Delaney Buffett & Katie Corwin On Dramatizing Their Friendship In Adult Best Friends

Adult Best Friends is a new dramedy debuting at Tribeca Film Festival 2024. The movie is about two lifelong best friends, Katie and Delaney, whose dynamic is threatened when Katie’s boyfriend John proposes. Nothing goes according to plan as Katie plans a beach trip with Delaney with the intention of breaking the news to her change-averse best friend as gently as possible.

The twist to all of this is that Katie and Delaney aren’t just the characters at the heart of Adult Best Friends—they’re the creators. Katie Corwin and Delaney Buffett star in and co-wrote the film, which was also directed by Buffett in her feature debut. The semi-autobiographical project is one of a few at Tribeca in 2024 (see: I Need Your Love about NYC-based musician Camille Trust), but it’s unique in the way it explores the powerful yet complicated dynamic of an ever-evolving friendship.

Screen Rant interviewed Delaney Buffett and Katie Corwin about their work making and starring in Adult Best Friends. The pair reflected on their friendship, bringing actors like Zachary Quinto, and more.

Katie Corwin & Delaney Buffett Talk Blending Reality And Fiction

Screen Rant: Clearly there are autobiographical elements to this story, but where does that end, and fiction begin?

Delaney Buffett: The plot is fiction. We’ve never gone on that trip. She didn’t lie to me.

Katie Corwin: I’m not a compulsive liar.

Delaney Buffett: I think the emotional beats are more autobiographical than the actual plot itself. Katie got married and I am not married, and I didn’t react that way, but I think [we touched on] a lot of the feelings that you have when you’re growing up and a friend surpasses you or goes through a milestone before you’re able to. I think we put a lot of our own personal feelings and experiences in those characters. But the plot, we took some liberty with, and a lot of the comedy. We wanted it to be a humorous look into the growing pains of friendship into adulthood, so we certainly elaborated.

Katie Corwin: We have really been best friends since fifth grade, so that is true. And like any kind of best friendship—but I feel like especially for girls—you really are like one unit when you’re younger. You’re inseparable. You dress the same, you talk the same, you do everything the same. When you get older, you individualize, or at least you should, but it’s kind of scary. You don’t want to change, and you don’t want to hurt the other or lessen your grip a little bit for fear of having the whole thing slip away.

So, I think it is scary. Something we talk about a lot is how to change a friendship into adulthood so it can survive. We never really had a risk of falling out, but there was definitely a moment of, “Okay, if you’re going to get married and if this is really going to be your partner, I can’t be your right-hand man unless you’re doing a throuple, which would be a whole conversation. Realistically, we need to make some room.”

We wanted to talk about navigating that chapter of adulthood when you have to redefine how the friendship will survive, but we wanted to do it in a funny way. And I think it’s universal. It’s not just for women, obviously. It happens when guys get married, when anyone has a kid, [and] that kind of thing. But all of the lying is fake.

Delaney Buffett: And I’m not an awful person.

Katie Corwin: Right.

You co-wrote the script, and you’re both hilarious, but it’s also really emotional. How much back and forth did it take to find the right balance between the two?

Delaney Buffett: I think it became more emotional on set than we intended in the script. I think it became more of a romantic comedy between friends. That element of emotion was always there—we wanted to write something with heart, and we wanted to write something that people could watch and relate to—but we write pretty hard comedy, usually, so it was a surprise to me when we were on set in certain scenes and we’d both just start crying. I was like, “Okay, I’m not going to use these.”

Then, you get in the edit, and you’re like, “Wow. I think this is a more emotional movie than I originally thought.” I think it took getting to set and acting together to get to that point and realize that there was a stronger emotional undertone to the movie than we thought.

Katie Corwin: We also joke around so much, especially with one another. We don’t talk about our friendship with one another very much [except for] when we were breaking this script. So, for as much time as we spent together, it was the first time we acknowledged the importance of the friendship to one another. It just so happened that we were recording it.

A lot of the scenes, especially when we were filming more of the end of the movie, were surprisingly emotional and not really as we imagined them. But I’m really happy with how it turned out. Our friendship is one of the most important things in my life and has been one of the most formative things in my life. For her too, not just me. I like that the movie pays homage to it in a serious way at the end.

Delaney, this is your first feature. How much did the creation of this differ from your expectations?

Delaney Buffett: Oof. It was really hard. I knew it would be hard. Everyone warned me it would be hard. I had done a lot of short doc stuff, which is harder and easier at the same time. Acting, directing, and doing a lot of the production was splitting myself many ways, so I think it was really important to me at the end of the day to come back and focus on the story and the tone of everything.

