Producer, songwriter, and musician Fred again.. is teaming up with Dropbox to share never-before-seen creative and raw material from his USB002 tour. 

In each city, people attending his shows were encouraged to be present and enjoy the moment together by putting their phones away. In return, Fred promised to give them direct access to videos and photos via Dropbox after the show. Now that the tour is over, Fred has opened up other folders with more creative, including previously unseen behind-the-scenes creative from USB002, artwork, photos, posters and other creative artifacts.

Inside the drop, you’ll find:

• Original flag design from the USB002 era
• ⁠Show posters 
• Vinyl artwork and templates
• ⁠All release artworks, including unseen and unused artwork options
• Ambient show creative folder
• ⁠Unseen images from each show 
• ⁠Visual stems from slo-mo visualizers

These are the actual working Dropbox files Fred again..’s creative team used to develop USB002, and it reflects how global artists create today: by collaborating, experimenting, and sharing ideas across files, fragments, and timezones.

By making these creative assets public, anyone in the community can now download, edit, and use the content however they want to create new posters, videos, and more.

Sharing these creative files allows everyone who came to Fred’s shows to relive the energy of each night, and for people from the community who weren’t physically present to be brought into the experience.

Check out the drop

The Fred again.. x Dropbox folders drop is available now at https://bit.ly/4eGvDvm. This is a rare opportunity to see a creative team's working files and how Dropbox was instrumental in bringing them to life. We’re excited to give fans a glimpse into the process and the chance to connect with the creative work around his music in a more real and tangible way.

Teams today use lots of tools to collaborate, create content, and get work done. But when they try to use those tools separately, it can take a lot of time and unnecessary effort to supply the right context—let alone bring that work back into Dropbox and share it with collaborators.

Millions of people and hundreds of thousands of teams trust Dropbox as a place to store, organize, and share their work. By streamlining that work into ChatGPT, it becomes easier to bring the right context into your conversations and get answers that are more relevant, useful, and actionable.

To keep teams moving quickly, today we’re introducing three new Dropbox apps in ChatGPT: a Dropbox app, a Dropbox Dash app, and a Reclaim AI calendar app. Together, these apps make it easier to access your work, bring the right context into your AI conversations, and complete tasks directly in ChatGPT.

Whether you’re working with files, searching for answers across your tools, or coordinating time on your calendar, these three new apps help you move work forward without interrupting your flow.

Dropbox app in ChatGPT

With the Dropbox app in ChatGPT, you can easily access and preview your Dropbox files, save AI-generated content directly to Dropbox, and share links to your work without leaving ChatGPT. That means no more manually uploading files or copying and pasting between documents.

ChatGPT can even reference relevant files already stored in your Dropbox account to help generate drafts and answer questions, so you always have the context you need without switching tools. And because your Dropbox sharing permissions and access controls stay the same whether your work starts or ends in ChatGPT, you can trust that whatever you store in Dropbox will remain secure.

The Dropbox app in ChatGPT is available globally and can be used by Dropbox customers on any plan.

Dropbox Dash app in ChatGPT

Dropbox Dash already brings content from more than 30 workplace apps into one, secure place for your company knowledge. But with the Dropbox Dash app in ChatGPT, you can also bring that knowledge directly into your conversations in ChatGPT.

Now, when you ask a question in ChatGPT, it can quickly surface the right answer using context from across your connected work apps, with results that are more personalized to you. That’s because Dash has context about you, your content, and your team.

With this richer context, the Dropbox Dash app in ChatGPT helps users surface more helpful, relevant, and actionable answers without leaving your current chat. And because Dash, like Dropbox, respects existing permissions and access controls, your connected content is always secure.

The Dropbox Dash app in ChatGPT will be available in the coming weeks for existing Dash customers. New users can try a free 30-day trial.

Reclaim AI calendar app in ChatGPT

The Reclaim AI calendar app in ChatGPT makes it even easier to plan, manage, and optimize your calendar in Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook. Instead of the back-and-forth of manual scheduling, now you can just use the Reclaim AI calendar app in ChatGPT for help. You can add events, find time for meetings, resolve conflicts, analyze your productivity, search contacts, and even understand what your day looks like—all within your existing conversation.

