Inside The San Francisco Apartment At The Center Of 'The Invite'

"The Invite," A24's new comedy-drama, takes place almost entirely inside a San Francisco apartment over one fraught, ill-fated evening with the neighbors upstairs. From the start, production designer Jade Healy knew the design of the apartment would have to do just as much work as the actors in showing the audience how Angela (director Olivia Wilde, pulling double duty) and her husband Joe (Seth Rogen) have become strangers to one another within their own home. High ceilings, long hallways, labyrinthine layouts, the classic features of pre-war San Francisco apartments, immediately came to mind.

“It was the first thing I thought of when I read the script,” Healy recalls, noting that the architecture helped create a paradoxical sense of spaciousness and suffocation on the set she built from scratch on a soundstage. “I wanted to have all these doorways where I could separate Joe and Angela, and find ways to always show how they're in conflict with one another,” she says. Those architectural details gave cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra the opportunity to frame scenes and create sightlines that help underscore the emotional language of the film, with many scenes showing Angela and Joe either “trapped in a doorway or trapped in a window,” Healy notes. 

Healy bathed the rooms of the apartment in paint in muted shades of blues and green, tying the palette directly to Angela—before the guests arrive, she changes into a blouse that almost makes her blend into the walls of the living room—and her role as the restless homemaker who has taken on renovating the space as her creative outlet. While Angela “channels every creative impulse and frustrated ambition into her domestic space,” Healy and set decorator Adam Willis didn’t want to fill the space with designer furniture and high-end art that felt unrealistic. “They don't have a ton of cash that she should be able to spend $5,000 on a chair or $20,000 on a couch,” Healy says.

The duo sourced accordingly on Facebook Marketplace, Etsy, thrift stores, and antique markets, decorating with the same resourcefulness as they imagine Angela would have. "She clings very tightly to it," Healy says of Angela's relationship to her interior design. “She’s like, ‘I don't have the career I wanted. My marriage is failing, but I can reupholster this chair, and I can paint this light.’ It's how she gets a sense of control." Additionally, some of the artwork on the walls was made by Healy herself, and a Moravian star light fixture hanging in the doorway was chosen as a deliberate nod to the Mike Nichols film adaptation of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" "Our film is so inspired by that movie that I wanted a little nod to that," Healy says.

Meanwhile, this sense of frustrated ambition is also felt in Joe’s music room, the one space seemingly untouched by Angela. “That was my favorite set of the entire apartment. I really wanted to feel like the space to feel like his own little man cave in a way, and Angela's just not part of that world,” Healy says. “In some ways, it's the vestiges of his past version of himself where he was a musician, and now it's just cluttered because he's buried that version of himself so far underneath so much baggage." Interestingly, the space wasn’t intended to get as much screentime as it does. “That scene with him and Pina (Penélope Cruz) where she dances,  that wasn't in the original script. So once I kind of created this room, it became ‘Oh, let's put that scene here.’"

The bedroom, by contrast, is stripped almost bare with the wall behind the headboard deliberately left empty. "I really wanted the bedroom to be a bit sad compared to the rest of the apartment,” Healy says. With paint samples still on the walls, it's the one space Angela hasn’t finished in her renovation project, and we get the impression that, despite her perfectionist personality, she’s okay with leaving it that way. “There’s negative space behind the headboard so that when they're standing in there having their fight, it's just like the space between them.” Healy has carried that instinct for restraint throughout her work, including previous projects such as “I, Tonya,” "Marriage Story," and “The Killing Of A Sacred Deer.” As she explains, "putting a bunch of stuff in the frame does not make it a good-looking frame. You've got to ask, how do I create the moments and where does the attention go?"

When “The Invite” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, some reviews mistakenly assumed the apartment was shot on location in a real San Francisco building. For Healy, that was proof of a job well done. "My biggest nightmare is creating a set that looks like a set," she says. “I always want it to feel real.” While on the shoot itself, Healy tells us that sometimes things verged on feeling a little too real. As Wilde would arrive on set each day still in the process of becoming Angela, she would find Healy fussing over unfinished corners, interrogating every choice. "I'd be like, ‘It's not ready, don't look over here, that's not finished," Healy recalls, laughing. "Which is very Angela, and they told me later, ‘Yeah, Angela's basically just being you when you're designing the set. Life imitating art. Art imitating life.”