PRODUCTION THE INVITE
DOP Adam Newport-Berra, ASC breaks down filming the chaos of The Invite’s single-location dinner party “ How can we make this apartment feel more like a landscape than a confined box? ”
WORDS OLIVER WEBB IMAGES A24
A fter a short hiatus from films, 2026 is proving to be Olivia Wilde’s year. Starring in the highly anticipated I Want Your Sex and Behemoth! , with several more projects slated for 2027, Wilde also returns behind the camera with her third directorial feature following Booksmart and Don’t Worry Darling . Wilde’s latest venture, The Invite , follows a dinner party that spirals into unexpected territory when a couple invite their upstairs neighbours over for dinner. Starring alongside Wilde is an ensemble cast made up of Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton. BOXED IN Adam Newport-Berra, ASC first met Wilde in 2025 on the set of The Studio , in which Wilde plays a fictionalised version of herself in the missing-reel episode. Working on the show also marked his first collaboration with Seth Rogen. Later that same year, producer Saul Germaine asked Newport-Berra if he would be interested in talking to Wilde about a project she was working on.
“I was excited by Olivia as a director and loved the script,” he begins. “That same week, I randomly ran into Seth in New York and told him to tell Olivia to hire me. I was really craving a project where we could sit with close-ups and focus on performance, and not jump through quite as many technical hoops.” A remake of the 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs by Cesc Gay, The Invite is confined to one space (opening sequence aside). Newport-Berra was admittedly excited by the prospect. “I tend to be drawn to projects that have some sort of red flag like that,” he laughs. “I find it quite liberating to have one hand tied behind my back because it forces me to think in new ways. For me, the whole question was: how can we make this apartment feel more like a landscape than a confined box?” Newport-Berra and Wilde looked at several films that predominantly feature one location. Their biggest touchstone was 1966’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? . “We had a lot of other references that weren’t necessarily one location but contained interiors
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