Movie Spotlight: The Invite

The wedding invitation had her name on the return address. She had left him with hardly a word, and barely a year later she was marrying someone else. And she wanted him there.

Mark Cornell got a real invitation that year too, though not from an ex. He was home sick, housebound, staring at an envelope that had nothing to do with heartbreak, and he asked himself a different question: what if it had come from her instead? The Invite is what happened when he answered it. Cornell wrote, directed, and stars in the film, a comedy about love, loss, and what a man does when mid-life stops being theoretical.

Nobody Else Could Play This Part

Cornell studied theater and film at UCLA and spent years writing screenplays that circulated around Hollywood without landing anywhere. Directing a feature himself felt out of reach: no financing, no crew, no equipment beyond an idea. Then the iPhone showed up, along with an app called FilmicPro, and the math changed. He rounded up old theater friends and started shooting shorts. By then he had left Los Angeles behind for North Carolina.

“I never actually made it to the wedding,” Cornell said. “But I did make the feature. It took four years. But I did it.”

Playing Himself

“I did play myself, but the character isn’t me,” Cornell said. The invitation that landed in his own mailbox came from friends. Sick and alone in the house, he pictured a different sender and started filming his reaction. “I just went around the house shooting various overblown reactions to the invite, with voice over,” he said. “It was great fun.”

Melissa Lozoff plays Amy, the new girl. Mark Jantzen plays James, his over-sexed best buddy. Ruth Kravitz, Cornell’s real-life neighbor, plays a neighbor who can’t stand him. He wrote the script as he shot it, a method he does not recommend, and ended up with roughly two features worth of footage before the storylines converged into one.

The iPhone Did the Work

Cornell shot across Chapel Hill, Durham, Orlando, Morro Bay, Ghost Ranch, and rural Iowa, mostly alone, with no crew and nothing but the phone in his pocket. “I was my own mobile production company,” he said. The iPhone went everywhere he did, so an idea could get filmed before it passed.

Festival Response

The Invite played Denver Indie Film Festival, Toronto Indie Filmmakers Festival, and Seattle Film Festival, plus a first screening at the Varsity in Chapel Hill. “The response was overwhelming,” Cornell said.

What to Know Before You Press Play

“It was a labor of love, for sure,” Cornell said. Four years, mostly solo, shot on a phone, building toward a wedding that only exists on screen.

Comedy

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Streaming now on Relay.