Delaney Buffett premiered her feature directorial debut Adult Best Friends at Tribeca and went on to collect the Golden Key for Emerging Talent at the Key West Film Festival, and the film’s whole philosophy is right there in the episode title. Comedy comes first in her heart, but on the page and in the edit, story comes first.
It’s about caring for the people that you’re laughing with.
A Movie Made by Actual Best Friends
Buffett wrote the film with Katie Corwin, her best friend since childhood and her writing partner of seven years, and the two of them star as fictionalized versions of themselves, named Delaney and Katie. The setup mirrors their bond: levelheaded Katie, engaged to John, takes her codependent, free-spirited best friend on a nostalgic girls’ trip to their childhood beach town to break the news gently, and it does not go gently. Buffett is candid that she’s had advantages, the daughter of musician Jimmy Buffett, she names her leg up plainly rather than pretending it away, and the grace she brings to that subject is the same grace she brings to the friendship at the film’s core.
The pair had been making things together for years, starting with a web series, the low-stakes sandbox Buffett recommends to anyone: start small, have nothing to lose, build a portfolio, find your voice. Adult Best Friends grew out of exactly that, with producer Marie Nikolova, who had worked with Zachary Quinto, helping turn a tiny indie idea into a feature. Quinto, whose company helped produce, came aboard as Katie’s brother Henry, dispensing unwanted secondhand therapy.
How a Hard Comedy Became a Love Story
Here’s the turn that defines the film. On the page, Adult Best Friends was a hard comedy with emotional undertones. But because Buffett and Corwin are real best friends who, like most best friends, never actually say the loving things out loud, performing that dialogue to each other’s faces undid them.
This was more of a romantic comedy between friends than it was a hard comedy.
They cried on set saying things they’d only ever implied in two decades of friendship, and Buffett realized in the edit that she was making a love story. Which is the deeper meaning of story first, jokes second: the comedy isn’t the payload, it’s the delivery system for a feeling too embarrassing to state plainly. That’s how the friendship itself works, you don’t say “I love you and I’m scared of losing you,” you make an inside joke, and the film smuggles the ache inside the laughs. Using their real names collapses the distance between the bit and the wound, so you can’t quite tell where the characters end and the actual decades-long friendship begins, and that blur is the source of both the laughing and the crying. The real subject isn’t friendship so much as the specific grief of adult friendship, the way the people who were once the center of your life become, by the ordinary math of partners and jobs and time, someone you have to schedule.
The Company of Two-Lane Directors
Buffett’s model for all this is the filmmaker who can run in two lanes at once, and her favorite film is the proof of concept.
The most direct influence on Adult Best Friends is Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids, the landmark comedy where an engagement strains a central female friendship, the same emotional engine humming under all the raunch. But the film she returns to again and again, the one she’s seen a hundred times, is Mike Nichols’s The Birdcage, which she prizes because it’s hilarious and yet entirely about the terror of not being accepted by your family, the jokes flowing straight out of the specificity of its characters. She rattles off the patron saints of the form, Nichols, who also made Closer; Billy Wilder, who made both Some Like It Hot and Sunset Boulevard; Martin McDonagh, whose In Bruges and Three Billboards turn on a dime from profound to funny. Their lesson is the one she keeps relearning: comedy isn’t the opposite of seriousness, it’s the smuggler of it. The film belongs in conversation with Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart, another comedy that earns its laughs by genuinely loving its two best friends, and with Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, a quiet drama about two men on a trip discovering how adulthood pulls friends apart.
Story First, in the Edit
Buffett admits she had to fight her own instincts. Time and again in the cut she’d chase the funniest possible version of a scene, jokes first, story second, until she hit a wall: one pivotal scene simply wasn’t working, and only in the last week of editing did she see why. She’d buried its purpose under improv and gags, turning a story beat into a sketch, so she stripped the jokes back out and restored the point of the scene. That’s the discipline. Pacing is the other half, and she cites Frank Capra’s rule that to feel like real life, a film has to move at double the speed of real life. She learned to cut three jokes down to the single funniest one so it could actually land, and to kill the lines she loved when they served her ego instead of the movie.
The Unglamorous Craft
For a first-timer wearing the director, writer, and lead hats at once, the production was a trial by heat. They shot in the Mississippi and New Orleans summer, one camera, a skeleton schedule, eight people crammed into an Airbnb with no air conditioning in 105-degree weather for the ensemble bachelor-party scene, the hardest day of the shoot, where Buffett looked around with no idea whether the coverage would even cut together. It did, because the comedic actors were all so strong, but it taught her the job’s real secret: leadership is a meditative act. You field an endless barrage of questions, and the moment you show anger or panic it trickles down to the whole set, so she learned to slow down, leave her ego at the door, and hold a calm end-of-day conversation with her cinematographer and AD about what everyone, herself included, could do better. Her AD even put her through a blocking boot camp, since she’d arrived thinking she could wing it because it’s comedy, and a low-budget shoot has no time to wing anything. Post-production deepened her love of the collaboration. The sound team kept pitching jokes she’d never have dreamed up, filling awkward beats with comic touches, and her music supervisor answered her impossible dream-soundtrack wishes, the real songs being unlicensable without a fortune, with playlists of substitutes that often landed better than her originals. Hearing strangers improve the thing she’d written was, she says, the genuine best part of the whole long process, a humbling reminder of just how many gifted, specialized hands a finished film quietly passes through.
Her advice to her younger self is the least glamorous and most useful thing she could offer: patience, resilience, and kindness, because the work is a long sequence of nos, and the only way through is to keep writing, keep making, and trust that the more time you give a thing, the better it gets.
