Scenes From The Invite: Production Designer Jade Healy on Crafting Olivia Wilde's World

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To look at the apartment in Olivia Wilde's latest movie, The Invite, is to see scenes of a life. The life of the characters, that is. From Joe's (Seth Rogen) expansive library/office to Angela's (Wilde) immaculately curated living room, it's production designer Jade Healy who crafts the locations these characters inhabit. "I start always with the character and the story," Healy tells The Film Maven. "Trying to figure out how to best serve the story by building the set that best suits how to drive the narrative forward, and how to tell the different progression between these different characters."

It starts with the script and for Healy, who'd worked with Wilde and producer Saul Germaine on a Red Hot Chili Peppers music video over a decade, the images came to her fast after reading the script. "I saw very quickly the world I wanted to create," says Healy. "We wanted to make a Who's Virginia Woolf, Woody Allen movie."

Though the film is set in San Francisco and relegated to one location – Joe and Angela's apartment – there wasn't any time to waste on finding a house and spending time in the city. "There was no time to go to San Francisco," Healy says, who explains she was looking specifically for a pre-war apartment. "I was relying on on Zillow and Trulia to do scouting, digital scouting, looking for apartments for sale or for rent that were in San Francisco." She eventually found Joe and Angela's apartment by simply looking on Zillow and then using Google Earth to move down the various streets.

"I didn't use any one single interior floor plan from an apartment I found," she says. "I Frankensteined [it] together. I used bits and pieces of different apartments that I liked. I liked this part of the foyer. I knew I wanted a hallway. But there was no apartment that had everything I wanted so I borrowed and stole inspiration from different apartments." From there she moved onto small scenic details within the apartment, such as "weird wires [and] cables" and brick. It became a running joke between her and Wilde that, through finding the apartments, Healy was becoming like Angela and Wilde was becoming like Healy.

For the production designer, there's a circularity between design and story, one informing the other. And in this case, the script didn't have a set story, with the ending coming as production started, meaning production had to be on its toes as things transformed. "We weren't working with this script that had a beginning and end, it wasn't rigid," she says. "We knew that there was this flexibility in the story, so different things would happen and change very quickly. Somebody's like, 'Oh, we need this here. Can you get us this?" That also meant things that were designed initially didn't end up being used at all, as is the case with an arts and crafts room Healy designed for a scene that ended up not being filmed at all.

One room that was vital to the film was Joe's study, which is so chock-a-block with stuff you almost wish the camera would zoom in and just let the audience look at it. This was Healy's favorite room to design because it conveyed so much of Joe and Angela's relationship. "It really wanted to be the space where Joe's stuff gets kind of shoved...Angela's taken over everything else in the apartment, and I kind of imagine it in a way that as time went by she would grab stuff from the living room or somewhere that was Joe's...Suddenly, she started to take those things, and every day he'd come home, and there'd be like the elephant statue that used to be in the living room, on the mantle pieces, now shoved in his shelf."

Extensive care and detail went into creating Joe's insular world. "Every book was selected," Healy said. "There are Polaroids of Joe as a musician in there. I think we got some from Freaks and Geeks that we manipulated with other band photos." These are details that, Healy admits, the camera doesn't pick up on, but that aid the actor's performance in the space. This anchors them in order to tell them who they are as the character.

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When it came to purchasing the items within the apartment it was Facebook Marketplace all the way. "It's a lot of Facebook Marketplace, which was a running joke," she says. "I spent so much time looking for stuff...[It] was really a mix of stuff we found in some prop houses, flea markets, different furniture stores all throughout L.A. [and] Long Beach. I was sending my team to random houses in the Valley for a couch, a chair, a bench. So much of that movie was shopped in Facebook Marketplace. I would just be at home sending a link to say, 'This dryer.' Really imagining what Angela would be doing. She spends her days on Facebook Marketplace looking for stuff."

Things like the living room couch came through happy accidents. "We bought three couches [and] we ended up using one we got for free as a gift," says Healy. "They were all used couches, but we ended up with this amazing couch that my decorator had been gifted from a friend, and we were looking all these couches. One day I said, 'What about that couch you got that's in storage?' The gold room is what we call it. So we brought it over and I was like, 'This is the couch.'"

With everything being ad-hoc, does that mean the crew took things home? "I took these chairs that I don't even know if we ended up using them in the movie. I think we bought them," Healy says. "I took the little bar cart that's in the dining room. I like to take art home. I wish I'd gotten more pieces....The costume designer [Arianne Phillips] took the couch home. She got the bed...All these things I probably shouldn't be saying out loud."

The Invite is in theaters now.

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