The new comedy film The Invite centers on an unhappy married couple who host another couple — they live upstairs — for an uncomfortable, and revelatory, evening of dinner and charcuterie. The film's screenwriters, Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, are actors who are also longtime writing and producing partners.
Jones and McCormack met decades ago, when McCormack's sister (actor Mary McCormack) set them up on a date. It didn't work out as a romantic pairing. Instead, it was the start of a long-running creative partnership.
"We're really like brother and sister who dated briefly, which is not weird," McCormack jokes. "I think we both knew right from the very beginning that we were connected and that we had to be in each other's lives. And it took us a minute to sit down to write, but finally we did, and I'm so glad we did."
Jones says she and McCormack share a voice: "The two of us have the same clip, the same rhythm, and we're so different in so many ways, but we just kind of like fit like puzzle pieces conversationally very quickly, which is a wonderful thing to have with a writing partner."
Inspired by the 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs, The Invite takes place over the course of one night in a chicly appointed apartment in San Francisco. Two couples gather for dinner, and as the evening unfolds, the stories they've been telling themselves about their relationships and about themselves fall apart.
McCormack describes the film as a sex comedy that's not really about sex. "It's about wanting to be seen and heard and valued," he says. "You live with someone for so long and it's really hard."
Jones says it's no accident that their work tends to focus on relationships and middle age: "Selfishly, it's great that we can channel the thing we're most interested in, which is relationships, living with other people, being parents, losing parents, being alive, getting older, being middle-aged, looking straight down the barrel of the back half of life. All these things we got to bring to this script."
Interview highlights
On their working relationship
Jones: We write separately. We write together. We're in an open relationship as writers, a very healthy, open relationship. But when we come together, there's a thing that happens.
McCormack: I think we always found the same things funny. … And I think also the same things sort of broke our hearts, and I think that we wanted to try to say something together. There were movies that appealed to us both, and there was a voice that we shared from the beginning. There was just an easy rapport.
On acting out the dialogue together as they're writing it
Jones: Well, we act while we're writing, but that's our discovery process of dialogue because we're lucky, we both started as actors and can do a good job with that. So often we act out the scenes and if it's not working, it doesn't feel right … that's easy to fix.
On why they're drawn to stories about heartache
McCormack: Life is really just a series of losses. It's one loss and one heartbreak after another. When your little summer ends and you don't want it to end, and then you get your heart broken, and then you have kids, and they're gonna break your heart, and then your parents die and then [you] start to lose bone density. ...
Those moments can actually be the funniest because they're so raw. And it's when we feel connected, right? Like, heartbreak is the thing that binds us. Like, no matter who you are or no matter where you are or no amount of how old you are, like you're gonna go through heartache. ... And to be able to dig into some of those moments with Rashida has just been such a gift, and I don't take that for granted to be able to do that for a living.
On Quincy, her documentary about her dad, Quincy Jones, and experiencing anticipatory grief
Jones: I filmed for six years, and the second to last year of filming, he went into a diabetic coma, and we stopped filming, and luckily my brother filmed a little bit in the hospital because we were going to kind of show him what he had been through if and when he came out and we were so lucky he did come out at 82. … But having that moment where he was that close to death, and then deciding to put that in the film and show him overcoming that, I think was my way of sort of preparing for the inevitable, you know? And I was so lucky to have him for another nine years after that, but ultimately, I knew what was coming, and it was really a love letter to my dad, but also a way to hopefully reach out to other people and say, listen, we're all going to go through this and we want to be honest about what it's like for our family to come to the other side of this.
My dad is obviously an icon and a culture shifter, and he had been documented a lot before. And what I felt like people missed, because he's so successful at what he did, was they missed his personality. They missed the personal side of him, which is a very important part to why he was successful. It's not just his talent and his hard work, but he had this gift with people. And he had a way of relating and being honest and getting to the heart and the honesty of something and the intimacy of something so fast with a stranger, with his kids, with the people who loved him, the people didn't know him. And I really wanted that to be on screen.
On what they bring out in each other
Jones: Will is like my closest chosen family in a way. ... I don't wanna get emotional, but I feel like Will, and I see the child versions of ourselves and can really take care of that little kid in each other, because we're both very hard on ourselves. … We sort of like, very kind of gently, love and respect each other and give each other the benefit of the doubt that we might not give ourselves. And then, I think, born of that is this sort of thing that lives in the intersection between pain and humor, and maybe hopefully something divine, like hopefully we leave some room, as my dad always said, "for God to walk in the door," because that's really our job ultimately is to channel. And so hopefully there's something about us coming together that allows that to happen.
McCormack: I don't want to get emotional either, but what she said.
Ann Marie Baldonado and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
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