How do you adapt East of Eden for screen
How do you begin breaking down a 600-page American epic to bring it to the screen? How did Florence Pugh capture the essence of the central character Cathy? How did John Steinbeck’s secret writing journals help the screenwriters? And what should you read next if you loved reading - or watching - East of Eden?
We kick off our next series of Ask Penguin with a special episode dedicated to Netflix’s lavish new period drama, East of Eden, adapted from John Steinbeck’s epic American family saga. Rhianna Dhillon is joined by co-showrunner, writer and executive producer Zoe Kazan, and co-showrunner and executive producer Jeb Stuart, to discuss their vision for bringing the book to life on screen.
East of Eden is released on Netflix 1st October
Listen to the episode and subscribe to Ask Penguin wherever you get your podcasts.
Episode Transcript
Rhianna Dhillon: Hello, and welcome to Ask Penguin, the podcast about books and the people who write and publish them. I'm Rhianna Dhillon, and in this episode, we're doing things a little differently. This week, I'm thrilled to be joined by some of the team behind Netflix's adaptation of East of Eden: co-showrunner, writer, and executive producer, Zoe Kazan; and co-showrunner and executive producer, Jeb Stuart.
Written in 1952, East of Eden was considered by John Steinbeck to be his masterpiece. "Everything else I've written has been, in a sense, a practice for this," he said. East of Eden is a breathtakingly moving, and at times brutal novel that follows two families, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, across generations as they grapple with questions of identity, ambition, and love.
Part family saga, part biblical retelling, it spans more than 600 gripping pages, all told in Steinbeck's deceptively simple, yet richly evocative language. And now, the story has been adapted once again, this time as a seven-part series, told through the lens of the novel's female protagonist, Cathy, also known as Kate.
Now, before we hear from Zoe and Jeb, we thought we'd share an extract from the East of Eden audiobook to whet your appetite. Have a listen.
Audiobook Narrator: Adam Trask grew up in grayness, and the curtains of his life were like dusty cobwebs, and his days a slow file of half sorrows and sick dissatisfactions. And then, through Cathy, the glory came to him.
It doesn't matter that Cathy was what I have called a monster. Perhaps we can't understand Cathy. But on the other hand, we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water?
Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong. But this culture is fenced, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back. Might it not be that in the dark pools of some men, the evil grows strong enough to wriggle over the fence and swim free? Would not such a man be our monster, and are we not related to him in our hidden water? It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.
Whatever Cathy may have been, she set off the glory in Adam. His spirit rose flying, and released him from fear and bitterness and rancid memories. The glory lights up the world and changes it the way a star shell changes a battleground.
Perhaps Adam did not see Cathy at all, so lighted was she by his eyes. Burned in his mind was an image of beauty and tenderness, a sweet and holy girl, precious beyond thinking, clean and loving. And that image was Cathy to her husband. And nothing Cathy did or said could warp Adam's Cathy.
Rhianna Dhillon: Hello both of you!
Jeb Stuart: How are you?
Zoe Kazan: Hi!
Rhianna Dhillon: Thank you so much for joining us on Ask Penguin. It's really great to have you both on. Now, I want to start by asking you about the first time that you discovered the work of John Steinbeck, and particularly East of Eden, and the impact that it had on you. Jeb, let's start with you.
Jeb Stuart: Oh, wow. Well, it's one of the few novels that I've read, you know, multiple times over my—over my life. It has different meanings at different times, you know. You read it when you're in high school, or if you're an English major, and you may read it again in your, you know, your thirties. And, you know, so I've read it multiple times. So, it was really strange, I had just read it about two years before Zoe and I met. But it's um, for me, having read a lot of Steinbeck, it's—it's his opus. It's—it's so much more than all of his other novels. So, you can approach it and—and find something new every time you read it.
Rhianna Dhillon: Yeah.
Zoe Kazan: Yeah, I um—I think I was assigned Grapes of Wrath in school, and I then went to my parents' bookshelves and looked for everything else that I could find written by Steinbeck. I think Travels with Charley was my favorite until I read this. And when I read East of Eden, it kind of blew me away. It's a very odd book, like it has all of these autobiographical passages and philosophical musings, and there are things in it like there's a chapter about his mother, Olive, going up in an airplane for the first time. It's like, what is that doing in this book? Um, all these things that are not connected to plot. And I think I read it at a period in my life when I was starting to read with an eye towards authorial intention, and not just towards plot and character. But I was blown away by the character of Cathy Ames, and I felt like I had never read anyone like her. Um, and I don't know, some books just stay with you. Jane Eyre did this for me too. It's not even about so much loving the book as it is that it sort of like dogs you. Um, yeah.
