Rashida Jones and Will McCormack describe how they adapted a Spanish dinner-party comedy and reworked it with cast and director Olivia Wilde.
LOS ANGELES, California (Screenplay Biz) – The strongest lesson in the screenwriting of The Invite is about timing: when the writers stopped writing alone. Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, who wrote the A24 comedy directed by and starring Olivia Wilde, say they and the cast spent eight days around a table before filming, and that they revised the script daily as the actors pushed on it. The script has since been nominated by the Gotham Awards for best adapted screenplay.
A remake with a strong skeleton
According to Creative Screenwriting’s feature on the film, the story remakes Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish film Sentimental, released internationally as The People Upstairs, which in turn came from Gay’s 2016 play. The writers kept the core of a four-person dinner party and the friction between a strained married couple and their free-spirited upstairs neighbours.
The reported changes are about place and character. The film is set in a historic San Francisco apartment, and the husband, Joe, is a modestly paid music teacher living in a flat that belongs to his parents. The neighbours then suggest a more liberated approach to intimacy, which forces the couple to examine how they talk to each other. McCormack and Jones told the magazine that the source was strong in structure and themes, which made it easier to adapt and expand where they found it interesting.
Eight days at the table
The same feature describes the workshop. Before shooting, the writers, the director and the cast spent eight days around a table, swapping personal stories, improvising, and testing whether each character’s choices felt true. The writers revised the pages each day, aiming to keep the structure intact while absorbing the actors’ ideas. The film was then planned around extended naturalistic scenes rather than frequent retakes.
This is a notable order of operations. The writers did not finish a draft, hand it over, and wait for notes. They stayed in the room, which meant that the changes were tested by actors speaking the lines. Structure was treated as the fixed part and dialogue as the flexible one. The reported detail does not say how many pages changed or what was cut, so the extent of the rewrite is unknown.
How a long partnership writes
An NPR interview with Jones and McCormack adds background on the working relationship. The two met through his sister, the actor Mary McCormack, and a romance never took off; a creative partnership grew instead. They write both separately and together, and they act out scenes while they write because speaking the lines helps them find the dialogue and spot a wrong note quickly. They say they share a comedic voice and sense of rhythm. NPR places the story over one evening in a stylish San Francisco apartment where two couples have dinner, and notes that the film premiered in Los Angeles in June.
McCormack described the film as being about wanting to be seen, heard and valued in a long relationship, and both writers say they gravitate toward relationships, ageing and loss, finding humour in heartbreak. NPR does not describe specific drafts or the length of the writing period.
Director’s input: contained films as models
Creative Screenwriting reports that early drafts had reached Wilde years earlier with an offer to act, and that she was later offered the chance to direct and accepted. She was less interested in remaking the Spanish film and looked instead to Mike Nichols, citing The Graduate and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as contained, character-driven models. She consulted the psychotherapist Esther Perel to deepen the emotional realism, and said she wanted to focus on relationship dynamics without taking sides. On her own motive she was brief.
“The thing that interests me most about directing is human relationships.” – Olivia Wilde, Creative Screenwriting
It is also worth noting what the reporting leaves out. Neither source describes how much of the final dialogue came from the workshop and how much was already on the page, whether the structure was settled before the table sessions, or how the changes were recorded. Those details would be the most useful for another writer hoping to copy the method, so treat the account as a pattern to test rather than a recipe. The reported facts do support one firm conclusion: the writers were willing to give up control of lines in exchange for performances that sounded lived in, and they protected the architecture that held the story together.
Awards position
The Gotham nomination was reported by The Film Stage in its list of nominees, where Jones and McCormack appear with the film under A24. The competition in the adapted category includes Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Chuko Esiri, Simon Lyashenko and Andrey Zvyagintsev, and Ajon Singh. The ceremony takes place at the end of November.
Takeaways for writers
These points are analysis drawn from the reported process, not statements from the writers.
- Pick sources with a sound frame. A single evening and four characters gave the writers a structure they could trust while changing the specifics.
- Use the table read as a writing session. Revising each night while the cast was present turned a read-through into a working draft.
- Protect the spine, loosen the lines. Keeping structure fixed gave them room to adopt the actors’ suggestions without losing shape.
- Act it out. Speaking dialogue while drafting is a cheap method to catch false notes early.
Those wanting a lighter look at the same industry can read Bohiney Magazine, which covers Hollywood and the film business from the comedy side.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/