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Oliva Wilde had a very good Sundance. She reflected on it during the Future of Filmmaking Keynote discussion at the IndieWire Studio, presented by Dropbox the day after her film “The Invite” premiered to a rare Sundance standing ovation, rave reviews, and an old school bidding war.
“Last night was the best night of my life, with all due respect to my children, those were great nights too, when they were born. They would get it,” joked Wilde.
“The Invite” is Wilde’s third feature film as director, starring an all-star cast, including herself, Seth Rogen, Edward Norton, and Penelope Cruz, with a bittersweet and hysterical script by the sought-after writing duo Rashida Jones and Will McCormack (“Celeste and Jesse Forever”) based on the beloved Spanish language play and movie “Sentimental.” It’s a project that went into the festival as the number one target on distributor’s list of films to potentially buy, and sparked the first all-night bidding war at Sundance in years (A24 eventually won out). Considering all this, why was Wilde so convinced “The Invite” had to be made outside of the studio system?
Answsered Wilde, “I think it just proves every single time that the movies that are made outside the system, and therefore with the freedom to allow for creative experimentation, they are always the ones that ultimately the studios end up recognizing as being valuable because those are the movies the audiences want, and we see that every year.”
Wilde pointed to this year’s Academy Award nominations as an example. Asked if after the freedom, and unorthodox process with which she made “The Invite” – which, as Wilde details in the video above, included weeks of workshopping the script with the cast and figuring out how exactly to end the movie while on set – what would it take for her to return to making a studio project? Wilde said it was all about “defining her non-negotiables” upfront, which for her meant having enough time to prep and work with the actors in a studio process that rarely budgets for rehearsals.
“The studios want to make really good movies, they’re not trying to take away the process that we all really want. It’s hard at scale for them to imagine, because there’s no mathematical equation for it,” said Wilde. “It takes a lot of trust and I think if you can earn that trust, which I hope at this point I’ve earned a modicum of trust that would allow for me to be able to run a production in the way that I think is just going to benefit everybody.”
Sundance 2026 also marks Wilde’s return to the big screen as an actress, starring in both “The Invite” and Greg Araki’s “I Want Your Sex” after taking four years off from acting in movies, with the exception of voice roles in animated projects. During the discussion, Wilde acknowledged she had been staying out of the limelight following the media circus and controversy surrounding the release of her second directorial feature “Don’t Worry Darling.” It was a streak she first broke to play a satirical version of herself, as a celluloid-crazed director, in the Apple TV+ series “The Studio.”
“I had been laying low and only for those two [“The Studio” creators Rogen and Evan Goldberg] would I have popped out and done that,” said Wilde. “There was so much that was so absurd and ridiculous about the whole circus around that movie [“Don’t Worry Darling”] that it was a chance for me to just laugh. And I just think what ‘The Studio’ has done for everyone is allowed for satirical reflection, and it is a love letter to this business as well, so I wanted to be a part of both, expressing my love for making movies, and also just poke fun at myself.”
It was on the set of “The Studio” that Wilde first met Adam Newport-Berra, the cinematographer who shoot “The Invite.”
“The skill with which that show was being filmed, it was such an impressive crew,” said Wilde. “I was so inspired, and Seth was the one who said, ‘You should ask Adam to [shoot ‘The Invite’], and I thought it was perfect because if we can take that mindset of being so sensitive to what’s happening with the performers, which is what they have to do in ‘The Studio’ [in which every scene is shot in a oner]… It is all about that crew being sensitive to what is happening in the scene, and that’s what we really needed.”
Watch the complete Future of Filmmaking keynote discussion with Olivia in the video above.
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