Olivia Wilde on creating the most controversial film of the year

By Robert Moran

From left, Gemma Chan, Harry Styles, Sydney Chandler, director Olivia Wilde, Chris Pine, Florence Pugh and Nick Kroll at the Venice Film Festival.

All right, let’s get the stuff you’re here for out of the way. For starters, there’s something to be said about timing. When I interviewed Olivia Wilde back in mid-August for Don’t Worry Darling, the most pressing controversy surrounding the film was rather innocuous. It was, as we all know, the project where Wilde, the film’s director, began a relationship with her actor, the teen-heart-throb Harry Styles.

Because Styles’ fans are, let’s say, deeply devoted, Wilde had already become a daily trending topic on Twitter for months, and not in a good way. Head to Twitter and type in “Olivia Wilde dancing” and feel the waves of anonymous, intergenerational resentment. The fact that Wilde, a 38-year-old mother-of-two, might be seen dancing off-stage at the arena concerts of the fantasy boy she’d stolen from them was too much for some young ’uns. The bitter commentary veered from quips like “so embarrassing” to GIFs of Elaine dancing on Seinfeld.

Olivia Wilde pulls double-duty as an actor and director in Don’t Worry Darling.

And so, during our tight, 20-odd minute Zoom chat at 10pm on Monday, August 15 – which, just to set the mood, I took in my mouldy, wet bathroom (my kids were asleep, and it was the only remaining room in the house with a door), with Wilde unknowingly (and figuratively) sitting on a stool in my shower, and I, precariously hovering in front of the toilet roll holder to maintain the illusion that I was speaking from any ordinary, nothing-to-question-here room – I asked her about it.

“I’m sure you’re aware that you’ve been trending on Twitter, like, almost every morning since the news of you and Harry first came out, mostly due to, I guess, young fans upset that you’ve stolen their man or something?” I asked and even paused to giggle to show her I too was aware of the absurdity of the whole thing. “Are you nervous that it’s pulling focus away from the film itself?”

Wilde, Chris Pine and Florence Pugh at the film’s Venice premiere.Credit:Invision

Needless to say, Wilde did not care to discuss this line of questioning.

“Rob, I totally get why you want to ask that, but I’d rather we just keep it to the film,” she said from her hotel room in Toronto (coincidentally, on the same day Styles was due to perform at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena; someone add “investigative reporter” to my title). Wilde wasn’t brusque in her response, just setting the parameters. “I get it. Like, I get it,” she added firmly. “But let’s just keep it to the film.”

Of course, a mere month’s retrospect sure changes the story, doesn’t it? About a week later, Variety ran their wild cover interview with Wilde, which instigated the unending circus that has plagued the film’s pre-release run to date. A brief recap, if we must:

1. There were the rumours of a tiff with the film’s star, Florence Pugh, supposedly sparked by her horror at watching her director and her co-star hook up on set and exacerbated by Wilde’s public focus on the film’s female-gaze sex scenes. “Men don’t come in this film,” Wilde proudly told Variety. Pugh told Harper’s Bazaar: “When it’s reduced to your sex scenes, or to watch the most famous man in the world go down on someone … It’s not why I’m in this industry.”

2. There was the ghost of Shia LaBeouf returning from Hollywood purgatory to refute Wilde’s claims that he had been “fired” (and replaced with Styles) before the film started shooting due to his “combative energy”, and leaking a private video chat with Wilde as receipts.

3. There was the nonstop carnival that was the movie’s Venice Film Festival premiere, which involved the internet parsing over the cast’s relationships with Zapruder-like intensity, including Pugh’s limited campaigning on behalf of the film (she has been labelled a “quiet quitting icon” for her less-than-bare commitment to the film’s pre-release PR) and a viral video that suggested Styles had spat on co-star Chris Pine, which prompted the incredibly insane clarification, “Harry Styles did not spit on Chris Pine”, from Pine’s PR rep.

