The Curious Case of a Woman in Hollywood: Robin Swicord’s Path to Adapting Stories for the Silver Screen

Robin Swicord is an award-winning screenwriter, director, and producer of feature films. She is most famous for her extraordinary adaptations of novels and short stories for the screen such as Little Women, Practical Magic, The Jane Austen Book Club, Memoirs of a Geisha, Matilda, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, (for which she received an Academy Award nomination), and Wakefield, to name a few. Swicord teaches screenwriting and is a Sundance Screenwriting Lab mentor. The accomplished, self-taught artist and champion for women in film sat down with me on Zoom from New York to talk to me about her career. She shared with me her gestation as an artist growing up in the South, the underpinnings of her feminist inspiration, and some of her considerable wisdom and expertise on writing adaptations for the screen.

Karen Gaul Schulman: To begin at the beginning, where did you grow up?

Robin Swicord: I was born in Columbus, South Carolina. We eventually settled in Panama City, Florida, to be near my paternal grandmother in Southern Georgia.

KGS: Were both of your parents from the South, and what were they like?

RS: My mother’s family were German immigrants and she was raised around Charleston, South Carolina. My mother wanted to become a Southern lady and not an outsider, and she really nailed that. My dad’s family were farmers. When he took my mother to meet them in 1948, they were living without electricity or indoor plumbing. It was a very different time in the South.

KGS: Do you think growing up in the South informed or influenced you as a writer, and if so, in what ways?

RS: There was nothing about my upbringing, on the surface, that would have prepared me for the life I was going to lead—one that now seems fated because of the way I went after my interests, which were not the interests of the people around me. I read constantly. I checked out recordings of Broadway musicals. I was interested in performance.

The town I grew up in, Panama City, had a small television station that aired mostly  WWII newsreels and farm reports, but they also played black and white movies; everything Hitchcock ever made—every movie with Bette Davis, or Cary Grant, and so on. I watched all these movies and mentally critiqued them. If it was an adaptation of a book I’d read, I’d have strong opinions about it. And I was very alone in this—watching this stuff like my life depended on it.

I was filling myself up with the larger world, specifically the larger world created by artists. But I was isolated because we lived out in this tiny beach town. There was just one little highway that came out there, and in the winter, no one was there. You could literally lie down on Highway 98 and look up at the sky for hours. I could ride my bike for miles and see nothing but the Gulf of Mexico on one side, and the pine trees on the other.

KGS: That sounds idyllic. Did you have any favorite southern writers as a kid?

RS: Flannery O’Connor blew my mind. When I found her, I felt like I had found somebody who had my inner voice. And she was an example to me.

KGS: What was it specifically about Flannery O’Connor that made you feel akin to her?

RS: The thing about Flannery O’Connor was that she wasn’t romantic. I loved how grim her stories were. I strongly felt the influence of my grandmother in rural Climax, Georgia. She could shoot a squirrel and skin it out in under a minute to make stew. She had a fourth grade education, but was regarded as the person to call to prepare a body for burial or help birth a baby. The Primitive Baptist church she attended forbade musical instruments. They used shaped note hymnals for singing, and instead of communion, they had ritual foot-washing. This was the world of Flannery O’Connor.

I’d seen so many movies in which women had to pay for their success through tragedy. And men were represented either heroically or in an interesting way, and we had the patience to sit and watch all that. I just felt like, well, maybe people don’t know that women are people too. I made a decision as I entered the film business that I was going to write those roles for women.

My mother tried to shape me to be a sweet Southern lady. And I wasn’t that. I was a tomboy. I was interested in scrutinizing roadkill and taking pictures of things no one wanted to look at. Also, we didn’t have a completely squared away family.  My dad had what we’d call PTSD now, but back then, we just knew he had these incredible rages. There was also, in our home and all around us, a certain amount of alcohol that added a kind of Southern Gothic flavor. And there was always this layer of pretense over all of it from my mother, who had a Southern lady’s gift for euphemism. I was given something to define myself against. There were certain ways I wasn’t going to be. Romantic was one of them. Euphemistic was another.

