Zoe Kazan embarked on a flight to New Zealand in June 2024 and excitedly settled in to watch the film East of Eden. For a mother with young children, a quiet flight alone counts as a sort of vacation. Upon seeing the film's name on the in-flight movie list, she said, "Apparently the gods are conspiring," and pressed play.
Until that point, she had avoided rewatching the film by her great mentor, Elia Kazan, from 1955. She was traveling around the world searching for locations for her adaptation of East of Eden, a seven-part adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel, which will be released on Netflix on October 1. She didn't want the film to influence her work, but her screenplay, which she had started in 2020, was finally complete.
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Fresh Analysis and Adaptation
After finishing the film, Zoe Kazan let out a sigh of relief. She said, "This film is less close to the book than I remembered." The film, which introduced James Dean to cinema, is more inspired by the novel than a direct adaptation: it only covers the last part of the story, key characters are omitted, and famous lines are absent. Kazan said in a café in Brooklyn, "The power of the story is how, over 50 years, it repeats or does not repeat its history."
Her faithful adaptation encompasses the entire multigenerational story and reconstructs the tale of Cain and Abel twice. Cyrus (Tracy Letts in the new series), a Civil War veteran who considers himself a myth, prefers his mild-mannered son Adam (Christopher Abbott) over his rough son Charles (Mike Faist). A generation later, Adam's twin sons, Aaron and Cal (Joe Ander and Joseph Zada), compete for the affection of their absent emotional father. Kazan grapples with the central question of the novel: Can these sons escape the shadows of their family history and forge their own paths? And can America, considering the sins of slavery, violent campaigns against Native Americans, and racism against immigrants striving to build a future in the West, do the same?
Living in the Shadow of the Past
Both versions, according to Kazan, are self-portraits of the artists who created them. Elia Kazan, known for directing A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront and founding the influential Actors Studio from which the "method acting" school emerged, was summoned to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. At that time, the Hollywood blacklist was in effect, and he was pressured to name names. His granddaughter has never read his autobiography, although she has tried. She said, "Part of me still wants my grandfather to be a grandfather and not have access to these adult issues." But she believes that Elia Kazan, who passed away in 2003, saw himself in a family black hole: "He had a cold and strict father, and I think he was projecting onto Cal."
Zoe Kazan, when she began working on the screenplay, was a new mother and was interested in the characters her grandfather had rewritten or omitted: Cathy (Florence Pugh), a mother who exits her children's lives and whom Kazan describes as "irredeemable, captivating, and full of will," and Lee (Hong Chau), a Chinese-American housekeeper who enters their lives to raise the boys.
Kazan may have the closest characters to Cathy and Lee in her screenplay. But perhaps the reason this project appeals to her is the concept of living and working in the shadow of her grandfather. She says, "The irony of this subject did not escape me. Objectively, I am following the paths of my family. I don't think I would be doing my job correctly as an artist if I weren't thinking about my family."
Zoe Kazan fell in love with Steinbeck as a teenager. At 15, she embarked on a Steinbeck-themed trip to the California coast with her parents, holding a copy of East of Eden. Years later, she asked her agents to inform her if anyone bought the rights to the story. That call came in December 2019 when Kazan was filming in Australia. She emerged from a flight to Los Angeles with her 15-month-old child, bleary-eyed, to pitch her idea to buyers.
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