Wilde didn’t talk to me about any of this, perhaps because a) at that early point in the film’s press run she might’ve thought she could still keep a lid on such tabloid-y distractions, or b) they hadn’t happened yet, time being linear and all. Maybe, also, I have a face that says to celebrities, “Nah, don’t trust this guy”, or maybe Wilde had noticed I was interviewing her from a toilet seat. Either way, and this might be your invitation to exit, the circus portion of the discussion more or less ends here.

At a private preview screening of Don’t Worry Darling in a theatre also hosting a personal rep for cinematographer Matthew Libatique and a Warner Bros studio employee there to run the reels, the only reaction we could muster among us as its final credits rolled was a “well, that was interesting!” with a polite chuckle. If visually stunning and thematically intriguing, the film closes with a twist ending that in early reviews has already proven divisive: to some, it punctuates the film’s pulpish topicality and Wilde’s ambitious bravado; to others, it undercuts everything that came before it, turning what might’ve been a stark allegory into “strictly nonsense”, as Entertainment Weekly scathingly wrote.

For Wilde, the big swing was part of the film’s appeal. Coming off her 2019 indie debut Booksmart, a critical success starring Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever as two high-school overachievers who’ve realised they’ve overlooked a key part of their youth (i.e. the irresponsible partying), Wilde had already defied the typical expectations of the actor-turned-director, the movie star who decides they’ve got what it takes to step behind the camera.

“I mean, there were no expectations of me before Booksmart whatsoever – like, literally nothing. I don’t think anyone had any idea of what I could do,” Wilde recalls.

By any standards, Booksmart is a modern masterpiece – a film perfectly realised in tone, visuals and performances; warmly empathetic in its depiction of female coming-of-age; and so creatively open to playing with filmmaking conventions. Booksmart’s unlikely success convinced Wilde her follow-up had to be ambitious.

“I wanted to take a big leap, to try something completely different. It’s also, like comedies, another genre I love so much, psychological thrillers, and I was hopeful I’d have the chance to play in that genre,” she says. “And so I feel lucky we got to do it because, also, it’s really rare now to get distribution for something that isn’t a franchise, you know? It’s kind of a miracle that we actually get to have this original piece of content open globally.”

Not to harp on the relevance of my rejected question but let’s face it: the tacky pre-release hoopla hasn’t done any favours to Wilde’s ambitious intentions. Written again with her Booksmart collaborator Katie Silberman, Don’t Worry Darling is a vicious skewering of patriarchal nostalgia, and the central myth behind Trumpism’s “MAGA”, defined by Wilde’s feminist lens.

Set in an idyllic 1950s TV dream of a world, amid the manicured lawns and palm trees of West Coast suburbia, the film follows Alice (Pugh) and Jack (Styles), newlyweds living and working among the mysterious Victory Project, led by the daunting, messianic Frank (Chris Pine, highlighting his underrated charm).

Wilde directs Pine behind the scenes on Don’t Worry Darling.

“[The film] has everything to do with modern incel culture and this kind of problematic nostalgia for a time in the past when men ruled the Earth without threat,” Wilde explains. “There’s this idea that there was a time when things were perfect – which, you know, nostalgia is only ever positive for straight, white men. There’s no one else that any other time was better for.”

Incels, a loose online collective of toxic young males who describe themselves as “involuntary celibates”, gained notoriety in mainstream spaces in recent years (in 2019, Vox described them as “a support group for the dateless [that] became one of the internet’s most dangerous subcultures”) as an example of the anonymous radicalisation fostered by social media and online forums such as 4chan. Don’t Worry Darling takes their ethos – a call for the return of traditional masculinity, and a reversal of “woke” cultural gains – as the stuff of cinematic horror.

Styles and Pugh play newlyweds Jack and Alice in the film.

Pine’s Frank, a charismatic leader with his gang of dweeby man-boy followers, evokes the subculture’s figurehead Jordan Peterson (who, coincidentally, is touring Australia in an arena tour in November; Peterson has praised the casting of “attractive” Pine as his stand-in, although attacked the “latest bit of propaganda disseminated by the woke, self-righteous bores and bullies who now dominate Hollywood”). The film does a stylish job of depicting a society that has returned to the sexual dynamics of the “idyll” ’50s, where gender roles were defined to the point of suffocation. (It’s effective if not subtle: just watch Pugh wrap her head in cling wrap, or get almost squeezed to death against the windows she’s cleaning.)

