Production: The Invite

DOP Adam Newport-Berra, ASC breaks down filming the chaos of The Invite’s single-location dinner party

Words Oliver Webb

After 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 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 filmmaking that sucks you in.”

Architectural ambitions

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.”

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.”

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 something. He points to one sequence as an example of the framing difficulties. 

“After Seth falls and hurts his back, they’re all positioned in the living room; he’s sitting on the ground, Olivia’s on the couch, Edward’s behind the couch and Penélope’s on the chair. I was figuring out the camera heights and the angles for the scene. Seth then eventually sits behind Olivia when Penélope’s giving them the big monologue. It was really tough to figure out how to shoot them so that we could connect and distance them all in certain ways.”

Shooting in one location opened up a lot of opportunity, and allowed the cast and crew to focus on crafting the story. Being in one space also meant Newport-Berra could come up with a lighting plan that worked for the whole film.

Initially, the plan was to shoot with lots of practicals and let it play out naturally. “A lot of Woody Allen films feel that way, for example,” he adds. “In Husbands and Wives, there’s a bunch of people in an apartment with the lights on; they each move in and out of the shadows and it feels natural. We shot some tests using that same method but didn’t love the way it looked. It forced the actors to be in certain places because of the shadows and we weren’t getting that nuance of their performance.”

The crew ultimately wanted more volume to the lighting, so to combat the issue they constructed thin-profile soft boxes on the ceilings. Although they were on a stage, they wanted a ceiling to be able to shoot at a low angle.

”We had a capped ceiling with practicals, then built soft boxes that could be easily moved in and out of the ceiling. These created a soft fill and a base layer of light for the apartment, bringing out the texture of the set decoration and giving more shape to the actors’ faces. From there, we added floor-based lighting for each shot using Astera Titan Tubes fitted with Lightsock Dooplo diffusion sleeves.”

Newport-Berra is grateful for the group of people he had around him, and credits gaffer Len Levine, key grip Adam Kolegas, camera operator Mark Goellnicht, first AC Lucas Deans and second AC Robbie Julian for bringing their own expertise to the project. He also enjoyed working with a cast that brought so much to their characters.

“They are all accomplished in their own right, so they know how blocking and staging works in mise-en-scène,” he says. “Seth was also given a chance to do something he doesn’t normally do – and it’s one of his best performances. They all dipped into each other’s genres and played in each other’s worlds. It became this beautiful collage of performances that’s very funny, but also dramatic and heartfelt.”

This article appears in the August/September 2026 issue of Definition