‘The Invite’ Screenwriters Will McCormack and Rashida Jones on What Makes Long-Term Relationships Work Inside Four Walls

You could make a reasonable case for dinner parties existing for the sole purpose of driving people insane.

The chief litigators of said case would probably be Angela (Olivia Wilde) and Joe (Seth Rogen), the protagonists of The Invite. Directed by Wilde, the film’s dinner party is an ostensible attempt for Angela and Joe to forge a new friendship with their adventurous neighbor couple, Pina (Academy Award winner Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Academy Award nominee Edward Norton). What happens instead is a hilarious sex comedy of errors and a profound excavation of a decaying marriage. 

It is a tricky tonal and thematic balance to navigate, which was central to the appeal for the film’s two screenwriters, Will McCormack and Rashida Jones. Both have long, storied careers in Hollywood: Jones has two iconic television roles in The Office and Parks & Recreation and won a Grammy for her documentary on her father, music legend Quincy Jones, while McCormack won the Best Animated Short Oscar for If Anything Happens I Love You after years on television and on stage. After briefly dating in the late 90s, Jones and McCormack became creative partners. Their first theatrical endeavor, 2012’s Celeste and Jesse Forever, netted them an Independent Spirit nomination for Best First Screenplay. Their third film together (including the development of Toy Story 4) afforded them the opportunity to take stock of long-term relationships and what it takes to make them work or not work.

“It’s something that’s always captivated us as writers, people, and friends,” Jones said of The Invite’s premise. “This was such a great way to talk about so many things that come up through the course of a long-term relationship, in a marriage. It’s like setting off an emotional bomb in a room, and then everybody has to deal with the reality and the aftermath.”

McCormack added, “We’ve always been interested in love stories and human relationships, how and why people fall in love, and how hard it is to remain in love, facing the vicissitudes of daily life. This movie met us in a moment in our lives where it felt very fertile and ripe to talk about.”

The Invite is an English-language remake of The People Upstairs, a Spanish comedy film written and directed by Cesc Gay. Beyond adapting the film, McCormack and Jones also worked with famed Belgian psychotherapist and author Esther Perel. Perel’s often-cited insights into modern relationships provided the screenwriters a helpful framework with which to confront Joe and Angela’s myriad issues. The most important nugget involves how one significant catalyst — infidelity, a new job, or a partner swap — can push a stagnant couple into reconsidering the status of their relationship and, in the best case scenario, develop a new, more compatible one.

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“Hawk and Pina are the catharsis for Joe and Angela that gives them the opportunity to finally say the things that have been so difficult to say out loud that couples can avoid for years, forever really,” McCormack explained.

“There’s so much that goes down in that evening,” Jones continued. “So much is uncovered that [Joe and Angela] are going to have to start again, if they start at all, and accept this new version of themselves. I think that’s part of the movie’s premise, that they haven’t accepted the present-day version of each other. They’re still comparing each other and themselves to the past version. It’s human, but it doesn’t make for a great, healthy relationship.”

While Jones and McCormack sketched out the foursome’s dynamics, they credit the cast and crew for helping to fully realize their intent. McCormack described how Wilde and cinematographer Adam Newport-Barra crafted a “propulsive, energized” atmosphere that gave the film a “destructive feel.” They ensured that the film “didn’t feel staid,” that “it felt like shit was going down” and the characters’ lives would change. Jones shared that Wilde held a “collaborative” workshop session with them and the actors where they brainstormed and tailored the roles and themes that she and McCormack laid out. 

One such idea came from Cruz and her take on Pina. Jones recalled, “She didn’t want Pina to be this wise, objective person who didn’t have her own pathos. The explosion she had at Hawk was really because Cruz was like, ‘Pina’s got to say something, she’s gotta fight back.’ Also, how quickly Pina retracts and apologizes to Hawk is an example of how you have a kind of healthy, functional working relationship, unlike Joe and Angela, who have stewed for almost two decades. That idea shows the contrast of how these two couples deal with their bullshit.”

McCormack, meanwhile, shared how Edward Norton fleshed out Hawk’s backstory. “He made Hawk’s sex not about sex, but from a place of deep curiosity, pain, and trauma, trying to give his character a fresh start in life and sex being a pathway, a conduit to that. It was such a smart, sophisticated idea that he brought.”

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A sophisticated approach to sex is another hallmark of The Invite, coupled with sex-positive empathy for its characters. Rather than making the foursome’s sexual interests and identities the butt of the film’s mile-a-minute jokes, Jones and McCormack validate their idiosyncrasies while still finding the humor within them. It would be easy, for instance, to turn Seth Rogen and Penelope Cruz’s love scene as an unserious gag given their contrasting scene personae. What’s far more interesting and satisfying within the film’s context is how it captures and enhances their palpable chemistry, reinforcing their sexual identities and laying the groundwork for the emotionally gutting final act.

“We saw from the beginning that [the film] was not a way to mine jokes at the expense of sex,” Jones explained about how the film regards sex. “I see sex as this sacred thing, this beautiful thing that connects us to other people, even if it’s for a night. Joe and Angela have lost all semblance of understanding their sexuality through the lens of each other, and Hawk and Pina have used it to grow.”

Jones added, “I don’t think Will, and I would ever want to adapt something that was just about sex, because our interest is in what the sex is connoting. Sex is about power, intimacy, vulnerability, and dysfunction. There’s so much more in there.”

McCormack referenced the scene of Angela standing naked in the window as being indicative of how sexuality functions in the film. “It’s about wanting to feel seen and about awakening a part of herself that has been dormant and lost. I think, for every character, sex is the window into the world for them to see differently. It’s every character having their own version of wanting to feel seen, heard, loved, and understood, and sex is a way to get that or not get that.”

The desire to feel seen and heard, and their inability to provide that for one another, ultimately lead to an unexpectedly somber penultimate note for Joe and Angela. And yet, the film closes on a moment that could be interpreted as a new beginning, with a refreshed understanding of who they are and how they can be better for each other, just in a new context. The idea of wholesale destruction leading to wholesale renewal bears striking similarities to a few other films released this year, including A24 stablemates The Drama and Mother Mary.

For Jones and McCormack, however, The Invite emphasized a path where wholesale destruction doesn’t have to be inevitable. When asked about why this particular story connected with them at this specific moment in their lives and careers, Jones replied, “This idea that you forget to be intentional and present, that you get stuck. There’s so much promise when you get into a relationship and you have all these dreams about what you’re going to do together. Then, many people look back 15 years later and forget to try and forget that the point of being in a relationship is always because they’re right together. It’s because they’re there to make each other grow, listen, and be a better person.”

McCormack believes that the film’s romantic core lies in that insight. “I think it’s hard to forgive, evolve, grow, and try,” he explained. “Even though Joe and Angela are so dysfunctional, they can still try, and it’s still possible. I think people forget that they can do that with the same person, and there’s something very romantic about that idea to us.”

As for their own creative relationship, McCormack and Jones enjoy what Jones playfully describes as a “writing open relationship,” one brimming with the confidence and harmony that Joe and Angela struggle to achieve. 

“We’ve lived so much life together: babies are born, parents are gone. We’ve just been through so much together that we bring all of that to our work.”

The Invite is currently in select theaters from A24 and will continue expanding throughout the month.