What convinced Wilde this would make a good setting for a Hollywood psychological thriller?

“Well, I mean, I don’t think there’s anything more terrifying than a disenfranchised white man,” she says with a laugh. “Chris’ character is very much based on Peterson and a combination, also, of some different cult leaders and political leaders. It’s that pseudo-intellectual, deeply misogynistic rhetoric that is somehow disguised as scientific theory or something biological. It’s so disturbing.”

Wilde and Silberman deep-dove into 4chan forums and YouTube algorithms as part of their script research. The pandemic’s reinforcement of social distance and online remoteness only intensified the relevance of their themes.

“I think what we’ve seen, with the internet creating an opportunity for wide reach and for these sub-communities to be built and for people to hide behind usernames, is there’s a really dangerous kind of mob mentality out there and I think it’s the source of some of the most devastating tragedies happening in our world today,” says Wilde.

Wilde, Pugh, prop master Joshua Bramer and cinematographer Matthew Libatigue on the set of Don’t Worry Darling.

“I’m fascinated by the rise of strange internet cults, like QAnon, and how do we raise a generation that is more discerning about information shared on the internet, a generation that understands that algorithms are distorting the information they’re seeing, and a generation that doesn’t rely on community solely in this kind of faceless world? I felt really inspired to dive into what I think is a really dangerous trend, and one that is very modern because it requires a technology which we’ve embraced without truly understanding its ramifications.”

As far as its message’s reach, Don’t Worry Darling might be preaching to the converted. But the numbers of misogynistic, young trolls online aren’t insignificant. Is Wilde intrigued to see how they’ll respond to the film?

She laughs loudly. “Intrigued, yes – in a twisted way. But quite often people fail to see themselves in material that’s very clearly based on them. I wonder … But also, you know, I think that community probably isn’t my greatest fan base anyway, so I doubt they’ll be first in line to see it.”

Don’t Worry Darling’s box office take will itself be intriguing; we might yet get an answer to the perennial question of whether all publicity is good publicity. We’ll also see whether the media circus scares off Hollywood’s studios on Wilde and dents the forward momentum her directorial career had established following Booksmart. Among the directing projects she has already been linked to are Perfect, a biopic on American gymnast Kerri Strug, and an untitled Sony/Marvel project rumoured to be a Spider-Woman film.

Wilde waves to fans at the film’s Venice premiere.Credit:Getty Images Europe

“We have so many fun things on the burner,” she says, giving away nothing. “At this point, I just want to keep trying things that push me further because I’m learning so much as I go and I just want to continue to challenge myself. I feel lucky I’ve been able to choose exactly what I want to do, which is great, and I think I’m in a position now where I can get films greenlit that wouldn’t otherwise have a chance in hell, which is a real honour.

“But, you know, once [Don’t Worry Darling] is released, it will feel like the end of an era. I’ve been making this movie for three years, and I’m looking forward to kind of handing it over to the world and then getting back to work on the next thing.”

The goal, says Wilde, is to not let her adventurous eye be diminished by any external criticism.

“I still feel proud to have earned my directing title with Booksmart. It was, in a way, so liberating to be able to try something without any expectations. But I think if you can kind of maintain that as an artist – internally, at least – you’ll continue to take risks.

“I remember when I got my DGA [Directors Guild of America] card, I cried – because Nora Ephron was the photograph on the card that year, and I felt inducted into a community that I so deeply respect and it felt really incredible, very humbling,” she says. “And so now it’s like, OK, you’ve earned your place, stay here and see if you can make something else worth watching. And I just hope I can keep taking risks and not ever create anything from a place of fear.”

Let’s hope the truly bizarre experience of Don’t Worry Darling hasn’t crippled Wilde’s creative ambition, because that would be worrying.

Don’t Worry Darling is out in cinemas on October 6.

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