The Reclaim AI calendar app in ChatGPT is available globally in English to customers who are using the latest version of the Reclaim AI calendar system.

To download the latest apps, visit the ChatGPT app directory.

To learn more, visit our Help Center.

"I've never seen that movie before." Zainab Azizi knew it the moment she read the logline: a Survivor-obsessed employee stranded on a deserted island with her terrible boss. She brought it to Sam Raimi—the director behind Evil Dead and Spider-Man—and spent the next six years getting it made.

The result is a gonzo survival comedy-thriller starring Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien that opened January 30 and has already crossed $74 million worldwide. See it in a theater and you'll understand why: it’s hard to keep quiet while you’re watching. It was also, it turns out, hard to make. Getting there required coordinating shoots across Sydney and Thailand, managing hundreds of storyboards, and funneling a flood of production material into a Dropbox folder that became the film’s command center—one Azizi was still adding to the morning of this interview.

Have you ever had a terrible boss?
Hah. No, but I personally have felt like Linda [played by McAdams] in the office, where she's being told “Oh, you'll be in the next meeting” and…you’re not. And when you have a bunch of people snickering. I think that experience is almost universal.

And that's what drew you to this project.
The hook was like a wish fulfillment story. I love that Linda [McAdams] is such an underdog and relatable, but also the story is very fantastical at the same time. The writers are such great storytellers: the way they were able to provide all of these twists and turns in their 30-minute pitch just got me hooked. We knew there was so much to play with here.

The film keeps flipping whose side the audience is on. How early was that a conscious decision?
That was definitely one of Sam’s. It’s one of the reasons he loved the project so much. He wanted to make sure that audiences were with Linda, but then with Bradley [O'Brien], and then back to her, and then back to him. So by the time we get to the end reveal, we're confused about how we're supposed to feel. 

When I saw it, I found myself turning around to look at the audience's reactions. I can't remember the last time I did that in a theater. Was that the experience you were designing for?
One of the factors is that people love to go to the theaters to see something they've never seen before. And one sub-genre that I consider this film to be is an adventure—an exotic adventure. We could have done the whole movie on a blue screen, and that would have been cheaper and easier for everyone. But we chose Thailand specifically because it was such a postcard-beautiful island. Seeing it on the big screen…it's a character in itself. And then there’s the comedy element, and the scares. If you’re at home and glance at your phone, you miss the jump scare—and then it’s not scary. But when you're in a theater, we make all of our suspense scenes very calculated. It's a fun way to manipulate the audience.

You shot near Phuket in Thailand. What were the biggest practical consequences of that?
Shooting on an island is incredibly complex. For one, the island is beautiful, but we had to bring in a really big greens department because Sam wanted it even more lush and exotic. Sound becomes complex, too—making sure we were protective of the voices of the cast not getting hidden by the waves. On top of that, you have the heat. And the bugs.

With a shoot that complex, how do you keep a production from flying apart?
You have to have your hand in everything, but you need to have really strong department heads, and you have to really trust and rely on them. If you start to micromanage one department, that attention takes away from another. As a producer, countless decisions need to be made in two hours. But most of that is done in pre-production, so that when you're on set, you've got a plan.

Sam storyboarded the entire film. What did that mean for how everyone worked?
Sam worked with his storyboard artist Doug Leffler, who he's worked with for over 30 years. They produced hundreds and hundreds of storyboards. Then Sam had an editor make an animatic of the whole movie. That was our North Star: okay, this is what our director wants. But because making a movie takes a whole village, it's really just the starting point.

Where did Dropbox first enter the picture on this project?
It first entered the picture with those storyboards. Because we had so many of them, Dropbox was a great place to organize them, by folders, by scene.

What else ended up living in there as production got going?
Slowly but surely we'd have a lot of art in there. Like the boar [a creature Linda hunts on the island that becomes one of the film's most memorable set pieces]. We're designing this pig, and the first designs were all hand drawn, and then it went to 3D models. All of that was in there. 