Jeb Stuart: Right. Right.
Rhianna Dhillon: I want to definitely come on uh more about Cathy in a minute, but I'm—I kind of want to know about how your relationship to the book changed through adapting it, because that's obviously, you're having to look at it through a very different lens.
Jeb Stuart: Oh, that's a great question. You want to—
Zoe Kazan: Yeah, I um—I think that this book is so full of mystery and so full of treasure, and you know, I think the most surprising thing to me in adapting it was that it kept giving me something new every time. Like, I've read this book now countless times, and pulled things out of it and put them in the mouths of different characters. Like, my relationship to it is a very tactile, like my sleeves are rolled up, my hands are in there. And yet, even like this week promoting this, I will open the book and find something new that's surprising to me. And I don't know, it's such a big book, it's so rich. Um, I think it's one of the reasons to spend six years of your life working on something like this is to feel like you're in communion with something bigger than yourself.
Jeb Stuart: I also think that when we first met, Zoe, you know, said to me, "There are things that Steinbeck wrote to his agent or wrote to others as he was writing the book, and he discovered things." And so, that discovery process was a really important part when we started working together to be able to say, you know, "It's not in the book, but it's in his writings to someone else about the book."
Zoe Kazan: Yeah, Steinbeck wrote longhand on these big ledger books, and on the right-hand side of the page, he would write his pages for the day. And on the left-hand side of the page, while he was writing East of Eden, he would write letters to his editor, Pascal Covici, to whom he sort of dedicates the book at—at the very start. And as Jeb was saying, you can watch his process and his relationship to these characters change over the course of it, and that really informed the way that I came to this material.
Rhianna Dhillon: That sounds so invaluable.
Zoe Kazan: It is, and it's published. You can read them, uh it's published under the title Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters.
Rhianna Dhillon: Amazing.
Zoe Kazan: Yeah.
Rhianna Dhillon: So—so back to Cathy, the kind of most striking difference between the novel and your adaptation is that Cathy is the narrator. So, tell us about why you wanted to place her at the center of everything.
Zoe Kazan: You know what's funny is I don't actually really think of her as the narrator. I—we are using her voiceover, but I think of her relationship to the audience as being almost as if she's talking to herself. I am putting some of Steinbeck's words in her mouth. I think I felt permission to do that because of the—what he writes in those journals, that he comes to an understanding that he has a point of identification with Cathy. That when he first starts writing about her, he thinks of her as a monster, and that his understanding changes over the course of writing. Um, I think in the 1955 film, Cathy is sort of relegated to the sidelines. I think that's one of the reasons like you're reading in our press materials that we are recentering her. But I don't think we're actually doing something that different from what Steinbeck's intention was. I think she's really foregrounded in the book, and creates—is like the plot generator. She's the catalytic element.
Rhianna Dhillon: And what do you both love or find fascinating about Cathy? Do, you know, do you like her? Do you want to hate her? How has your relationship with her changed? Do you think that she is manipulating the audience as much as she is the other characters?
Zoe Kazan: You know, I think one of the great pleasures for me as a viewer is to feel like whoever is making the thing that I'm receiving trusts me to make up my own mind and have my own experience. And that's something that we really tried to do with this. I think people are going to have a whole wide variety of reactions to Cathy. I know as a reader I did.
Jeb Stuart: Right.
Zoe Kazan: I think one thing that was really important to us is to treat all of these characters with humanity. I think if we think of people who do terrible things as not being human, we don't learn anything about ourselves. And so, we were always coming from that perspective, but we really want to leave that up to the viewer.
Jeb Stuart: I think everything that she does is grounded, and that makes it instantly relatable, you know. It's not like, "Wow, where did that come from?"
Rhianna Dhillon: Yeah. There was a moment um, I was watching it with my mom, and there was a moment where Cathy does something, and my mom just went, "Good for her!"
Zoe Kazan: Yeah!
