‘I feel both amused and disturbed by this’: Olivia Wilde and Edward Norton on making sex comedy The Call | Video

Eearlier this week, Edward Norton she took an overnight flight from Los Angeles to London and was so nervous the next day that she decided to get a massage. He said: “I had never slept for so long, and I almost cried.”

He’s heard similar words in the screenings of his new movie, The Invite, which is about the damage marriage can do to your sex life. “People just burst into tears, and they’re like: ‘I haven’t been laughed at by a great person who has made me feel this way in a long time.'”

He laughs, all tanned and relaxed. “Many people feel alone because of the breakdown in their relationship – they worry that both of you have these problems. Universality is a relief. It allows you to forgive yourself.”

Next to him he is shaking his head Olivia Wildehis expert and director. He said: “My favorite listeners laugh at the words: ‘I thought I was alone!’ It’s like ha-ha-ha-aaah; moan a little. “When you hear yourself laughing at something that you think is revealing, and then someone else does it, the shame you felt is instantly relieved.”

Seeing and feeling seen by The Invite is cathartic. It is also far from attractive. Wilde plays Angela, a frustrated actress married to failed singer Joe (Seth Rogen). They share a 12-year-old son but not much else. After their daughter falls asleep, Angela asks their upstairs neighbors – ex-firefighter Hawk (Norton) and his girlfriend, Piña, a therapist played by Penelope Cruz – over for dinner. It is not a spoiler to say that the evening does not go well, or as predicted. Think Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and additional resources.

Of the four characters, Piña is the only one you’d want to be, perhaps because she’s the film’s collaborator: Belgian-born, Manhattan-based psychologist Esther Perel. Piña talks a lot about Perel’s important ideas – especially that all relationships end but sometimes they can be rekindled with the same person. One of Perel’s ideas, which isn’t spoken out loud but seems to be circulating a lot, is that “death in bed” is an inevitable part of the American dream.

Yes, says Wilde enthusiastically. “It’s an American job: I started this family, I will finish it, I will go through it. The puritanical roots of our culture mean that it is not shameful to appreciate pleasure, but also to accept defeat. “

For women in such a society, he says, there is still “the idea of ​​success in the family.

Wilde and Norton each have two children; she and her ex-husband, Jason Sudeikis, he and his wife of 14 years, producer Shauna Robertson. Wilde continues to say: “When one sees a family with a young child in France, repeated Perel, the thought that the people are having sex, is what caused the child to have a child.” In America, it’s like: no sex because she has a small child. This marks the end of the study of sexuality and focus on the very different views of femininity based on work and parenting. “

The call seems to be mostly US, though it’s based on a Spanish drama that has already been adapted into movies in Italy, Switzerland, France and South Korea. It is also because the film is set in San Francisco and channeling California’s favorite sexologist, the actors discussed the script for two weeks with screenwriters Rashida Jones and Will McCormack.

Adding those hangups to the mix was easy and subtle, said Norton. “There was comfort and confidence that was already there” – they already knew each other; he and Rogen have previously collaborated on small group meals Sausage Partywith whom The Invite shares a dirty DNA. There was a lot to add: very funny jokes, slapstick, even a devastating speech in which Hawk explains the origin of his name. Norton is still amazed that Wilde let him win. “Directors don’t say: ‘Don’t tell me what this important moment is going to be.'” Especially if you’re shooting on 35mm. “Honestly, I’m surprised Seth was okay with that. Seth is a master craftsman and mechanic.”

More than a year later, Norton, 56, still seems to be kicking ass. He keeps uploading and sharing his favorite lines. He talks about “getting into a state of motion” and being “excited” when he shook everything was coming together. The analogy of a jazz quartet is starting to make sense. He has made more than 50 films, he says, but this was the first to be filmed in chronological order (in one group, about three weeks).

“It wouldn’t have been possible if it had been shot in sequence. We would have been more careful. It had a lot to do with how the story ended up.”

Wilde beams at him, his handsome, Bambi-like face shining. He said: “I’m happy and sad about this experience, because I don’t know when I can expect to have something like this.” Having a group of people who are united.