And then the plane crash: our VFX supervisor gathered footage of plane crashes across cinema—from Castaway, to others, including one Russian film with an insane crash—he put it all in Dropbox. One day we had a production meeting just to focus on the crash, and we went on Dropbox in the conference room and reviewed every clip. We wanted to make sure our plane crash was different, fresh, original.

Somehow you made a plane crash…funny?
Right? And then even this morning—this morning—I used Dropbox on the movie, because our photographer on set had a lot of behind-the-scenes photographs, so it was all stored there.

How do you describe what Dropbox does for a production like this?
To me, Dropbox is organization. It helps you take all of these chaotic materials and organize them. It helps me become responsible with my to-do list and keeps me on track.

You never gave up on this project through six years and a pandemic. Why not?
Because I love it so much. I just thought so many people could relate.

For a behind the scenes look at the film, check out our Send Help x Dropbox Stack.

Images courtesy of 20th Century Studios.

We started Dropbox Ventures to support companies that are reimagining how work gets done—helping teams move faster, collaborate more effectively, and focus on what matters most. Today, we’re excited to share new investments that reflect our belief in AI’s ability to streamline complex workflows, along with updates from portfolio companies that have reached meaningful milestones.

New investments

Last summer, we announced investments in five startups working to push the boundaries of what’s possible across design, security, language models, and enterprise AI. Here are the latest additions to our portfolio.

Spellbook: Transforming how lawyers review and negotiate contracts
Spellbook is a generative AI assistant built specifically for transactional lawyers who draft, negotiate, and review business contracts. Integrated directly into Microsoft Word, Spellbook brings advanced drafting, review, and analysis tools into existing workflows, reducing friction when working on high-stakes documents. With its reference of extensive legal data, Spellbook enables instant clause suggestions, redlining, and compliance checks against firm-specific precedents and market standards—helping legal teams move faster without sacrificing quality. As active users ourselves, the Dropbox legal team has experienced Spellbook’s intuitive design and efficient contract analysis firsthand. We’re excited to partner with a team that shares our belief in using AI to drive real impact at work.

Momentic: AI-native automation for software testing
Momentic is the AI-native test automation platform that helps engineering teams validate web and mobile applications. By reducing the need for manual test creation and maintenance, Momentic enables teams to ship more frequently while maintaining product reliability as development velocity increases. Used by modern software teams to automatically verify real user flows, Momentic is becoming increasingly critical as organizations scale in the age of AI.

Kaya: Bringing predictability to construction supply chains
Kaya is an AI-powered operating system for mission-critical construction projects, unifying procurement, logistics, and asset lifecycle workflows into a single predictive platform. Construction teams often rely on fragmented tools like emails and spreadsheets to manage high-stakes supply chains, where delays can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per day. Kaya centralizes these workflows and uses AI to help automate coordination, surface risk, and support proactive decision-making. We’re excited to partner with Kaya as they bring AI-native workflows to one of the world’s largest and least digitized industries.

Portfolio updates

Lakera: Acquired by Check Point
Lakera has been acquired by Check Point, marking a significant milestone in enterprise AI security. Lakera has helped organizations—including Dropbox—protect against emerging AI-driven threats and safely adopt large language models. As part of Check Point, Lakera’s technology will help deliver end-to-end AI security at enterprise scale—underscoring the growing importance of securing AI systems as they become embedded in everyday work.

AugX Labs: Acquired by JWX
AugX Labs, a Dropbox Ventures portfolio company, has been acquired by JWX, a technology platform supporting modern media businesses. AugX Labs built Augie Studio, an AI-assisted creative platform that helps teams transform existing content into multi-format experiences more efficiently. As part of JWX, Augie’s technology will be integrated into JWX Studio, helping publishers unlock more value from their content while streamlining production workflows.

Bardeen: Launched WIQ
Bardeen, a Dropbox Ventures portfolio company, has launched WIQ, a workflow intelligence platform designed to help enterprises make more disciplined, data-driven decisions as they embed AI agents across their operations. By creating a factual baseline of how work actually happens across tools and systems, WIQ helps organizations identify where AI will have the greatest impact and measure results as they scale from pilots to production.

