How Jade Healy Built a Home as Complicated as Seth Rogen & Olivia Wilde’s Marriage in “The Invite”

For The Invite, production designer Jade Healy found the authenticity of the director and star Olivia Wilde‘s riveting new film by scouring property websites and Facebook Marketplace. The artisan, also known for her work on I, Tonya and Marriage Story, wanted to ensure that the apartment where most of the film takes place reflected the people who live in it, much as our personal spaces reflect us. That meant the space had to radiate personalities and histories, and be furnished in such a way that people without limitless funds—most of us—could furnish their own apartments and homes.

Seth Rogen and Olivia Wilde play Joe and Angela, a couple whose marriage is in a precarious place. When they invite their enigmatic upstairs neighbors, Hawk (Edward Norton) and Piña (Penélope Cruz), over for a dinner party, the evening takes both couples to places they never expected. The question becomes, have they reignited the spark or lit the match that burns it all down? The San Francisco-set comedy-drama is an English-language remake of the 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs and draws inspiration from Mike Nichols‘ iconic adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

We spoke to Healy about how she found perfect solutions in unlikely places, the perfection in imperfection, and the California crew that made a career dream a reality. 

What did you look at to nail the apartment’s very specific Northern California look and feel?

I spent so much time on Zillow looking at San Francisco apartments (laughs). I found some historical information and researched architecture in San Francisco, but I couldn’t get into these homes. I looked at old books and photos and got a sense of the different renovation iterations over the years. Zillow is how I found the location we ended up shooting for the exterior. For the interiors, I needed the right height in the correctly sized apartment that would also make sense for Hawk and Piña. They would live in a space with features like a small elevator and bay windows. I found a lot of different apartment interiors on Zillow and Trulia, then I Frankenstein’d them together.

In an age of gentrification, how hard is it to find these original locations that have lost their authenticity?

It’s hard, but many people do want to preserve beautiful architecture. When we went to San Francisco, we looked at a couple of apartments, and so much was preserved. They wanted to keep the wood floors, mantelpieces, trim, and molding. The kitchens are always some ghastly renovated affair. The elevator I built was based on a real one I found on a website. There is a guy, an elevator enthusiast, who goes around and photographs elevators. That’s what I love about my job. It’s like being a weird sociologist. I’m an architect, an archeologist, and a historian. I never found an apartment with the decor I liked or the exact layout I wanted, so I took the parts I liked and sketched it all out. My art director, Sandra Doyle Carmola, modeled it, then we moved things around until they were in the right place, and then I presented the model to Olivia and Adam Willis, the set decorator. We had a very truncated prep time. I read the script on a Thursday, we modeled it on the Monday or Tuesday of the following week, and we started building right after.

What is the most fun part?

Figuring out how to make it real and not perfect. With architecture, you’re often striving for perfection. With film design, I’m trying to find the layers of human error, where they’ve messed up or undone something. I’m always like, “Shove the closet too far over to the left.” I don’t want the proportions to be too perfect. In these old apartments, it’s like, “That room used to be the kitchen, and when they renovated, this got shoved that way. This doesn’t make sense.” It was about finding the weird elements that made it feel real. I had such an amazing construction team who delivered beyond expectations for the budget.  

Were they local?

Everybody was, yeah. Karen Higgins was my construction coordinator. Until The Invite, I’d never worked with a female construction coordinator, so that was amazing. I actually just did another movie with her, too. I try to only work in LA. I got lucky that this movie came to me, and I think it’s because I dug my heels in. I read the script for the first time while on the way to the hot springs with my best friend. She was driving, and I was reading it out loud because I had no time, and we were dying of laughter. In different hands, it could have been a rom-com, but Olivia was like, “I want to make cinema. I want to make movies that you don’t see anymore,” and I was so down for that.

Something I loved about this, and you often don’t see this in movies, is the fact that the space matches the income of the characters.

It’s my biggest fear. Luckily, part of the storyline was that this big apartment used to be Joe’s parents’ place. It is important to me not to have furniture that isn’t within my financial reach. I hate that. I’m like, “How do you have that $10,000 lamp?” I spend so much time with my decorator, going to thrift stores and flea markets, but a lot of the stuff came from Facebook Marketplace. I wanted to channel Angela and how she would actually do this apartment. She’ll get the fabric for the curtains, and she’ll find a dining room table somewhere. That table actually came from Orange County. Some guy was clearing his grandmother’s storage unit, and I gave him $100 for it. The couch was given to us by the decorator through a friend of his. I also think about how I would do my space. I do get a lot of stuff from movie sets. The kitchen chairs and the bar cart from this movie are in my house. The costume designer has the couch, and she has the beds.

Joe and Angela have their own spaces that reflect their personalities.

I wanted him to be stuck in that little room, his space, where there’s no Angela. It’s his music room now, but it was once something different. However, over the years, you can see it has piled up with stuff, and that part of him has been buried under this new layer of himself. The way Angela deals with that and her own baggage is that she’s constantly trying to beautify everything. You go to the bedroom, and there’s nothing on the walls. It’s a bed and some lamps, but she hasn’t put much in there. I wanted that to reflect where their marriage is. There’s this space between them; it’s a bit sad. It’s probably a sexless marriage. It’s not a big bed, so you get that he’s probably often sleeping on the couch. I used the windows to create a sense of how they’re always looking through these spaces right until the very end. 

The Invite is not the first reiteration of this story. Did you incorporate any Easter eggs referencing other versions into the design?

No, but it’s funny because I wanted to watch the original movie, so I skimmed through, but I was like, “I don’t want to see any more because that’s not the movie we’re making as far as the design goes.” There is an Easter egg in homage to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which was a huge inspiration for us. The light in the entryway is the same Moroccan star light that’s in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Tell me about the ephemera from Joe’s band and the littering of it around the apartment.

We had so much fun fantasizing about a music video we were going to make, but never got to do it. I was like, “Please, can we do it for the end credits?” Please, A24, make the music video. Everybody wants to see it. It’s really fun to imagine who this band was and to put together the album covers that would have looked like that. Someone had a friend from a band back in the day, so we took some of their photos and put Seth’s face in them. There were also some images of Seth playing guitar from his Freaks and Geeks era, so we got a few of those photos cleared and added them in.

Your work on this is sublime.

It’s so hard for designers to get noticed sometimes. The first time we showed this movie, everyone thought it was a location, and that is the dream, but sometimes the work gets missed. A lot of the credit often goes to the DP, and Adam Newport-Berra was amazing to work with, but it can be hard to carve out a little bit of room for my team, who did such amazing work building this world. It’s always nice to hear that it’s seen and appreciated.

The Invite is in select theaters now and opens nationwide on July 10.

Featured image: Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, Edward Norton (Credit: Courtesy of A24)