Olivia Wilde shares why her new film ‘The Invite’ had to be set in SF

In Olivia Wilde’s new film “The Invite,” a San Francisco apartment becomes an interpersonal battleground. The claustrophobic, not-so-romantic comedy directed by Wilde is set in the City by the Bay, and had two days of local filming, hitting spots like Molinari Delicatessen, A.P. Giannini Middle School in the Outer Sunset and the Glen Park BART station. Last night, the film screened in 35mm at the Castro Theatre as the opening movie of the San Francisco International Film Festival, with Wilde in attendance.

“I think we really took advantage of everything that I love so much about this city. Which is the texture, the vibe, the specificity of this place. It’s such an incredible cultural melting pot, and you can feel that. It sets the tone for our film,” Wilde said to KTVU on the red carpet at Swedish American Hall before the screening.

“The Invite” premiered at Sundance to universal acclaim, sparking a bidding war that resulted in film distributor A24 acquiring the film for over $10 million. It is set for a theatrical release on June 26.

The San Francisco shots are relegated to B-roll during the film’s introduction, but set the stage for a dark drama with a plot twist that feels distinctly Bay Area. Wilde plays Angela, a mother and homemaker who obsesses over renovating her classic San Francisco apartment while keeping it true to its vintage character. Seth Rogen plays her husband Joe, a disgruntled music teacher at an East Bay conservatory who cycles up San Francisco hills on a bike that’s way too small for him. Their marriage is very much on the rocks, with the couple squabbling over the pettiest of domestic details. 

“Seth and I had worked together before. We knew we had this weird ability to harmonize with each other,” Wilde said during a Q&A following the screening. “We like to say that we can talk over each other while listening to each other, and we really enjoy arguing. It was so fun. We loved to argue and scream in each other’s faces.”

Joe and Angela invite their upstairs neighbors Hawk and Pina (Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz) over for a dinner party, during which Angela hopes to impress them with a spread from Molinari, meanwhile Joe plans to confront them about their extremely loud and “animalistic” sex. 

“I don’t want to spoil the film. What I will say is that it doesn’t do what you think it is going to do,” SFFILM executive director Anne Lai told SFGATE. “To see these actors playing off of each other, I’ve never seen them do roles like this before. It just continually subverts your expectations in a wonderful way.”

Eventually, Hawk and Pina make an invitation of their own, which turns the plot on its head. It’s a wickedly funny film that lays bare the messy mechanisms of marriage with a whip-smart script by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, plus a tense cello score from Devonté Hynes of Blood Orange. Wilde cited director Mike Nichols as a primary inspiration, calling out films like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” “The Graduate” and “The Birdcage.” At the Castro screening, “The Invite” received the biggest laughs I’ve heard in a theater in recent memory.

Although viewers don’t see much of San Francisco, Wilde told SFGATE that there’s nowhere else it could’ve been set.

“I feel that it’s so telling when a film sets a very specific location you can tell what that’s supposed to mean, and what it means about these characters,” she said. “When you see the film, it really does make sense that this particular group is from here. I think that there’s nowhere else we could’ve filmed it, and nowhere else we could’ve set the story.”

She continued to elaborate on the film’s San Francisco connections during the Q&A, gushing over the local film crews, calling the city “the most beautiful place on the planet” and reiterating how rooted the characters are in the identity of the city.

“The type of people in this story, I just somehow understood that they would probably live here. Pina and Hawk could live above any of you, right?” she said.

The San Francisco International Film Festival continues through May 4 with 79 programs from 40 different countries.