KGS: It sounds like the things you didn’t want to become shaped you as much as your childhood artistic interests did.

RS: Yes, before I got a college scholarship, my dad’s dream for me was that I would live in a trailer in the backyard and be an assistant kindergarten teacher. When I look back now, I still don’t completely know how I found my way out. But I knew I would from a very young age.

KGS: I’ve noticed that much of your work is very female forward. I’m assuming that’s not accidental. Not only has your writing been largely about women, but you’ve advocated for women in the arts via teaching and mentoring. I’m wondering about the seeds of your motivation in supporting and encouraging women in film.

RS: I’d seen so many movies in which women had to pay for their success through tragedy. And men were represented either heroically or in an interesting way, and we had the patience to sit and watch all that. I just felt like, well, maybe people don’t know that women are people too. I made a decision as I entered the film business that I was going to write those roles for women.

I didn’t grow up in the business. I really didn’t know how it worked, or that there just weren’t many female screenwriters working, and those that were working were most frequently partnered with a man, or they’d been re-written by a man. The first thirty years of my career was the story of being re-written by men, because somehow, they just couldn’t allow a woman to oversee her own screenplay. There was this very quiet sexist bullshit going on. But I didn’t know that, so I just kept trying to write good roles for female actors.

The first thirty years of my career was the story of being re-written by men, because somehow, they just couldn’t allow a woman to oversee her own screenplay. There was this very quiet sexist bullshit going on. But I didn’t know that, so I just kept trying to write good roles for female actors.

Little Women was part of my looking to create a path for other women and to change the way women were viewed. One of the reasons I wanted to do Little Women was because at that time we were reading a lot in the paper about “Welfare Queens” and these “Dangerous Single Mothers” who were parasitic. We were meant to look down on them. And I thought, “well, who is Marmi if not a single mother? She’s raising these daughters with tremendous resourcefulness. And how about we do that story?” I felt we needed that story.

KGS: I loved that book as a kid. How amazing it must have been for you to immerse yourself in that world.

RS: That book had a lot of meaning for me because I read it every year from the time I was eight. One of my first thoughts I had about that book as a child was that I felt respect from the writer to the reader. She was not hiding the truth from me. The first time I read it, Beth’s death overwhelmed me. But on the second reading I thought, “she thinks I’m grown up enough to be able to deal with that.”

I felt that the two versions of Little Women that I had seen as a child didn’t reflect the book. And it really bugged me that those films seemed to be about “who these girls are going to marry?” My understanding of the novel was that it was very much about female ambition and accepting who you are in the face of a world that wants to define you differently.

KGS: This brings us to questions about some of the nitty-gritty of writing adaptations for the screen. With Little Women, obviously you couldn’t interview the author, so, what kind of research were you able to do?

RS: There were people who had done biographies and collected letters, so I immersed myself in that. I spent about eight months just reading about the time, the book, the writer, and her family ‘till I understood the Transcendental roots of the book. But it still comes back to who are these four women and what do they want? My feeling about these classic novels is that they can be adapted again and again over time and reinterpreted for the contemporary moment. This book spoke to me in my contemporary moment.

KGS: I understand that the rights to Little Women were public domain, but if a book or short story is not public domain, how do you convince people to let you buy or use those rights?

RS: Well, to get the rights to a bestseller like Memoirs of a Geisha someone has to have optioned the book and you need to be in the path of the producer who laid out that money and is looking for a writer. I had to have an established career to be considered. I had to audition for that job like crazy.

KGS: So, you had to do, like, treatments and pitches?

RS: I didn’t have to; I just knew I wasn’t going to get the job unless I did.

But then on something like Wakefield (adapted form an E.L. Doctorow short story), I’d loved his books since college, and I was just a goner for his way of looking at people from history and historical moments. He was just an extraordinary novelist.

KGS: Did you personally go after the rights to Wakefield then?

RS: I did go after Wakefield. I knew it wasn’t going to be a very commercial movie—it needed to be a small movie, done for not much money, with a tour de force performance. I was lucky enough to meet Doctorow several times during that process.

KGS: They say, never meet your heroes, so, how was that?