Looking ahead

These investments and milestones reflect the kind of innovation we’re proud to support at Dropbox Ventures. From legal drafting and software testing to construction and AI security, our portfolio companies are applying AI in practical ways to solve real-world problems. We’re excited to continue partnering with founders who are building tools that help teams work smarter today and shape the future of work.

To learn more about Dropbox Ventures or connect with our team, visit dropbox.com/ventures

2026 marks five years since we committed to Virtual First, our operating model where remote work is the primary experience for employees, and we prioritize in-person connection through regular gatherings. In that time, we’ve moved beyond the “what ifs” to a much clearer understanding of what’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to change. What hasn’t wavered is our core belief that Virtual First is a flexible model that allows us to continue learning and adapting, while shaping how we design products for a distributed world.

As we launch into 2026, we’re taking a close look at what we’ve learned over the past year to better understand how our culture drives employee satisfaction, which ultimately fuels our productivity and impact. Together, they form the foundation of how we build, operate, and evolve in a Virtual First world.

How we’re moving forward:

To build on these insights, we’re creating a Deep Work Index (DWI) to help us understand whether people have—or don’t have—the conditions they need for focused, uninterrupted work. The DWI brings together everything we’ve learned about meetings and autonomy into a single number. It includes metrics such as meeting load, focus time, and how tightly meetings are clustered, which all relate to how able people feel to engage in deep work.

Rather than asking managers to monitor dozens of inputs, the DWI distills work patterns into a single, testable signal related to deep work. While still in it’s early days, the DWI is being explored as a way to identify early signs of meeting creep, interruptions to focus, and calendar fragmentation. It will also assess whether these signals can ultimately inform practical actions like reducing meeting-heavy days, protecting longer focus blocks, or strengthening meeting norms and tools.

2. The goal is meetings that are fewer in number and stronger in purpose.

Yes, we need fewer meetings. But the ones we do have need to be effective. Thoughtful preparation, clear ownership, and support from AI tools make meetings more purposeful and leave more time for deep, focused work.

The number and quality of meetings at Dropbox are in a healthy place compared with external benchmarks. Dropbox employees consider about 70% of meetings effective, versus 28% among knowledge workers overall, and spend less time in meetings than peers at other companies.

Still, meaningful challenges remain. Nearly a third of our meetings are less effective than they could be, with our top challenges being lack of a defined purpose, ownership, or an organized agenda. When those basics are missing, employees report that discussions can drift, feel repetitive, or end without clear next steps. Employees also shared that meeting best practices matter even more in large, cross-functional settings, where friction is more visible.

While it’s encouraging that most meetings at Dropbox are considered effective, the ones that aren’t add up to millions of dollars in lost productivity each quarter. That’s why we’re applying the same operational rigor to our meetings as we do to every other major investment.

What we learned:

Our effort to reduce meetings worked. In 2025, we ran a Meeting Reduction pilot with developer teams that included practices like No Meeting Wednesdays, fewer recurring one-on-ones, and an async-first approach to alignment. The results were clear:

• 27% reduction in weekly meeting hours (1.8 hours)
• 20% fewer meetings per week
• 28% increase in coding time
• 80% of participants found the pilot effective, and 90% recommended scaling the guidance

We need a common way to talk about a meeting’s purpose. Through a design sprint focused on reimagining meetings, we identified a core gap: Teams often don’t have an easily understood way to describe the “why” behind a meeting. As a result, people often join meetings out of obligation rather than purpose, and live meetings remain the default. Giving meetings clear categories—like “decision jams,” “sync updates,” “connection circles,” or “AI briefings”—helps teams understand the goal of a meeting before it begins.

AI-generated meeting summaries save meaningful time. Through our Zoom AI Companion pilot, we found that users saved an average of 37 minutes of work per meeting by using AI-generated summaries and action items. Many found the tool easy to use and especially helpful for asynchronous collaboration, highlighting the growing role AI plays in the Virtual First experience.

How we’re moving forward:

Together, these insights have helped shape our company-wide Meeting Effectiveness initiative—an evidence-based framework that defines best practices by meeting type, stage, and participant role. We’re rolling out improvements in phases, giving teams tools like calendar and agenda reminders, Reclaim.ai scheduling enhancements, plus ongoing support to make sure these habits stick.