Rhianna Dhillon: Which I laughed.
Zoe Kazan: I think I know what moment that is.
Jeb Stuart: Yeah.
Rhianna Dhillon: Um, what kind of conversations were you both having with Florence Pugh about Cathy's character, and how did Florence see her, and what did she bring to the screen kind of above what was on the page?
Zoe Kazan: You know, Florence was the only actor that I had in mind from the start of this project. I had seen her in Midsommar, um, which is a very different film with a very different character, but seeing her portrayal of Dani in that, I felt like, this is an impossible role. How is she doing this? It felt otherworldly to me. And it was this lightning bolt moment of feeling like, well, if she can do that, she can play Cathy Ames. And I felt very strongly that we needed an actor who was capable of holding empathy for the character without softening her. And I knew that Florence could do that. I will say, I think Florence is a genius. I have no idea, even having spent all this time making this with her, I have no idea how she crafted her performance. It's otherworldly. It's like a force of nature.
Jeb Stuart: We spent 12 months after shooting with Florence's character in—in the edit, and you can't get tired of it. It just grabs you every single time, even if you've seen it 20 times in one day.
Rhianna Dhillon: And that's quite unusual when you're in the editing process! Um, what strikes you about the difference between today's audience and a readership or movie audience from the '50s, and how did you want to approach that with kind of modern sensibility, but without making it a modern adaptation?
Zoe Kazan: Yeah, it's a really good question.
Jeb Stuart: Yeah.
Zoe Kazan: I think at his heart, Steinbeck is a humanist. That was a guiding principle for me in thinking about how can I honor that impulse while sort of freeing up the material from anything that mires it in white mid-century America. That was quite easy to do, actually. It meant maybe looking a little past the margins of the page in some places, or rethinking the context for other things. But I think this is a very faithful adaptation, and we weren't trying to modernize it or change it profoundly.
I think our relationship with our attention span is very different, and I think that we as a culture have—have a different relationship to like literary works, where I think we have so much more junk food now, for lack of a better word, in our pop media. I really wanted to preserve the idea that this was for the people. Like, when he wrote this, he wasn't writing this for just critics to enjoy. This was not like supposed to be high literature, necessarily. It was supposed to be for the average reader, and I really wanted to lower the gates and say like, "This is for everybody." This is not just for people that have an English major. Like, I think that we sort of march into the plot a lot faster than—the book takes a long time to warm up.
Rhianna Dhillon: Yeah.
Zoe Kazan: I think as—for a modern audience, we don't have that luxury, but we were trying to preserve some of that pace as we walked through it, to give people time with these characters and to let people get to know them the way that we feel that we know them and love them.
Rhianna Dhillon: And because Steinbeck's writing is—it's so precise, and he does tell us, everything is there on the page, including, you know, the characters, what their desires are, what they're thinking. So, how did that translate where obviously when we don't have an internal monologue going on for all of these characters, so what were the challenges in bringing that to life without sort of spoon-feeding the audience?
Jeb Stuart: I think that's the—that's—I want to say the word "brilliance" of Zoe's scripts. It's very interesting, she doesn't direct the actors in any way, which is different from the way, you know, I've written scripts before. And that's, and there's not a lot of parenthetical, but the intent is so obvious, and it allows the actors to go in—in a direction that helps, you know, hold the whole framework up. But we had a spectacular cast of actors to bring this to life. It was—it was amazing.
Rhianna Dhillon: Yeah. And the setting, Jeb, is such an important part of what makes East of Eden what it is. So, I'd love to know about how you decided on some of those visuals, how much is lifted from Steinbeck's own descriptions, how much came from your own vision for the series?
Jeb Stuart: I think a lot came from his vision, but we had—we were shooting in New Zealand. We were able to get the Connecticut farmhouse, the Trask farmhouse, on the North Island outside of Auckland, and I live in Connecticut, so it's easy to kind of, you—I drive by these houses all the time. So, translating that into what we knew was the Trask farmhouse was—was important. And then, we both were very familiar with, you know, the California, you know, the coastal hills, the Salinas look, from years in California, and Zoe had made a pilgrimage when she was, you know, a teenager. So, we found that in East Otago, which was fantastic because you could get up there and you wouldn't see another—
Zoe Kazan: On the South Island.
