Olivia Wilde remembers driving to Palm Springs for the first time 20 years ago, taking in the Midcentury Modern architecture, the palm trees, the lush golf courses and the flowing fountains, a verdant city plopped in the middle of a desert. Every time the native New Yorker looked out the window, the same thought ran through her head: If we settled Mars, this is what it would look like.

It felt like the ultimate expression of mans dominance and power, Wilde says over the phone, taking a walk around New York. Its so beautiful, but its also a really strange place. If not for all the creature comforts that man has created, you would die very quickly out here. And its the desert, so its spooky. I recall thinking that someday we have to make a horror movie out there.

That day has arrived with Dont Worry Darling, opening in theaters Sept. 23 after world premiering next week at the Venice Film Festival, a psychological thriller about a couple (Florence Pugh and Harry Styles) living in a utopian desert community called the Victory Project. Its a place where men leave in the mornings in their vintage Corvettes and Pontiacs for mysterious jobs while the women stay home, make the beds, scrub the bathtubs and cook up a pot roast for dinner. The ethos, in the words of the communitys leader, Frank (Chris Pine), is all about mining pure, unbridled potential. That and hedonism. The women must keep the liquor cabinets fully stocked too.

As the song goes, Its the good life if youre one of the men nuzzling your submissive wife over a bacon and eggs breakfast. Otherwise, to use another line from the same Sinatra song, You hide all the sadness you feel. The tension between the colonys seductive glamour and the level of control it imposes on the women who live there (imagine the most draconian HOA and you get the idea) gradually becomes exposed as Pughs character begins to question her surroundings over the course of the films two-hour running time.

Palm Springs stands in for the otherworldly setting of the Victory Project in Dont Worry Darling, an elite community with some dark secrets.

(Merrick Morton/Warner Bros. Pictures)

There was a moment when Dont Worry Darling might not have happened in Palm Springs. Wilde, writer Katie Silberman and production designer Katie Byron, the trio who collaborated on Wildes directorial debut, the acclaimed 2019 teen comedy Booksmart, had embarked on an early road trip to the desert to start scouting locations. It was July 2020, hotter than hell and the beginning of the pandemic, which made the Victory Projects life of revolving dinner parties feel like a complete fantasy. Taking in all the butterfly rooflines of communities like Canyon View Estates, they were certain they had found the movies setting.

But because of COVID, Wilde says, very reasonable powers that be suggested moving the production to New Zealand to save money. Wilde understood the logic but resisted, believing that, on a subconscious level, Palm Springs connected to what she calls the patriarchal masculinity that was essential to the story she was telling.

For me, New Zealand is this ecological gem thats evidence of natures power, Wilde says, and feels connected to Mother Nature and femininity. I think if I made a sequel about the matriarchy, New Zealand would be a reasonable place to go because its a place where you go to be humbled by nature. Thats the opposite of what the character Frank wants. He wants people to feel that nature is humbled in their presence, that man has molded nature to his will.

Chris Pine as Frank, the charismatic leader of the Victory Project, in Dont Worry Darling.

(Warner Bros. Pictures)

The location for Franks home was vitally important, and Wilde lucked out in securing the Kaufmann Desert House, a marvel of Modernism, a home made from glass, steel and Utah stone, epitomizing the indoor-outdoor Southern California lifestyle aesthetic. The home, built in 1946 to the designs of Richard Neutra, has been immortalized in photographs, including Slim Aarons Poolside Gossip, a shot that, coincidentally, Wilde had pinned to her wall while she was developing Dont Worry Darling.

To have that image on the wall and then be able to crawl inside it felt like that scene in Mary Poppins when they jump into the chalk drawings on the sidewalk, Wilde says.

The movie makes use of a couple of other Palm Springs landmarks, the City Hall and the Visitors Center, both designed by renowned architect Albert Frey. But for another key location, the building that stands in as the Victory Projects mysterious headquarters (employees only!), the films location manager, Chris Baugh, ventured a couple of hours north to the Mojave Desert community of Newberry Springs. There, atop a 150-foot cinder cone, sits a building known as the Volcano House, a saucer-like structure that appears to have materialized from another planet or dimension.

The Volcano House in Newberry Springs serves at the setting for the Victory Project headquarters in Dont Worry Darling.

(Warner Bros. Pictures)

We got shivers down our spines when we first saw it, Byron says. Adds cinematographer Matthew Libatique: It just feels like it melts into the landscape. Its a trek to get out there, but when everyone saw it, they knew: This is it. This is what the Victory Projects headquarters would look like.

The triumph associated with the communitys name appears to be confined, as the films trailer hints, to a small slice of the population. And yet, Wilde says, its easy to be seduced by iconography of the midcentury, Rat Pack era, which is why she hoped to keep Dont Worry Darling from being didactic in its depiction of its patriarchal world.

Filming at the Kaufmann Desert House as the films community gathers for a speech from Frank (Chris Pine).

(Merrick Morton/Warner Bros. Pictures)

Theres a recklessness to the debauchery that feels almost aspirational to us today, Wilde says, Because it feels like a world without consequence. Id be lying if I said I didnt find it really compelling and alluring. I didnt want to make a preachy feminist parable that depicts men as villains. I think the film is about our collective complicity in this futuristic infrastructure that objectifies women.

And what I found so interesting was the complicity in myself, she continues. That feeling of, Oh, Im all about new-wave feminism and smash the patriarchy. But here I am loving this era and you can use the Rat Pack as an example of it that was really horrendous for women. That tension between knowing somethings wrong but still being very seduced by it is where the movie sits. I want the audience to be tugged back and forth between those emotions.

See more here:

How 'Don't Worry Darling' Palm Springs locations add to thrills - Los Angeles Times