Our goal is to reduce the number of meetings that don’t deliver a strong return on investment, improve the ones that do, and protect important time for focused work.
 

We’re not waiting for the future of work. We’re building it together.

In 2025, one thing was clear: Our culture is the engine behind our success. We can see how intentional design improves both our satisfaction and productivity, and how our commitment to Virtual First continues to strengthen month by month, year over year.

We’ve learned that smarter collaboration beats more collaboration, that personal agency is the new productivity, and that well-designed gatherings create momentum long after teams return home. As we head into 2026, we’re continuing to improve how we work, the tools we use, and the cultural foundations that make Virtual First so successful. We’re actively building the future of work, and we’re just getting started.

Follow along at our Virtual First hub.
 

Most creative projects hit a point where the answers stop coming easily. You’ve done the preparation, you’ve started the work, but somewhere in the middle, clarity gives way to uncertainty. It’s unclear whether you’re moving toward something or away from it, because the project just hasn’t taken shape yet.

That in-between phase—the messy middle—isn’t just something to power through. It’s often where the work begins to reveal what it actually is. This year at the IndieWire Studio presented by Dropbox at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, we spoke with the crews of five films that collaborated using Dropbox about how they move through that stretch of doubt, experimentation, and discovery.

Louis Paxton, The Incomer director, on overcoming self-doubt:
“You’re stuck with this self doubt, which you’ve kind of imposed on yourself, but I found the way through that was just to get it in front of people and to get feedback. It’s not that they necessarily tell you what to do. As soon as you start talking about how they’ve received the story, you immediately realize what’s working and what’s not working. It sounds obvious, but feedback, feedback, feedback—loads of feedback.”

Charli XCX, The Moment actress and musician, on embracing creative mess:
“Sometimes, I really do have this finite idea, concrete knowledge of what the end thing is going to be, and all of the things leading up to that are totally in service of that. And then sometimes the actual creating and bouncing off ideas part really is the best bit—that’s the joy—where you can totally take a huge pivot and turn down this completely different alleyway. Generally speaking, when I’m making something, I really do love that creative mess phase. I find it really rewarding.”

Mia Wasikowska, Leviticus actress, on the magic of uncertainty:
“I think filmmaking is a process of doing all this preparation, but ultimately in the moment, you let it all go, and something completely different happens. As I’ve made films more and more, you get more confident in that space of surrender. You’re confident in prepping everything, and then inevitably, it changes. That’s the magic of it.”

Ramzi Bashour, Hot Water director, on letting the edit reveal the story:
“There was this engine that pushed its way through the edit. It was a case of letting the engine drive. A lot of scenes didn’t make it in for good reason because there was such a strong connection between these two people. When I wrote this film, I thought I was making a movie about landscapes and locations. I didn’t understand that I was making a story about a mom and son. It was in the edit that revealed itself.”

Edward Norton, The Invite actor, on collaboration as a way through uncertainty:
“All you can do is throw what you’ve learned and what you feel and what you’re nervous about out loud, and then light it on fire and let it go. The whole thing, process-wise, was a creative dream—a dream experience in terms of collaboration, a sense of kinship in what we were doing, and the thrill of discovering it on the fly.”

Photo caption: “The Moment” director Aidan Zamiri and Charli xcx at the The IndieWire Studio Presented by Dropbox at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Photo courtesy of IndieWire. Credit: Tiffany Burke. 

How do you say goodbye to something you thought would last forever? This is the question Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason keeps returning to in Oscar-nominated director Sara Dosa’s latest documentary Time and Water. As Andri grieves both the loss of his grandparents and his country’s dwindling glaciers, the film contrasts Iceland’s dying ice—a once-unthinkable reality—with Andri’s own attempts to preserve his family’s memories before they, too, slip away.

“I was so moved by that conflict that he felt,” Dosa recalls. “I thought it was a profound and devastating paradigm for thinking through climate grief and how we make sense of this critical juncture in our planet's history.”

