For screenwriter Robin Swicord, Little Women became her passion project after a childhood of obsessing over the novel. She met Amy Pascal (acclaimed producer, former co-chairman of Sony Pictures and a name you may remember from 2014’s Sony Hack scandal ) right out of college as newbies in Hollywood. The two shared a mutual affection for Louisa May Alcott’s story, and since Pascal was named after two March sisters (her middle name is Beth), their partnership felt like fate. The pair tried to adapt the book for 12 years before Pascal produced A League of Their Own and Groundhog Day and finally garnered the clout she needed to get the project made. “I thought, ‘Women need to see this movie right now,’” Swicord tells me over the phone while visiting her daughter, actress Zoe Kazan, in New York. “I had tried for so long and hoped for so long, and it felt like, if not now, when?” Once the film was picked up by Sony/Columbia Pictures, Swiccord says she and Pascal were met with an “aggressively against-us attitude” from the all-male execs. The shoot was plagued by a low budget, production days that were cut halfway through filming and a one-person art department. Still, they created a beloved movie that has held up for decades and feels just as timely now as it did in the ’90s.