Friendship breakups, though rarer than romantic ones, are nonetheless intense, dramatic—screaming matches, all without the satisfaction of breaking up with an ex. But growing apart from your best friends? Putting a career or romantic partner or new city first? Having them slip slowly down your contact list, until you see them twice a year at a baby shower or a wedding? In a world where platonic love is not given the same life–defining weight as romantic love, one could argue that this is normalized. But maybe it doesn’t have to be.
Street sat down with director Delaney Buffett (C ‘14) and producer Marie Nikolova (C ‘14) to talk about their new film, Adult Best Friends, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2024. It is currently available on most platforms for a fee but will be streaming exclusively on HBO Max on May 2. Adult Best Friends follows Delaney (Delaney Buffett) and Katie (Katie Corwin), two women in their thirties who have been best friends since they met at a middle school sleepover. Now, a recently–engaged Katie—happy but anticipating that the news of her pending marriage will not go over well with her unmoored, codependent best friend, Delaney—takes her on a nostalgic beach trip in an attempt to find a way to break the news on her own terms. Obviously, nothing goes according to plan, and hilarity ensues.
Writers Buffett and Corwin—the real–life Delaney and Katie—have been friends since they were ten years old. According to Buffett, their objective was to produce a film “that talks about what happens once you graduate from childhood to adulthood, and how to maintain friendships with all of life's obstacles.” The plot is fictional, but the love between the actors is believable, bleeding naturally into their performances and easy chemistry.
By contrast, Buffett met producer Nikolova when they were students at Penn together, inserting a complementary motif of female friendship into the project, this one entirely off–screen. They started their working relationship postgraduation, once they were both plugged into the Penn alumni network. Buffett says, “We went to college together and then we were friends in college, but I don't think we ever thought we'd be working together if you saw us freshman year, any year, honestly. [But] here we are.”
When you consider the unpredictability of the industry—as Buffett explains, there’s a lot of “zig–zag” and “no direct path” to success—and their disparate interests as undergraduates, this starts to make sense. Nikolova took a more conventional approach to a preentertainment education: studying English, minoring in Cinema and Media Studies, and eventually taking her first internship at a talent agency. She credits her writing seminar on voyeurism in film as the beginning of her interest in the intersection of film history and writing. She also took journalism classes, and penned a few movie reviews for Street during her time at Penn, including one on Disney’s Frozen that was just barely ahead of the musical’s impending box office annihilation.
On the other hand, while Buffett loves her current job, she didn’t originally know that her career would lead her here. She was a criminology major, vaguely interested in going to law school or entering the CIA, but then stumbled into the entertainment industry through a summer production internship. After pivoting into marketing at HBO and taking online screenwriting classes on the side, she rediscovered her love for writing and movies. Previously, it had never felt like a real job option. She slowly started to transition out of the corporate space and onto sets, finding her passion for directing, producing, and working with Nikolova along the way.
Buffett and Nikolova shed some light on the uphill battle they had to face before they finally were able to get the movie made. “The industry has been super tough,” Nikolova says. “By the way, that's not saying anything bad about [working in] it. It's just that there's been so many shifts and changes and it’s hard to get something greenlit.” After several TV pilot attempts and script drafts written by Buffett and Corwin, they needed a new idea, one that could tell a deeply personal story within the constraints of a simple rotation of sets and a low budget.
Their solution? Write Adult Best Friends. And then keep everything about it small.
And yet, the film never really feels like a low–budget student film, because it never bites off more than it can chew. There are no attempts at big scenes with a lot of extras, no stunts, no extravagant shots. But it’s not lazily executed, either. When the duo drives to the beach, the montage is shot like a collection of art stills. The apartments, the bar, and the beach house are all intimate, intentionally focusing on the conversations between the characters within them rather than the locations themselves. And with an 83–minute runtime, the script has to be tight and witty; there’s no time for any long, slow shots or filler dialogue.
For other filmmakers, this reduced scope would be a significant creative challenge. Buffett sees it as an advantage. “I didn’t go to film school,” she reminds me, “so I am less visually inclined and less visually savvy.” Her strengths are with actors, story, tone, performance, and her hope with the movie was to bring out the best in all of these elements, while also striking the precariously correct comedic tone.
With less focus on cinematography and conceptual visuals, the small comedic details become extremely important in making the film come together. Costumes match personalities, the casting of everyone is phenomenal, and the delivery of particular lines creates meme–able humor out of punchlines on a page. I laughed aloud at Delaney’s perpetually pessimistic roommate Roxy’s (Cazzie David) deadpan delivery of “Like … eating on the ground?” in response to hearing about a picnic date, and again later when ex–frat guy Kyle (Benjamin Norris) replies to Delaney’s request for fireball shots with an incredulous, “You like fireball? I LOVE fireball. Let’s fucking go.” It’s this kind of natural humor and attention to detail that makes the performances buzz with an infectious warmth and energy.
A small film means a small crew as well. When Nikolova attempts to undersell her own involvement in the production, Buffett blatantly refutes this, making sure to emphasize that the film is just as much Nikolova’s as it is hers and Corwin’s. “When you make a movie of this size and this low–budget,” she continues, “I think it's everyone's movie.” Roles shifted around, some things got scrapped together, and everyone took on responsibilities that they may not have had to do if they just had more bodies on set or more writers in the room. But learning as they went and figuring out their style along the way has only inspired them to do more; they tell me excitedly about their upcoming project, also written by Corwin and Buffett and produced by Nikolova. Buffett is hungry to keep directing, and to eventually find her artistic niche by broadening her filmography, and seasoned producer Nikolova has a lot of wisdom and experience to offer.
We also feel this sense of smallness at the plot level, and it’s a necessary asset. While the stakes are relatively light and there’s no true fear of an unhappy resolution, it’s because of the fact that the story doesn’t attempt to take on anything particularly life–shattering that the relationship between the characters can shine brighter than anything else. And in that sense, the film’s impact has the potential to be huge.
Buffett and Corwin put their hearts into the women they play, almost encoding a promise within this fictional conflict that they will continue to value their own friendship in their real lives. The intersection between fiction and reality blurs, but not in a way that’s unprofessional; the film instead can apply to almost any adult friendship, to have viewers contemplate what it means to maintain your friends while moving into each new stage of life. It’s not always easy, but it can be overwhelmingly worth it.
“I look at you and I think that we’re still 12 years old, and I really love that,” Katie says to Delaney at the end of the movie, in the aftermath of their fight. Delaney found out indirectly about the engagement, and felt not only betrayed by Katie moving on without her, but also about the deception. “But we’re not. And I want to get married. And I want to have kids.” Starting to break down into tears, Katie continues, “I’m really happy about this next chapter of my life, but I’m terrified you don’t want to be a part of it.” Delaney has a choice to make here, too: to cling to the memory of when their relationship was unmarred by a husband figure or to stand by her best friend and embrace the new development for all of its change and uncertainty.
Friendship is just as complicated as romance, but it doesn't always come off that way in the media. The happy ending is supposed to be the partner, the kids, the house, the career of your dreams. So while adult friendships can persist alongside all of that, they start to require effort and care and compromise, far more so than adolescent friendships, and especially when you’ve grown up with someone through the decades. And Adult Best Friends, in its beautiful tribute to female adult friendship, shows us when it’s important to hold on, and when it’s time to let go.