RS: God, what a gentleman and a great mind. He died just a few weeks before the film went into production, but I got to tell him that his work had meant so much to me.

KGS: What about Matilda (the children’s book by Roald Dahl)?

RS: My husband, Nick (Kazan), and I went after that. We’d been reading that book to our daughters, and we really wanted a movie out there for little girls who love to read and have all this power inside them. We got in touch with Roald Dahl’s agent. He had recently passed away, and he’d been very unhappy with previous adaptations of his work. His wife, Liccy Dahl, wasn’t inclined to have more movies made from his books. But we got in touch with her and made a proposal: “What if we write the script on spec, and you don’t sell the rights to somebody else for one year? Then you can read our screenplay, and if you like it, we’ll go out together to find somebody who will make this movie?” And she agreed to that.

KGS: That’s kind of a big risk, right? That’s a lot of work that maybe won’t pay off.

RS: That’s certainly something our agents and our lawyers reminded us of. But we wrote it and took it to Liccy, and she was happy with it, so we set out and we sold it. And since we went out together with the Dahl estate, our screenplay was tied to the underlying rights and attached to the book, so, we couldn’t be re-written. That’s a rare coup. It’s something every writer should have. It shouldn’t be a thing you have to sneakily go around to get. But we didn’t want to see some terrible, watered down, exploitative thing. We wanted the innocent thing that our girls could watch.

KGS: And it was, although it certainly had some dark moments in it as well…

RS: Yeah, but like Louisa May Alcott, you gotta trust the kid, as in, “I’m going to show you something hard, but I trust that you can handle it.”

KGS: So, for a story like Matilda, or say, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which was based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, what kind of preparation can you do on stories that are fantasy and not grounded in a novel or in history?

RS: I think the preparation to adapt any story is to first invite the book in. Get the story under your skin and understand—what movie does this book want to become? What is the core of this story?

For Benjamin Button, the core of that story was that Fitzgerald had an idea based on Merlin, who also aged backwards. It was not a new idea. Fitzgerald started in the Civil War–not that long before he wrote the story. He didn’t have the same things on his mind back then that I had on my mind in 1989. As a dramatist I had the right to interpret this story as not starting during the Civil War, but instead to have the film look back over the Twentieth Century. Because what an incredible century.

I began by reading the books coming out in anticipation of the year 2000 that were being published. In college I’d absorbed every issue of Life Magazine, all the twentieth century, largely through photography. I had all of that in me. My Benjamin Button was a musician who we followed through the Twentieth Century via his music. The movie that got made was heavily re-written. In it Benjamin was not a musician and yet the thematic core remained.

KGS: You’ve said that “Adaptation is interpretation.” How much can a writer depart from the original work and still maintain what you’ve called “…the thematic core” of the piece, especially when the original isn’t particularly cinematic, or doesn’t conjure up strong images?

What you owe your audience is a strong dramatic narrative that allows them to reside in the central protagonists of the story.

RS: Not everything lends itself naturally to adaptation, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be adapted, as long as there’s something there you feel would speak to an audience. There aren’t many approaches that are just flat out illegitimate if you’re trying to convey the same themes that the author of the original piece was conveying.

There are movies that are considered adaptations because they’ve used a character that’s been in a previous movie even though you’re making everything else up, like the Marvel movies. Another example, Sleeping Beauty, is a fairy tale, but it’s also a Disney cartoon and a ballet and a piece of music. It’s a myth from which we can extract a story set in a contemporary time without princesses and kings.  Anytime you’re coming from the core of something that has already existed, you’re adapting.

KGS: Okay, wow, I see that.

RS: What you owe your audience is a strong dramatic narrative that allows them to reside in the central protagonists of the story. So, for example, The Jane Austen Book Club, a wonderful book by Karen Joy Fowler, is quite different from the movie because she enjoyed the freedom that novelists have, and screenwriters do not. The novel devoted many pages to the character’s back stories, whereas I had to focus on the present-day story of the book club. I had to invent scenes and create conversations, things we have the right to do as dramatists. We don’t replicate the novel; we provide an experience for the viewer that suits a movie.

