Interview: ‘Little Women’ Screenwriter Robin Swicord
In Maker’s Dozen, we ask folks in and around the film industry 12 questions and have them ask one of us.
Robin Swicord is a writer, director, and playwright. Her screenwriting credits include Little Women (1994), Matilda, Practical Magic, Memoirs of a Geisha, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
For 1994 Month, we spoke with Robin about developing Little Women with Amy Pascal, capturing period dialogue, advice for her younger self and aspiring screenwriters, and more!
This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
1. What’s the Robin Swicord origin story?
I did not come from a filmmaking family. I was in a military family when I was born. My father got out of that line of work and sort of struggled to be a contractor in Panama City Beach, FL, which was the town we were in when he got out of the military. So I grew up in this kind of cultural island in northwest Florida. I didn’t really know much about the outside world. But my window into the outside world for film was that there was a very small local television station, so small that they had no network affiliation, which meant they had to bring their own programming. It turned out there was a guy there who loved the movies and he would rent 16mm films and then cut local commercials into them. So that was my film school. From childhood on I was seeing Hitchcock and John Ford and everything. I thought that’s what TV was. Getting out of a place like that and joining the larger world and becoming an artist and filmmaker is its own kind of journey and story. But I could tell you that there was a big arc, and I made it by the time I was like 28 years old and I had sold my first screenplay.
2. It’s been 30 years since Little Women was released, and it remains one of our favorites from 1994 and beyond. How has your relationship with that story and the March family changed over time, from when you first encountered it to today?
That’s such a good question. Because I was an early reader and I read that book for the first time when I was eight, my feeling when I finished it was that somebody should have put a warning on the outside that says “Beth dies.” Going from Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins to this work of American literature in which bad things happen to good people was a lot for an eight year old, but I wanted back in there. I wanted back into that family and in that world. So I read it again every year of my childhood. I think the last time I read it for myself I was probably 19, and then I didn’t read it again for 10 years or so.
One of the things that always bugged me about previous iterations was that they were always about who these girls will marry. By the time I was 16 or 17 I was looking at this portrait of marriage that’s in the book—Meg’s marriage—and thinking that marriage is a prison. So it changes as you read it and as you mature through your life. I read it again thinking that I don’t love any of these other things and wouldn’t it be nice to do my own adaptation? It took me 12 years to get anyone other than Amy Pascal on board.
Amy and I met and had a good conversation about Little Women, and she continued to carry this idea forward with me in a kind of background way. We weren’t in business together, but every now and then we would see each other as friends and we would have a conversation again about Little Women. What we heard a couple of times when we tried to pitch it was “no one is interested in seeing movies about when girls were wearing long dresses.” Objectification of women was at a high point in some ways in the 1980s, so we were just ahead of the zeitgeist.
3. What’s a memory you have from developing the project with Amy Pascal?
We have a place up on a small island in the Pacific Northwest that we bought as a refuge so that our kids didn’t have to spend every minute of their lives in Los Angeles. It was a way to bring a little bit more nature in a different culture into their lives. Amy came up and she stayed with me, and we sat on the floor of my office and put pieces of paper out in front of us and we kind of tracked what the shape of the film would be, what we would focus on.
The part that interested me was their ambition. Each of these girls in the first chapter of the book describes their personal ambition. At that time if you wanted to completely gut a woman’s reputation in public, you would describe her as being ambitious. Single mothers were under attack. And although Marmee is technically married, her husband is not in the picture until he comes home from war. And what you see is a family struggling in poverty and this mother is working outside the house and she’s lost some social status because of that. And so we wanted to focus our story and restore this idea that ambition is good whatever your gender is.
4. Gillian Armstrong complimented your dialogue as beautiful and naturalistic for the period. How did you accomplish that?
She’s a wonderful director. I had seen a film she made called My Brilliant Career. I think she hesitated before saying yes to this film because she had done something that was set in that same time period. In fact, a piece of music I had suggested in the screenplay she used in My Brilliant Career, which I didn’t realize. So I think we were simpatico in a lot of ways. For the dialogue, if it’s in the script and the actor is saying it in this way or that way, she’s going to be able to arbitrate that.
But for the quality of the language and vernacular, there are a lot of diaries in libraries in California of people who wrote when they were crossing on the Overland Trail headed west. I looked in those diaries because what I was looking for was not the kind of studied genre dialogue you see all through the book, because it had to get past the sieve of the editors into the hands of the reader. There was this idea at that time that with writing for young people, you had to always be teaching. I wanted to get past these sieves that were always being put up to reinterpret the female experience, so I went to these journals, which were mostly written by women. They have the language of people who are in a hurry and don’t expect anything to be published. You know, you have seven minutes between the time the kids go to sleep and you need to go to sleep and you’re jotting down the day. I tried to draw from that language for writing the dialogue of the March sisters. Gillian’s gift for that is that she’s just a damn good director.
5. Little Women happened earlier in your career. What advice do you have for 1994 Robin?
Worry less and find your allies.
6. How does one even begin to adapt a short story into a three-hour movie like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button?
Well, my process began when the producer Ray Stark, through Universal, brought me the short story. It’s a very slight short story. The idea of a man aging backwards is not original to Fitzgerald—you also see that in Merlin from the King Arthur myth. It began in the Civil War days and ended in the 1920s. This is a property Stark had owned for several decades and he had never found somebody who was willing to dive into that. But as I thought about it, we were about 12 years away at that point from the turning of the century, and I thought it would be so great to do the whole 20th century in the story of this one man’s life. I broke down for myself a way of looking at him so that in the middle of his life, for the first time his inside and his outside match. I also wanted to get a sense of the passage of time through music, because our music has changed so much in this American century where you start with jazz and then you end in this completely other thing.
