How 'The Invite' Designed the Perfect Apartment for Everything to Go Wrong
Production designer Jade Healy explains how Facebook Marketplace finds and carefully layered details created the film's most important character.
This story contains minor spoilers about The Invite. The Invite, this summer's buzzy comedy that takes a casual dinner party and spins it into a swinging, relationship nightmare, is stacked with A-listers (Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, Edward Norton). But one of its best and most memorable characters isn't human at all: it's the San Francisco apartment that serves as the backdrop to the chaos.
The anti-rom-com—inspired by the Spanish film The People Upstairs—centers on married couple Angela (Wilde, who also serves as director) and Joe (Rogen) as they unveil their renovated prewar abode to their neighbors, Hawk (Norton) and Piña (Cruz). Production designer Jade Healy (The Green Knight, The Killing of a Sacred Deer) was tasked with building the set, which helps entrap the cast in a labyrinth of hallways, corridors, and nooks. She came onto the project after reading the screenplay by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack; the entire building process took just five weeks.
Angela (Olivia Wilde) welcomes Hawk (Edward Norton) and Piña (Penélope Cruz) into her and Joe's (Seth Rogen) home.
It’s as if the space Healy constructed is a nod to rom-coms of yesteryear with their picturesque dream homes—but her set has bite, as its charm is more of a commentary on how we’re perceived inside and outside of our relationships. As she explains to Marie Claire, it was central to her vision that nearly every detail in the apartment attempts to mask the drama and disastrous nonmonogamous revelry within its walls.
“It wants to be so beautiful on the surface because that's how [Angela, Wilde’s character] can repair her life: Just make everything beautiful, make it perfect, make the charcuterie board perfect,” Healy says. “But underneath, she's floundering.”
Here, Healy breaks down what was on her mood board for the film (in theaters now), where she sourced Angela’s antiques, and all of the space's symbolism.
Healy says most of the art in the apartment was painted by the cast and crew.
Marie Claire: When you know the space you’re designing is going to almost function like a character, where do you begin?
Jade Healy: Even though there are descriptors of what the apartment looks like [in the script], I try to not let too much of that interfere with my initial emotional reaction to what I'm starting to see. I read [the script] on a Thursday, and over the weekend I spent every waking hour on Zillow and Trulia. I start digging into old movies, trying to find great references. We all immediately were looking at Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Woody Allen movies. (I have one little nod to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: The entry light is the same—not the exact same—but they have that Moroccan star.) I was also looking at Rosemary's Baby, old French films, Rear Window because I wanted to find the voyeuristic quality of how we're all looking into other people's lives.
There was such a fear of, We're going to be in one location. That was the greatest pressure: I have to build a set that we have to exist in for pretty much the entire movie, and it has to remain exciting and help push the narrative forward.
MC: What were some of those initial elements that felt essential to include?
JH: Olivia really wanted an old, prewar apartment—that was always part of the design and the script. I wanted a labyrinthian feel to it. The script initially had an open kitchen-living room-dining room floor plan. I wanted prewar frames within frames, hallways, and to create space between the characters—being able to move from the kitchen and find a moment of separation so that they can get away.
I also wanted the characters [to] feel entrapment. I was like, “Olivia, I want to have these doorways so you can almost feel the walls always closing in.”
"The mirrors were so integral to the story that we were trying to tell, about how we move ourselves in our relationships," Healy says.
MC: Mirrors become really integral to the cinematography. Was that in the script, or was that driven by your design?
JH: That wasn't in the script. In my lookbook, I had a page called “Reflections and Mirrors” and a page, “Doors within Doorways,” so that was part of the visual language we were channeling.
It's also so telling of their character development and where they are at this moment of seeing themselves and trying to figure out who they are and getting trapped in these mirrors. I wanted this sense of reflection. At the end of the movie, there's this heavy weight that's lifted, but also this moment of, Who are we anymore? I don't even know who I am. The mirrors were so integral to the story that we were trying to tell, about how we move ourselves in our relationships, and then you want to blame somebody else, but so much of it is just trying to figure out who we are anymore as we grow.
I wanted to feel like Angela was almost drowning under the stagnant weight of her life—and every piece of decor she brings in is adding to the weight.
