has often quoted something “Fleabag” writer/star Phoebe Waller-Bridge once told her, “People are never as vulnerable as when they are laughing.” That vulnerability began with Wilde and her collaborators well before production.

Screenwriters Rashida Jones and Will McCormick did not have time to write a new draft once Wilde came aboard as a director with a new cast — the project was originally set up for co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, with actors Amy Adams, Paul Rudd, and Tessa Thompson attached. At the same time, Wilde wanted an improvisational rehearsal process in which the actors could discover and breathe life into the characters. Eventually, the rewrite and actors workshop rehearsal combined — a two-week period in which Jones, McCormick, Wilde, Rogen, Cruz, and Norton acted out, improvised scenes, and, most importantly, talked about characters.

“There was a kind of collective confession. I love the way Seth discusses this, which is that in order to discuss relationships, everyone had to reveal what they consider a healthy relationship to be, which was very revealing about our personal lives,” said Wilde. “We all very quickly started to share our experiences and what we had learned in life, in therapy, and what we thought about these characters. That was extremely revealing and totally cathartic.”

Wilde didn’t want it to stop with the two-week workshop. With “The Invite” being a one-location movie (sans the opening credit sequence), she insisted on shooting in chronological order. This allowed the cast to continue to improvise and further discover their characters through production, while providing the safety of moving linearly through the story.

It also unleashed Rogen to improvise new punchlines, many of which Wilde would hear for the first time on set. Rogen’s “count the rings” line and his joke about condoms — both of which were likely enough to earn the film’s R-rating, and the actor expressed amazement that his dirty improvisations made it into the final film — caused Wilde to break into laughter on camera.

“In both of those jokes, I break, and there was nothing else — I couldn’t use another shot because it was the perfect shot of Seth. So I was like, ‘Well, I guess we have to use the one where I break,’” said Wilde, who came to peace with showing an unintended side of her character’s rocky marriage. “ This character, who had become so adversarial to him, he still makes her laugh. It was perfect.”

By design, discoveries along the way would have ripple effects later in the story. While Jones and McCormick’s script is well-structured, there was room to play within that architecture, which is why Wilde is convinced no studio would’ve financed or backed the film.

“This film is such a product of the process, [it] was not something that could’ve been predetermined or planned for.  There are no pages for the studio. It would’ve been impossible for a studio to allow for the kind of flexibility that this process required,” said Wilde. “The risks that we got to embrace, that led to the reward of the film, are just not allowed in the studio system, unless you’re Paul Thomas Anderson or Quentin Tarantino.”

Once the film won over its initial Sundance audience, the studios’ specialty units — reportedly Warner Bros Clockwork, Focus, Searchlight, along with NEON, Apple, Sony, and Amazon — all came calling, in what turned into the festival’s most heated bidding war. Ultimately, A24 won the film that had been backed by Megan Ellison’s Annapurna despite Netflix offering more money. Wilde makes no secret about why.

“For me, [theatrical] was a non-negotiable. I was very lucky that I was supported in that by Annapurna. I think that Megan Ellison could have easily said, ‘No, we can get more money from Netflix easily,’ said Wilde.

For Wilde, the trend toward skipping theaters with comedy features is particularly troubling, considering how much the humor in a film like “The Invite” is buried in glances, and trading on the audience being able to fill in the blanks and giving themselves over to it.

“I do feel that this idea that comedies belong on streaming is something that we have slowly accepted over the last couple years. It’s a new thing, and I hope it’s ending,” said Wilde. “Even in production, there was the assumption of, ‘Well, I guess they’ll probably just want to toss it on Netflix.’ But the thing is, this is a kind of movie that you need to watch and listen to; if you have a phone in your hands, you won’t get it. And I think we both know they are making movies specifically for people with a phone in their hand now, which is the most devastating thing that’s happened. And I think that’s the thing about being in a theater, not only is it the lovely collective experience of everyone enjoying something together, but you are forced to pay attention.”

For Wilde, the danger in this form of distribution is clear: “If we start making movies without that expectation, we won’t feel obligated to make things that are really worthy of the audience’s attention.”

Conversely, A24 won Wilde over with how it saw and wanted to market “The Invite.”

“They understood that it was not just a chamber piece for an adult audience, meaning older people,” said Wilde. “They were the ones who said, ‘Let’s give this a summer release, let’s be ambitious with this.’ And their approach to marketing felt very much in line with the way that I like to work.”

“The Invite” opens in select theaters on Friday, June 26 and expands everywhere on Friday, July 10.

To hear Wildes‘s full interview, airing July 2, make sure you subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.