Over 10 years I wrote 16 different drafts for four different directors and two or three different producers. At some point it left Universal and got horse-traded to another studio, I believe for Casper, and then it was at Paramount. I left the project after all of that work because I had a meeting in which the studio executive said, “It’s just going to be too costly to try to do all of this century. I think you should just pick one year in his life and we think it should be the year that he turns 40.” Which of course is the year in which he completely matches. You lose all the tension of the inside and the out, the feeling of his freakishness and all of that. So I stepped away from that.
It was a script, I guess, that David Fincher had carried around with him for years. When he finally had built up his own reputation to the point that he could say “I want to direct this,” he stepped forward and brought on another writer, Eric Roth. Some of the scenes that you probably love most I think Eric wrote, and what remains of mine is kind of all the conception around him. When I saw the film, it was like, “Well, that’s mine but that’s not mine…” It was a schizophrenic thing. I never got to see my Benjamin Button made. But I have a lot of respect for Eric Roth, and I think he did an incredible job.
7. You’ve written and directed for both the stage and the screen. Which role is most satisfying?
I love to write. I love actors. I have two daughters who were actors and one of them is married to an actor. I just love the creative moment. It’s wonderful when you’re doing it alone in your room, and it is also wonderful when you get a chance to do it with other people and you see what they’re doing. I would say I’m kind of a hands-off director in some ways, because I just want to be shown and then try to shape what I’m shown. So both of them are very rewarding.
8. Speaking of your daughter being married to an actor, I just rewatched The Batman. How do you watch your son-in-law (Paul Dano) in a role like that and then just welcome him to your home for Thanksgiving dinner?
First of all, I understand that it’s a role. [laughs] When I see Paul on screen and something awful is happening to him, my heart breaks more than the normal audience member watching it. And he’s such a funny person in life. When he gets to do a comic thing like in this Mr. & Mrs. Smith series—he plays this tiny cameo because he was doing a favor for the people he knows. He’s just so funny as the hot neighbor, because I know how funny he is in life.
“Worry less and find your allies.”
9. Overrated or underrated: sharing a profession with your spouse.
I like it. There’s a lot that just never has to be explained because you both understand already. I think the hard thing is when we might both be on different sets at the same time and you can’t support each other. That’s an additional little difficulty of like, “I wish I could help you on this, darling…” That doesn’t happen so much anymore. But he is a very supportive husband.
10. What movie has a perfect script?
God, there are so many. I really love Tony Gilroy’s script for The Bourne Identity. I think that’s perfect. Everybody always mentions The Godfather and The Godfather Part II—those are very good scripts for people to study. I love the script for Animal Kingdom. There’s a very difficult thing that happens in that, which is that the protagonist doesn’t get to emerge because of his youth until about a third of the way through the film. He waits for his situation and we see enormous transformation in that guy. That is a challenge—the same kind of challenge they had in The Godfather where the protagonist isn’t immediately announced. I love Anthony Minghella’s script for The Talented Mr. Ripley, which I saw it again a couple of weeks ago. Hollywood is filled with great storytellers. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing some of them. Tom Schulman, who did Dead Poets Society—that’s a good screenplay. Something that isn’t completely understood by people who are not in the film business or don’t live in Los Angeles is that there’s such a community here. It’s not like it’s a big party, but you run into each other and you get excited when you see their work.
11. What’s your go-to advice for aspiring screenwriters?
Organize your life so that you have time to write. It’s very hard to do a super demanding job and then go home and write well. You’re going to be tired. You have to kind of go all-in, bet on yourself, and take the day job that allows you to have the energy to write and to look at movies. I’m a big fan of watching movies with the sound off. You learn so much about storytelling. You just look at every scene and say, “What were the tasks of this scene? What got done here? How did this change?” I taught myself to be a screenwriter. I didn’t go to film school. The university I went to had a film department where you could check out a Bolex for the day, but it was not the film school that it became. You can teach yourself. Not everybody can afford to go to film school, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a life in filmmaking.
12. What’s a memory from your childhood in Barcelona you’d love to relive?
I remember going to the Boqueria as a child, when it wasn’t a tourist destination, with the woman who worked for our household. Her name was Mercedes. She would take me to the Boqueria and I would look at these ghastly dead lamb heads and strange-looking fish and the octopus with their arms. It was so vivid. I just loved that place. I feel like my interest in the visual world was born at the Boqueria.
And Barcelona is also where I learned to read. I had gone to Spanish-speaking preschool, and I went to an English school for 10 days in the interim between my family being shifted out of Barcelona and going on to the next place the military was sending us. It was what they called a family grouping, which is where everybody who is in different ages is in one room and the students were all reading from the same reader that would pass from hand to hand. I would just say whatever the person before me said and pass it on. But the teacher was on to me, so when it came to me she opened it to a fresh page and she said, “Read this page for me.” I looked at it and I could not, of course, read anything on that page, but as I stared all of a sudden I had this tremendous feeling of heat on the top of my head and a white light spread in front of my vision. And I looked at the page and I could read every word. That is literally my experience of learning to read.
+1. What’s your question for us?
What’s your favorite movie? The one you watch when you have the flu?
(Kevin): Almost Famous. Just pure comfort food. I saw it at just the right age. Just pure heart and soul. Love all the characters. Frances McDormand, Kate Hudson in her breakthrough role, Billy Crudup, Philip Seymour Hoffman… Unbelievable.