KGS: Something that I, and others who primarily write prose, struggle with is that we can get caught up in the way words sound and feel and lose track of the big “S” story, or the narrative arc. How do you keep the flow of the story in the adaptation without all the…words?

RS: I guess I would say, sometimes we do, and sometimes we don’t, because sometimes, the voice of the novelist is so strong. You know, the voice of the novelist in Matilda was so strong, that sometimes we had to have some voiceover.

KGS: Right! And it works. But I’ve heard that in the screenwriting world, voiceovers are sometimes pooh-poohed.

RS: Yeah, I’ve heard that, but I’ve used it perhaps more than some because in adaptation we often want to bring in a strong authorial voice. For example, in Little Women, with voiceover I was able to build in a kind of novelistic quality by bringing in Jo’s private thoughts here and there. She was our storyteller.

KGS: Okay, something I must ask you…about the Barbie movie, which because of this conversation I now understand was an adaptation. It’s a female forward movie and it did very well commercially. But, as you know, Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig were passed over for nominations while Ken (Ryan Gosling) got the Academy Award nomination love, which is ironic, since that was kind of the point of the whole movie. What are your thoughts about what’s going on with that?

RS: I think it’s just another opportunity for us to see what’s going on with our culture. With Little Women, Gillian Armstrong and our incredible production designer, and  others were passed over for Oscars because men did not go see that movie at first. I joked at the time, “If only we’d named it Little Women with Big Breasts…” The idea that you could simply make a great movie for a female audience was considered absurd. The entire culture had to change before a blockbuster Barbie movie could get made, so seeing that happen really thrilled me.

But it’s a snapshot of where we are at this moment, that Barbie could be a ginormous hit, and have a huge audience, but the people who are in the position to award prizes to it, apparently hadn’t seen it.

Hats off to Greta Gerwig for the wonderful big set pieces she did in this movie. The song, Just Ken, really spoke to something we are up against in the culture right now, which is the hurt feelings of guys who are seeing women become ascendant, and their fears that they’re going to become irrelevant if there’s not a patriarchal structure around them that insists on placing them at the top.

KGS: Which seems to have played out in real life with the Academy Award nominations.

RS: Absolutely. I think of all the movies I sat through as a child…the Tarzan movies, and Star Wars, where it’s just guys, guys, guys. And when we come to movies like these where women are at the center of it and it’s about how powerful they are, it’s like, “No, no, no!”

KGS: And yet it was a phenomenal commercial success.

RS: Exactly. Because there’s a huge audience for that. I’ve been in countless meetings where I’ve had to justify wanting to make a movie that would appeal mostly to women, which is a big audience.

KGS: Women do make up over half the population.

RS: Yeah. I mean, c’mon, we can do that. A movie doesn’t have to appeal to all the little marketing slices they come up with, “men between eighteen and thirty,” or whatever. If we only get the girls, it will be great. And Greta Gerwig showed us that.

KGS: So, in your career, that has now spanned over forty years, what experiences stand out to you from a feminist perspective?

RS: I think some of the experiences that have pained me the most are those in which women were in power, who could have empowered me but chose not to, or even chose to actively oppose me.

KGS: Because they felt it was a zero-sum game, or…?

RS: I don’t know their personal reasons, but I do know that there’s an atmosphere of scarcity, where only a certain number of women are going to be allowed to succeed. Sometimes it may have felt like a risk for women to support a female filmmaker or the woman’s voice in the room. The women working in the business were trying to carve their paths only to hit that glass ceiling. A lot of women in that environment tried to protect their own careers.

Also, one of the things I experienced when there was absolutely, definitively feminist subject matter in a movie I was part of, is the producers took me aside at the start and said, “We don’t want any of your feminist bullshit…”

KGS: Wow.

RS: Making films is a business, and in a business world, there’s a lot of fear. Fourth quarter projections and Wall Street and all that. In some cases, I’d be told, “We don’t want the studio to have any reason to say ‘No’ to us, so, put a lid on it.”

KGS: Ah. The bottom line.

RS: That’s right. These are all publicly traded companies, so it’s you know, a weird place to come to be an artist.