Director Olivia Wilde on building trust, collaboration, and creative freedom
Published on January 26, 2026
Before she was an actress and a director of festival darlings like Booksmart, Olivia Wilde had another career in film—in casting. That may explain why her Sundance directorial debut, The Invite, is stacked with such a masterful line-up: Seth Rogen, Edward Norton, Penélope Cruz, and herself. In the film, written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack and made using Dropbox, this mighty cast brings to life a dinner party gone bad—stupendously bad.
As chatter of a contentious bidding war ripped through Sundance, Wilde stopped by the Dropbox House for a keynote chat with Indiewire’s Chris O’Falt. Here are seven lessons from the multi-hyphenate on doing your best work.
Lesson 1: Creative freedom comes from specificity, not scale.
“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 studios end up recognizing as being valuable, because those are the movies the audiences want. Specificity is something that the studio system is notoriously afraid of. Specificity feels like it’s excluding a large portion of your audience, but it’s the specificity that cuts through this incredibly saturated space.”
Dropbox Dash: The AI teammate that understands your workLesson 2: Design the process around the work you want to make.
“We made this film in 23 days—as a group, collectively workshopping the material together. We shot in order. We shot on film. We had rehearsal time. These are all things that seem reasonable, that one should expect. But everybody gives these things away when they’re trying to get a film financed. We wanted to experiment and make a movie in a way that was conducive to the best possible performances.”
Lesson 3: Workshop early—and question everything.
“[The cast and writers] sat around a table just tearing the script apart and forcing each other to pour in personal specificity that made each character feel authentic. It was wonderful.”
Lesson 4: Trust the audience enough to say less.
“We knew where we wanted to get to, and then it was: how do we get there without ever underestimating the intelligence of the audience? It’s very tempting to overindulge in the dialogue, but by the end we thought there’s value in silence—in saying the least.”
“Specificity feels like it’s excluding a large portion of your audience, but it’s the specificity that cuts through this incredibly saturated space.”
Lesson 5: The work isn’t finished until your collaborators shape it.
“This was the type of material that was always going to adapt to whatever performers came onto it. There’s that idea that you don’t know what your movie is until you have your cast—until the cast tells you what the movie is. That’s always what was going to happen with this script, no matter what.”
Lesson 6: Collaboration is built through clarity, not control.
“Sidney Lumet wrote in his incredible book Making Movies that he loves prep because you’re forced to justify each part of your script to each member of your crew. When your head of department says to you, ‘Why am I building that wall?’ it’s never arbitrary. It’s like, we need that because it’s in the script—because of this. The process with this workshop period was like gut-checking everything. It meant that everyone understood why we were doing what we were doing, and that creates trust across the entire team.”
Lesson 7: Protect the time to do things properly.
“My non-negotiable was allowing for time to prepare the film correctly. For instance, rehearsals don’t tend to exist, even on big films. But I want to know how the cast is going to create this together. There’s no mathematical equation for it. It takes trust. And if you can earn that trust, it benefits everybody. You work long enough, hopefully for many more years, and eventually you get to say, ‘Can I have the time to do this properly?’ And then it really becomes about making the best work possible.”
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