The Call may not be his last film. Following its premiere at Sundance in January, it was sold to A24 for $12m (£9m) after a bidding war and is now a serious, commercial favorite and an award contender. It is felt even by the enthusiastic reception given to Wilde’s 2019, Booksmartand almost wiped his memory, Don’t worry Darling (2022), which did not please critics, listeners or fans of Harry Styles (Wilde is his partner of several years; he has withered due to media scrutiny).

“I’m a big believer in the idea of ​​using storytelling to develop feelings that no medical treatment can completely remove,” says Wilde. “I was surprised at how I was doing, because things happened that I didn’t plan for.”

Among these was the moment Angela called herself a “stupid idiot” before reassuring Hawk that she was fine; and his inner voice. This, says Wilde, was a tribute to the late Diane Keaton, to whom the film was dedicated.

“He must have been the most arrogant person I’ve ever met.” Certainly in many of his great works he recognized himself at once in a most brutal and dangerous way.” They played mother and daughter in Christmas 2015 with the Coopers, and Angela takes a lot from Keaton, as the film does the best jokes of Woody Allen and the best Mike Nichols.

The “cunt” line, is the successor to Keaton’s “what a jerk” ramble in Annie Hall’s. events after tennis – an event, says Norton, that not only includes the first “la-di-da”, but also the first sight of Keaton’s classic hat-tie-waistcoat-slacks (things that Wilde adopted today), and “the moment of a generation because he was the first person to do an inner monologue, to say the quiet part out loud”.

The invitation encourages its audience to speak the unspoken and – Keaton’s killer gift – sit still. Rejecting both, says Norton, is probably because “what this” – he talks on his phone – “is doing to us psychosexually”. There is only one moment that involves technology in this movie, and it’s terrible. That absence adds to the movie’s joy, as does its central setup: the quick bowing of strangers. “Now, our lands are very well maintained,” says Wilde. “You get together in groups of like-minded people. You try out your day before you meet them. You already know everything about them. The idea, today, of bumping into the unknown is really strange.”

It is also, he adds, terrifying. Tech tells us we don’t need other people. “And we are leaving Covid, which told us to be afraid of others, and accept isolation. Friendship involves danger, conflict – all these things that we are now cleaning up our lives.”

In addition, says Wilde, it’s hot again, social media prevents the flexibility needed to keep relationships healthy. “People have become celebrities. Everyone has defined a certain brand. I wonder if putting a profile to who you are, and what you like, means that people are giving themselves less permission to change.”

When he was young, every new step – high school, college, another city – was an opportunity to reinvent himself. “I hate the idea that people feel free to do that because they wrote a document that will be criticized as evidence of what they already had.”

Wilde’s first marriage was at 19, to an Italian nobleman, on a school bus with two witnesses. Today, there is little to sell on such a deal. “There is this idea: ‘How can you change! You were 24 years old you said you wanted this kind of life and now you are 44 years old. How can you want different things!’ The best relationships I’ve ever seen are people who seem to really love each other like they do today.

Settlement is shameful, says Piña in the film: people live on crumbs, forgetting that they deserve more. This has been greatly lifted from Perel and is the philosophy that the psychiatrist put forward for the upbringing of Nazi survivors – a group he divided into “those who did not die, and those who lived again”.

“The idea of ​​living one life and how to live it well is what seems to drive him,” says Wilde. It is ironic, I say, that Perel’s godmother, US sexologist Dr Ruth Westheimer, was also the daughter of European Jews who were sent to concentration camps – even though both of her parents were killed.

Norton shakes his coffee. Did I know, she says, that Perel’s husband, Jack Saul, is also a specialist in post-traumatic stress disorder? He said: “I talked to Esther. “We are living in a world crisis right now. Genocide is on the rise. Armed forces are attacking civilians in Ukraine and Sudan. Hidden, fascist terrorists are shooting American citizens in the streets. This is what we know best. And terror and violence and cruelty oppress.”

So the Invitees aren’t just foaming at the mouth, they say – it’s motivational. People feel out of touch with their sexual desire at times like these. You feel angry and guilty because you didn’t take action because the whole world is telling you: you have to survive this horror.

He and Wilde look at each other and sigh. Time for another massage, maybe.

The invitation is to the cinema