The film is based partly on Andri’s book, “On Time and Water,” which inspired much of the narration. But much like Dosa’s previous film, Fire of Love, it is Andri’s tender, lively archive of family films and photographs—some of them, his, and others shot by his glacier-loving grandparents during their many expeditions onto the ice—that bring the documentary to life. Dosa worked with many of the same editors as on Fire of Love—including Erin Casper and Jocelyne Chaput, joined this time by Mark Harrison—who, together, stitch past and present into a time capsule for an uncertain future. 

“We thought bringing in the power [and] the life force of glaciers was key to then feeling the loss that comes with a death—and same thing, too, in the entangled world of humans,” Dosa says. The result is as awe-inspiring as it is alarming. But as uncertain as our future may seem, the film also leaves open the possibility that things can still change. “The future is not yet written,” she says. “What we do now actually does really matter.”

In an interview ahead of the film’s premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, Dosa spoke about the allure of making another archival film, how Dropbox helped her team stay organized, and the challenge of telling a story that is, quite literally, unfolding at a glacial pace. 

~ ~ ~

After Fire of Love, did you always know you wanted to make another film that was so heavily based on archival material? 
Yes and no. Fire of Love was the first archival film that I directed. I feel like it opened the creative doors in a way for me that was really meaningful. The combination of archive and narration—I find that particularly challenging but also particularly interesting. And this seemed like another opportunity to work with both archive and a poetic, subjective style of narration. We didn't, by any means, want to make Ice of Love—which is what we jokingly called this film at first. We really wanted it to be different. But I was really excited to continue playing with some of the themes that we were playing with in Fire of Love—like how geologic time can dialogue with human memory, and how to contend with these forces that seem so much greater than ourselves and find that kind kinship, so to speak, with nature.

What is it about the concept of geological time that you find so interesting?
There's a quote from a writer named Robert Macfarlane—who's kind of a peer of Andri's—who talks about how, with the gaze of deep time or geologic time, things that seem inert to the human eye come alive. A glacier, a mountain, actually do contain a life cycle. There are these kinds of patterns and rhythms. And I think by showing that life force, there's a way that it acts almost like a rebuttal to these really damaging, violent narratives about how the wilderness is a barren wasteland—that there's nothing there. We're hearing, for example, that Greenland is this wasteland, but there's people who have lived there for thousands of years. There's so much richness and life there. So I think that geologic time is a paradigm that can articulate that life force. And to play with it visually and sonically is really exciting to me—to show that, no, this is not a resource to extract. It has its own ontology, its own life. 

I think wherever we can see ourselves in kinship with not just nature but our ancestors from the past and our future descendants, that can conjure a different sense of responsibility and caretaking—not just for the land that sustains us, but also responsibility to future generations, while honoring the past and where we come from at the same time. 

I've been thinking a lot about how you and your team brought the glaciers to life in the film. There's some really incredible images, and I also imagine it must have been a bit of a challenge to capture something that is so massive, that doesn't move in a way humans can perceive. Can you tell me more about how you and the team approached that?
I have an amazing team, both in North America and in Iceland. They were so skilled at finding the right locations, how we could film on glaciers responsibly, ethically, and safely. And then I got to work with an incredible director of photography, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa, and an incredible sound designer, Björn Viktorsson. We were really talking about this idea of glacial sentience to capture visually and sonically. Pablo, as both a cinematographer and a director, he's so skilled at working specifically with water, fog, ice. He was finding these compositions where you could really feel the motion of the ice and the water, even if the composition seemed still. But since it's so hard to perceive actual movement of glaciers, the only way we could really get at movement without time-lapse images was through sound. And that's where Björn, working with this amazing sound consultant named Konstantin Vlasis, worked with these geophones and hydrophones to capture the sounds of the movement of the ice.  

One of my favorite scenes in the film is where we're in this ice cave and you just hear these creaks and groans. And Andri, through the narration says, like, “This is how a glacier sounds. You can't quite see it, but it's moving.” And so that's how we're really trying to invite the audience into feeling not just the movement but the aliveness of the ice—which, in a film that is about the death of a glacier, we first want you to know it's alive.

