Best Of: ‘The Invite’ screenwriters / Guitarist Lenny Kaye

**Tonya Mosley** (0:01)
From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tonya Mosley in Los Angeles. Today, writing team Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. Their new film, The Invite, takes on the realities of marriage and middle age, told over the course of one dinner party that goes into salacious territory.
Jones and McCormack have been mining stories like this together for decades and finding the funny inside the painful.

**Rashida Jones** (0:27)
We are never above a laugh. There's nothing that's grave enough for us not to laugh about because that's how we process our pain. It's like we laugh through death and sickness and sadness.

**Tonya Mosley** (0:39)
Also, Lenny Kaye, Patti Smith's longtime guitarist. He's made his first solo album at 79

**Terry Gross** (0:46)
It's about time you made your own album. Why did you never do it before and why did you do it now?

**Lenny Kaye** (0:51)
Well, Terry, I've been slightly busy.

**Tonya Mosley** (0:54)
That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.
This is Fresh Air Weekend, I'm Tonya Mosley, and my guests today are writers and performers, Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. They dated for a stint in their 20s. It didn't work out, but what they found instead was one of the longest running creative partnerships in Hollywood. Their first screenplay together, Celeste and Jesse Forever from 2012, followed two people who couldn't stay married, but also couldn't imagine life without each other.
It's the kind of complicated relationship stories that they've returned to throughout their careers.
Their latest screenplay is The Invite, directed by Olivia Wilde, who also stars alongside Seth Rogen, Penelope Cruz, and Edward Norton. The entire film unfolds in a single San Francisco apartment. Two couples gather for dinner, and as the evening unfolds, the stories they've been telling about their relationships and themselves fall apart. It was inspired by the 2020 Spanish film Sentimental, The People Upstairs by Cesc Gay. In this scene, the couple who live upstairs, played by Cruz and Norton, have just arrived at their host's apartment, played by Wilde and Rogen.

**Rashida Jones** (2:16)
It took you a while to come to the door.

**Tonya Mosley** (2:19)
It sounded like you were arguing.

**Rashida Jones** (2:22)
No filter.

**Tonya Mosley** (2:22)
I just want to be honest, we were at the door before we rang and we could hear you were fighting.

**Will McCormack** (2:28)
Oh, we were talking, we were, um...

**Rashida Jones** (2:31)
We were fighting.

**Terry Gross** (2:31)
We were fighting, yeah. A bit of a contentious environment in here, so I understand if that's repellent to you.

**Will McCormack** (2:36)
No hard feelings, you know what I mean?

**Terry Gross** (2:38)
Completely understand, you know?

**Tonya Mosley** (2:40)
We love a contentious environment.

**Will McCormack** (2:44)
We love it.

**Tonya Mosley** (2:46)
Well.

**Will McCormack** (2:46)
Really, it's fine.

**Terry Gross** (2:48)
You hit the jackpot then, my friend.

**Tonya Mosley** (2:51)
As the evening goes on, Awkward Small Talk turns into an unexpected invitation.
Rashida Jones is an actor, writer, producer and director. She won a Grammy for co-directing the documentary, Quincy, about her father, Quincy Jones, and recently earned an Emmy nomination for her performance in Black Mirror. Will McCormack is an Academy Award-winning writer, director and actor. He won the Oscar for the animated short, If Anything Happens, I Love You.
Will McCormack is with me in our Los Angeles studio, and Rashida Jones joins us from London. Welcome both of you to Fresh Air. Thank you.

**Will McCormack** (3:31)
Thank you so much, Tonya. It's so great to be here with you.

**Tonya Mosley** (3:34)
All right. Let's start with this first scene that I just played, because there is a rule that we all live by, and nobody ever says out loud if you hear a couple fighting through a door, you pretend you didn't hear it, and this movie actually opens with that rule being broken. Take us inside of the writer's room when you decide it, that these four will start with that rule being broken.

**Rashida Jones** (4:01)
Well, it's the beauty of this match of these two very different duos, where you have a couple that is boiling over by the time their neighbors arrive, and then you have this couple who has decided to kind of take the honesty of life and turn it inwards into their own kind of fantasy and excitement.
So, you know, it's his theme stated. They're coming in, they're going to perhaps bring a wrecking ball to this already fragile relationship. Right from the start.

**Tonya Mosley** (4:41)
Yeah, well.

**Will McCormack** (4:41)
Yeah, I think Hawk sets the tone right from the jump. You know, tonight we're gonna sing it We feel it. And I think that there's something really refreshing about that to Joe as well. Like it does making them comfortable. But I think that it's so unvarnished and it's so raw that it's actually intriguing. And this is a night where people will have to reveal some hard truths. And Edward gets the party started right away.