'The Invite' screenwriters Rashida Jones & Will McCormack
7/13/202646 min
The new film, ‘The Invite,’ directed by Olivia Wilde, offers a portrait of a marriage in middle age, told over the course of one dinner party that spirals out of control. Screenwriters Rashida Jones and Will McCormack have been mining this territory together for decades, while finding the funny inside the painful. “We are never above a laugh,” Jones says. “There's nothing that's grave enough for us not to laugh about, because that's how we release. That's how we process our pain.” They spoke with Tonya Mosley about their creative process and their other films, ‘Celeste & Jesse Forever,’ ‘Quincy,’ and ‘If Anything Happens I Love You.’
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First 90 secondsTonya Mosley· Host0:00
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tonya Mosley, and my guests today are writers and performers Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. They dated for a stint in their 20s. It didn't work out, but what they found instead was one of the longest-running creative partnerships in Hollywood. Their first screenplay together, Celeste & Jesse Forever from 2012, followed two people who couldn't stay married but also couldn't imagine life without each other. It's the kind of complicated relationship stories that they've returned to throughout their careers. Their latest screenplay is The Invite, directed by Olivia Wilde, who also stars alongside Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton. The entire film unfolds in a single San Francisco apartment. Two couples gather for dinner, and as the evening unfolds, the stories they've been telling about their relationships and themselves fall apart. It was inspired by the 2020 Spanish film Sentimental: The People Upstairs by Cesc Gay. In this scene, the couple who live upstairs, played by Cruz and Norton, have just arrived at their hosts' apartment, played by Wilde and Rogen.
Speaker 21:11
It took you a while to come to the door.
Speaker 31:14
I know.
Speaker 4· Soundbite1:15
Daí vai.
Speaker 21:15
And it sounded like you were arguing.
Speaker 31:18
No filter.
Speaker 21:18
No, I just wanna be honest. We were, we were, we were at the door before we rang, and we could hear you were fighting.
Speaker 4· Soundbite1:23
Oh, we were talk- we were, um... We were fighting. We were fighting, yeah. Um, bit of a contentious