MC: Beyond the mirrors, there are many other pieces—particularly the rug and lamps—that become touchstones throughout the movie. Where did you source the individual pieces?
JH: Facebook Marketplace, thrift stores, vintage stores, and the prop house, because they do have some great finds. The rug was a search, and we ended up finding it at one of the old prop houses that had it buried. We went through several iterations of what the rug could be, and in the end, we were like, “It needs to feel like one she got at a flea market.”
The lamps, I wanted to find some that looked handmade. We had an arts and crafts session with Olivia and the set dec team where we were painting lanterns and paper mâchéing and making art.
I was channeling Angela as much as I could to get into the DIY. I remember sitting in the dining room with art supplies and making paintings to put on the wall, of her daughter or herself, because she was supposed to be a painter. We were really wanting to feel like her handprints were everywhere in that apartment, from the art to the selected pillows to the curtains.
"I wanted to find this color that wasn't too heavy, not too bright, but had this beautiful feeling, and then give you the sense that she's stuck," Healy says of the blues in the film.
MC: How did you land on the signature blues and greens that are a throughline throughout the apartment?
JH: I wanted to feel like Angela was almost drowning under the stagnant weight of her life—and every piece of decor she brings in is adding to the weight. I wanted to find this color that wasn't too heavy, not too bright, but had this beautiful feeling, and then give you the sense that she's stuck.
MC: Aside from looking at Zillow, did you take inspiration from visiting any San Francisco apartments? The movie briefly shows the exterior of what’s supposed to be Joe and Angela’s building.
JH: I was worried [the apartment was] too big. But, oh my God, San Francisco apartments are massive. I had found the building exterior on Zillow, sent it over to [the locations team], and we actually got to go into some of the apartments. I was like, “Are you kidding me?” It was much bigger than our apartment, which was a relief.
It was too late [for inside] because we had already been building, but for scenic references, we were still painting the exterior. I would take pictures of any details whenever I saw something interesting. I definitely put a window into the corridor after visiting. I get inspiration more from the real layers—the weird signs in the hallway, a weird wire, or a weird light.
I get inspiration more from the real layers—the weird signs in the hallway, a weird wire, or a weird light.
MC: Did you conceive what Hawk and Piña’s apartment might look like?
JH: I didn’t have time to mood board it, but we would definitely talk about who they were. There is so much interaction with Hawk and Angela in regards to the decor and their love for it. And we were imagining the layout above to understand: Angela and Joe took two apartments and made it bigger. Where's their bedroom in accordance to their room?
The Invite expands to theaters everywhere on July 10.
MC: Did you or the cast steal anything from set?
JH: The couch—which is a designer couch, it doesn’t look like it, but it is—ended up going into the costume designer, Arianne Phillips’s house. The coffee table went to the line producer. I ended up with a bar cart. We didn’t really see Angela’s workshop—the door was sort of ajar, so you see into it—but that whole room had these beautiful nudes and sketches that came from her, and I took one of those home. A jar of buttons, little figurines on the mantlepiece that I loved—I took those.
MC: It feels like The Invite is part of a microtrend of unconventional romantic comedies—along with The Drama and its chic Boston condo—that have these amazing homes but tell a more pragmatic story about love. As a production designer, what do you make of this?
JH: This is definitely an anti-rom-com movie. You think of the Nancy Meyers and the beautiful homes [in her films]—and we didn't want to do a Nancy Meyers [set]. We really wanted to find something that had the layers of imperfection, of finding the little moments that weren't perfect in there. We are so obsessed with how things look: our faces; can we de-age ourselves?; GLP-1s. I think this trend is exploring what is actually underneath. With Instagram now, everything is about, "Look at this beautiful apartment, look at these perfect lives." And you're like, Wow, they have all these things I don't have. But everybody has problems. This movie's so relatable because we've all lived it to some degree, whether it's our family, our parents, our own marriages, our own relationships, our best friend's marriage.
When you see what's underneath and you get to take a step in, you're like, "Oh, it's human." It's just layers of humanity. That's what works so well in this film. That's what works well in The Drama. It seems this is going to be a funny movie. It's set up like a rom-com, but it's not. It's not meant to be. And that's what pulls you in, and then suddenly you're crying, you're laughing.
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
