PRODUCTION THE INVITE
NEW SPARKS The Invite was shot across a period of 23 days, with the majority on a soundstage at Sunset Las Palmas Studios, as well as on location in San Francisco. Newport- Berra shot on 3-perf 35mm, selecting the Panavision Panaflex Millennium XL2 camera and Panavision GW lenses custom built by Dan Sasaki. “The lenses were originally made for VistaVision, but Dan ended up building a full set for us. They were beautiful lenses, I loved them. He’d barely finished them in time, and when they showed up to set they were just these silver metallic barrels where all the markings on them were handwritten.” Newport-Berra ended up shooting a lot of the longer dialogue scenes with two cameras to expedite the coverage and make sure they didn’t tire the actors out. He admits that each scene was challenging in its own way and he was always trying to come up with the most inventive or dynamic way to shoot
with multiple people throughout a long period. We also looked at films that had interesting composition within interiors.” Newport-Berra points to Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse as an example of a film with dynamic staging of actors, the use of reflections and high or low angles to make a mundane space feel more dramatic. He also lists the films of Éric Rohmer as a strong influence on how to make interiors unique and magical, even if they are somewhat banal. “ Le Bonheur by Agnès Varda was a really strong reference in terms of colour and close-up photography,” he adds. “She makes things romantic, seductive and magical. Again, a lot of her stories take place in mundane situations that we can all relate to. She has a certain grace and magical quality to her After reading the script for The Invite , Newport-Berra admits he had a very different idea in mind for laying out the apartment. However, when production designer Jade Healy shared her vision of a labyrinthine set, he was excited by the possibilities. Healy created a series of hallways, doorways, frames within frames and ways to separate the characters. “She did all that while maintaining a consistency in the architecture that very much feels like a San Francisco apartment,” adds Newport-Berra. “Some friends from San Francisco visited the set and were blown away by how real it felt. Jade did a great job of honouring the real architecture, while also creating something unique that was very fun to shoot. My favourite part was that inner hallway you can see into from inside the apartment. It creates all these angles and you can shoot through multiple windows to see across the apartment. It creates this mystery and drama in the middle of the apartment, which I found so fun to play with.” filmmaking that sucks you in.” ARCHITECTURAL AMBITIONS The goal was to make it feel dynamic and always be evolving the filmmaking, ensuring that every scene felt like a
logical progression from the previous scene. Newport-Berra didn’t want it to feel confined or claustrophobic unless the scene called for it, and then he could mirror that emotion. Newport-Berra and Wilde put together a map of the general trajectory of the movie, showing where characters would be at different parts of it. Each day they blocked it with the actors and talked through the scene, then everyone would bring their own ideas to the table. “It was a real dance and much was figured out on the day because we also didn’t shot list the movie,” he says. “We came in with an idea of how we wanted to shoot scenes and conceptual ideas of how we wanted a certain scene to feel, whether it was awkward, sexy, intimate or distant. We’d have these keywords in the back of our head that would inform the framing and the blocking. We had a good idea of how we wanted to carve out each scene and we got an embarrassment of riches.”
SET PIECE The Invite was filmed almost entirely in a replica apartment, inspired in part by classic one-location movies
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