And I had an amazing [team]. It was all of my friends in it and behind the camera, and I think that, in and of itself, made it a very, very pleasant experience for me. They were all incredibly supportive. I had a lot of shortcomings as a first-time feature director, and I was able to overcome them because people picked up the slack and we were very honest and communicative with each other.

If someone had said a piece of camera equipment, I wouldn’t be like, “Oh, yeah. I know what that is.” I would be like, “I don’t know what that is. What is that? Explain it to me.” I think all of us wanted to learn and make it the best experience possible. It was as hard or harder than I was warned, but at the end of the day, I had the cast and crew that propped me up [so] I was able to finish everything in a way that I’m very happy with.

Katie, this movie is about you, it’s about your friendship, but then your friend is also directing you. How was that?

Katie Corwin: I think—and maybe Delaney will disagree—her directing me is much easier than anyone else directing me, because we have such a wealth of shared knowledge, references, stories. If she’s trying to elicit a certain reaction or emotion, she can be [like], “Remember in eighth grade when Gregory X, Y, and Z?” and I’m like, “Totally.” You have so many ways that she can get into my brain, so it was awesome being directed by her.

And, like Delaney said, we have so many friends on set that it was really fun to riff and see what would come out and improvise a little bit. We really just had so much fun. Delaney and our producer, Marie Nikolova really just threw this movie on their backs, and they were really leading with such a great example of not complaining and just getting the job done.

Delaney is a ridiculously hard worker, but it was really impressive [that] in the heat, in the blurry [chaos of] everything going on, Delaney was doing 1,100 jobs and always had a smile and was patient with people. Like Delaney said, it was a million times harder than I expected. After we wrapped our first day, I texted my husband, “This is extremely hard.” But overall, it was such an incredible experience and such a product of hard work and passion.

Corwin & Buffett Wanted To “Show People How Funny” Zachary Quinto Is

The rest of your cast is fantastic. This is maybe the funniest I’ve ever seen Zachary Quinto be, and Mason Gooding is so good. What was the process of finding and working with them?

Delaney Buffett: Marie Nikolova, our producer, is one of my friends from college, and she works with Zachary Quinto at his production company. We had a couple projects with them that we were working on, and we had said to Marie, “We want to make an indie film, and we’d love to write Zach a role.” She was like, “Okay, just make it funny. He likes doing comedy. He doesn’t do enough comedy.”

Katie Corwin: In working with him when he was mentoring us, but we had realized, too… At first, he was so intimidating—he has this kind of intensity to him—but he is so funny. We just had no idea that after meeting with him for a few times, we were like, “Oh my God. If we could show people how funny he is… it would be such a dream if we’re able to write something where he could really do that.” I was really, really happy.

Delaney Buffett: He’s so great. We worked on that character with him and he was so generous with his time in being like, “Yes, this is great. Let’s change this.” He’s also an EP on the movie, so he was helpful, and he and Marie were instrumental in casting. Marie, from her computer, cast this entire movie and I think did an incredible job in terms of reaching out and the connections.

Cory Walls, who plays the Airbnb owner, and Connor Hines, who plays Katie’s forbidden love, were two of our closest friends. So, we had a lot of friends in the movie as well. But Zach did it because Maria was producing it, and then she found all these insanely funny comedians. I had been friends with Cazzie, so she also did us a favor by being in it. It was a lot of emailing, agents, collecting, but a lot of it was through personal relationships as well, which made it that much more of a fun and personal experience on set.

Delaney Buffett Might Not Act In And Direct The Same Project Again

Have you two thought about the next thing you want to do together? Would you be playing yourselves again? You both work so well on screen together, so I hope there’s more projects on the way.

Delaney Buffett: I think definitely, eventually. I think the next thing we have written, I think… I’ll be honest. I don’t know if I would ever star in something I directed again until I have a bit more experience on both sides, just because it is such a challenge. [With] the next few things we’ve written, I would love for Katie to be in them. I’m biased, but I think Katie’s so funny. And I think we really like the idea of writing an action comedy, and I don’t think I could really handle all the roles in something like that.

Katie Corwin: Get your wire team.

About Adult Best Friends

Katie and Delaney, inseparable since childhood, find their paths diverging in their 30s. Despite the differences in their lives, their friendship is still a top priority. They’ve always been the most important person in each other’s lives. That is, until Katie’s boyfriend proposes. To soften the blow, Katie plans a nostalgic trip to their childhood beach town, intending to share the news in a familiar setting. But the journey takes unexpected turns, courtesy of a bizarre rental homeowner, a chance encounter with a former classmate, a bachelor party, and a few potential love interests.