Walton Goggins and his wife, Nadia Conners, were throwing a party in their Los Angeles home when a disoriented older woman showed up, thinking it was her house and asking for help opening the garage door. Her phone book was filled with the names of friends who had died. While the police came and helped the woman, Conners was haunted by the experience and what it says about the inescapability of time’s passage.

Conners would tell the story occasionally, and one night five years later, Walter Hill, the tough guy director of “The Warriors” and “48 Hours,” burst into tears upon hearing it.

“His reaction stayed with me,” Conners recalled in a recent video interview with Goggins discussing “The Uninvited,” the film she wrote and directed inspired by the incident. (The couple now live north of New York City.)

Initially, Conners drew pictures of an old woman sitting in their living room. Then she wrote a play. Goggins says when he read the script, he “cried uncontrollably.” Then he adds with a laugh, “I wasn’t invited once to be a part of the readings; it had to be made into a film for me to get a shot.”

But when Conners turned it into a screenplay, the “Justified” star was nervous about taking it on. “The idea of being this person in her story; I just didn’t want to let her down,” he says.

Goggins co-stars as Sammy, a film agent unhappy in his job, with Elizabeth Reaser as his wife, Rose, an actress whose roles dried up when she became a mother. (She’s even told she’s too old to play a mother of a young child.)

For the party in the film, the most important guests are Pedro Pascal as a dissolute movie star and Rufus Sewell as an egotistical director. Lois Smith, 94, plays Helen, who disrupts the party when she arrives, bewildered to find all these people in what she believes to be her home.

The film opens today at Laemmle Monica. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Walton, you say you were reluctant to act in her movie. Why?

Goggins: My wife has always had a voice that deserves a seat at that table, but I just didn’t know that I fit in that world. And if I was going to do it, I’d have to do it my way.

Conners: You changed Sammy. He brought him to life in a way that gave Rose so much more to react to. And he brought a necessary edge and a feeling of being an outsider, of having to impress this woman.

Goggins: Well, I’ve spent 20 years of my life trying to impress you, Nadia.

Q: What do you think Helen’s interruption of this party ultimately means?

Goggins: What it says to me is that “The Uninvited” is really about an invitation to participate fully in your life.

Conners: I love that. You’ve never said it exactly like that before. Quickly, go put it on the poster.

Goggins: Please give me credit for that.

Q: Nadia, how much is this a personal movie about being a mother and a woman, and how much is it a broader indictment of Hollywood and society?

Conners: It’s both of those things. It’s not an autobiography — I’ve never been an actress — but I was so bewildered by the struggle of becoming a mother in our culture. I did stay at home to take care of our child and what I missed most was a version of myself.

I was already writing a play about isolated mothers in cubicles texting each other when that old woman showed up at our house in real life. And she showed me this multigenerational disorientation that strikes lonely women.

I like writing about Los Angeles and the contradiction between the promise of the city and the reality of its failures. And the way the industry ages women out. Pedro’s character, Lucian, is about to play the same role in a movie that he played in the theater years earlier — but with a younger actress. (Rose earned acclaim opposite him onstage but isn’t even offered an audition this time around.) For women, there are fewer second chances like that.

Q: Ultimately, I felt like it was also about the ability to find, give and receive grace.

Conners: Oh, that makes me want to cry. Please write that this was the reason I wrote the movie.

There’s a secondary theme about teaching our children about the hero’s journey in the post-religious West. Rose makes up a story for her son about a starfish who becomes a star, and slowly that story expands into all the characters’ consciousness. Then you have Rufus’ character, Gerald, who directs this movie that makes a billion dollars and has these little toys, and he thinks he’s God.

So you have this diametric opposition between a very small female story and this really big grandiose male one but they intersect at the end when everyone comes together and they all accept that Helen is in the place that she needs to be, participating in the illusion because it feels true in the moment and gives her grace. That word is the only version of the religious experience that you can hope for in this post-religious society — to feel that grace and to let go of your superficial concerns in the moment.

Goggins: We all want to be seen. We all want to be heard. When Sammy comes back into the room and sees things from Rose’s perspective, really sees and hears her by participating in Helen’s story and saying, “I’m fully here and I should have been listening to your story,” it’s the apology she needs. And for Sammy, he is allowing himself to fully participate in his life for the first time.

Q. You obviously didn’t film in your own home, but you did make the house feel like a character. How did this come about?

Goggins: Our home was a mile away from the home that we shot in, and we had many parties there.

Conners: Our parties were more fun than the one in the movie. And our home in L.A. did not look like that home, but it had a similar nostalgic vibe. We did redecorate the interior.

The home in this movie is a character — it’s the place that Sammy can’t wait to get out of and the place that Helen wants to get back into, with Rose stuck in the middle.

Goggins: This home belongs to our dear friends who gave it to Nadia at a price that was a fifth of what would’ve normally been rented for, which allowed us to make the movie. Nadia had only $800,000 for the budget and 15 days to shoot.

Conners: It was insane. I’d wake up in the middle of the night a lot thinking, one more day. Just give me one more day.