With an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay to her name, Nicole Holofcener knows a good script when she sees one. So when she caught word of Lesley Arfin’s “Worried” pilot, she made it clear that she wanted to direct it.
“We were at a party and we had a mutual friend who said ‘This woman wrote the best pilot I’ve ever read,’” Holofcener said in the IndieWire Studio, presented by Dropbox. “And I said ‘Can I direct it?’ I mean, who doesn’t want to direct the best pilot ever written?”
Holofcener was joined in the IndieWire Studio by Arfin, Alexander Tanner (who wrote the original novel that inspired the series), and stars Gideon Adlon and Rachel Kaly. The five women discussed the process that led to “Worried” becoming one of the hottest episodic projects of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
“’Worried’ is a novel that I started working on in 2019 about the experience of sharing a 150 square foot studio apartment with my sibling,” Tanner said. “It’s about two sisters that move in together. Poppy needs a place to stay, Jules is a beleaguered email job haver. And they have adventures and hijinks and they drive each other crazy. The book is set over the course of the year, but we’re doing something different with the adaptation and layering things in.”
Arfin explained that she is picky with the material she chooses, and had never adapted someone else’s work before, but the humor and relatability of Tanner’s book was too good to pass up.
“It’s so funny. I have a sister as well. I don’t like a lot of the stuff that is sent to me to read, but I read ten pages of her book and I was like ‘Where is she?!’ I didn’t know if I was able to do anything with it. I had never adapted anything before. But I just think Alex is a phenomenal writer, a really funny writer and person. And the fact that it was sent to me made me feel good.”
Watch IndieWire’s complete conversation with the “Worried” team above.
Dropbox is proud to partner with IndieWire and the Sundance Film Festival. In 2026, 68% of feature films premiering at Sundance used Dropbox during production. Dropbox helps filmmakers and creative teams find, organize, secure, and share the content that matters most to any project.