How did Dropbox help you and your team bring the film to life? 
Dropbox was extremely useful for us. It housed our everything. We had all these different folders of still photographs, archival material, sound—and not just our field recordings that we took, but also, our glacial sound consultant Konstantin Vlasis would send us stuff too, so his collaborators from across the project would find this digital hub in Dropbox. Our extraordinary composer Dan Deacon would always send us his files via Dropbox—and not just the score for each scene. His music editor, Chester Gwazda, would then send us the MOV files with the music cut in on Dropbox. It was very much embedded into every stage of the process, from production all the way through scoring and to the end. 

There's a quote from Andri in the film where he says “our time is unlike any time before.” I was really struck by his reckoning with these things that we thought we'd never lose are now disappearing—how changes that once took hundreds of thousands of years are now happening in a human lifetime. Those are the things that stuck with me the most, but what do you hope will stick with people most after watching the film?
I hope that that line will very much resonate with people as well. We are living in an unprecedented time when human actions have indelibly changed the earth. It is a radical break unlike any other in thinking about geologic time. But I also hope people can feel the handshake of generations that Andri says in the film—of how our past is not just embedded in the glaciers, but also in these deeply human stories. And how, by embracing these stories, they make dreaming of a habitable future possible. It's through the telling of stories that we can open our minds and gaze, to think: We are living in a time where glaciers are still alive. And knowing the power of a glacier—not thinking of it as just kind of a frozen block of water, but as something that has sentience, that has life force, that is encoded with human meaning.

I hope that the film can relay the sense of possibility, of knowing how powerful nature is—that, yes, we have changed it indelibly in these violent ways that we're feeling the consequences of now, but that we possess the power to make it a more habitable, balanced, just place again. And then, on maybe a more simple note, I just hope people will love their family—whether it's your biological family or chosen family. I hope people will hold their people close in this moment of crisis and preserve what makes us human.

Time and Water premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival on January 27. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

Before she was an actress and a director of festival darlings like Booksmart, Olivia Wilde had another career in film—in casting. That may explain why her Sundance directorial debut, The Invite, is stacked with such a masterful line-up: Seth Rogen, Edward Norton, Penélope Cruz, and herself. In the film, written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack and made using Dropbox, this mighty cast brings to life a dinner party gone bad—stupendously bad. 

As chatter of a contentious bidding war ripped through Sundance, Wilde stopped by the Dropbox House for a keynote chat with Indiewire’s Chris O’Falt. Here are seven lessons from the multi-hyphenate on doing your best work.

Lesson 1: Creative freedom comes from specificity, not scale.
“I think it just proves every single time that the movies that are made outside the system—and therefore with the freedom to allow for creative experimentation—they are always the ones studios end up recognizing as being valuable, because those are the movies the audiences want. Specificity is something that the studio system is notoriously afraid of. Specificity feels like it’s excluding a large portion of your audience, but it’s the specificity that cuts through this incredibly saturated space.”

Lesson 5: The work isn’t finished until your collaborators shape it.
“This was the type of material that was always going to adapt to whatever performers came onto it. There’s that idea that you don’t know what your movie is until you have your cast—until the cast tells you what the movie is. That’s always what was going to happen with this script, no matter what.”

Lesson 6: Collaboration is built through clarity, not control.
“Sidney Lumet wrote in his incredible book Making Movies that he loves prep because you’re forced to justify each part of your script to each member of your crew. When your head of department says to you, ‘Why am I building that wall?’ it’s never arbitrary. It’s like, we need that because it’s in the script—because of this. The process with this workshop period was like gut-checking everything. It meant that everyone understood why we were doing what we were doing, and that creates trust across the entire team.”

Lesson 7: Protect the time to do things properly.
“My non-negotiable was allowing for time to prepare the film correctly. For instance, rehearsals don’t tend to exist, even on big films. But I want to know how the cast is going to create this together. There’s no mathematical equation for it. It takes trust. And if you can earn that trust, it benefits everybody. You work long enough, hopefully for many more years, and eventually you get to say, ‘Can I have the time to do this properly?’ And then it really becomes about making the best work possible.”

Photo caption: Olivia Wilde and Chris O'Falt during the IndieWire Future of Filmmaking Keynote Presented by Dropbox with Olivia Wilde at Sundance on January 25, 2026 in Park City, Utah. Photo courtesy of IndieWire.