Jeb Stuart: On the South Island, and you wouldn't see another farm or a light or anything. And it gave you the feeling of actually coming over the hill and finding, you know, this old, you know, Spanish estate down below that the Trasks are on, well—
Zoe Kazan: We had also brilliant DPs, Stuart Dryburgh and Sam Chiplin; wonderful directors, Garth Davis and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre—
Jeb Stuart: Right.
Zoe Kazan: Apologies to my French-speaking friends! Um, and our collaboration with them, and then also incredible heads of departments: our costume designer, Kirsty Cameron; our production designer, Grant Major; our hair and makeup teams. Like, and one of the things that we said to all of them was, "Please don't draw attention to your own work." Like, essentially like, we want everything to be period appropriate, we want everything to feel beautiful and right and real, but if it draws our attention away from these characters, from the story, we're not doing our job. We want people to walk away from this feeling like they know these people as people, and like the period-ness of it can't get in the way.
Rhianna Dhillon: Yes, that's really interesting.
Rhianna Dhillon: For all of those departments, obviously, you've both worked across film and TV for a long time, but which do you really, because it's not necessarily your area of expertise working with all these HODs, which do you really love sinking your teeth into, because you don't necessarily get to do that on a day-to-day?
Zoe Kazan: For me, having spent 20 years as an actor, and then having written other scripts, and having been an executive producer on those projects, I feel really lucky to have a lot of fluency in production. I think one of the things that gives me sort of special access from my acting background is my relationship to costume, and working with Kirsty Cameron was a joy. She's so special, so hardworking. She did Power of the Dog and like Whale Rider and stuff like that. She comes from an independent film background like I do. And like, that department worked so hard to make the most of every dime, or every, whatever, dollar, pence, pound, you know.
Rhianna Dhillon: Every quid!
Zoe Kazan: Um, I felt—I know the power of costume. I know that my experience as an actor is that like costume does at least 50%. The—the moment when you're in a fitting and you look in the mirror, and you see the character for the first time is a magical moment. And if you haven't gotten there yet, you have to keep working until you get there. I'm so grateful for her collaboration.
Jeb Stuart: And it was a moving target. We're dealing with so many years, it wasn't like we're hitting the 1870s, period. It just moves.
Zoe Kazan: Yeah, yeah, this is also like—this is a quite nerdy, technical thing, but if the whole story was set in the 1870s, then she could be reusing costumes, especially like for background. And instead, we're marching through like 50 years in this series, and so there had to be new background costumes for every era. And that's just such a huge technical challenge, especially in New Zealand where everything has to be shipped if you're going to get it from a warehouse. So, they built so many of these costumes, even costumes that are just in the background. It's one of the things I love about our series, is that it's the product of so much human labor. We're not using AI. This is like someone painting sweat stains on the, you know, underarms of a dress, and somebody else like, you know, putting dirt on the hem, and every stitch, I—I just know how much work went into it.
Jeb Stuart: Or the forge for the cavalry hats, or, you know, all of these kind of things.
Rhianna Dhillon: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's extraordinary, the attention to detail. Now, this is a book podcast after all, so if people enjoyed East of Eden, do you have like another book, maybe like a—a family saga or a novel set at the turn of the century, something like that, that they might like?
Zoe Kazan: Yes, I do. Do you?
Jeb Stuart: I mean, you go first.
Zoe Kazan: Okay. I think if you love East of Eden, the book or the series, you should read Toni Morrison's Sula, which takes up immediately after this time period. So, this book ends during the First World War, and Sula takes up in the aftermath of the First World War. And it's also American history, also following people over the course of their lives. It's also about good and evil, and what do you do about it inside of yourselves, inside of others? How do you forgive someone? How do you forgive yourself? But it's from a very different perspective, a Black female perspective. It's about sort of a sisterhood of kind, which I think is a lovely juxtaposition with the brotherhood in this book.
Rhianna Dhillon: Love that. Thank you.
Jeb Stuart: I would say John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy.
Zoe Kazan: Which I've never read.
Jeb Stuart: Yeah, oh, it's—well, you've got something to read.
Rhianna Dhillon: There you go, that's a recommendation! Both, thank you very, very much for talking to us, and East of Eden is available to watch on Netflix from October the 1st. Thank you so much for joining us on Ask Penguin.
Jeb Stuart: Thank you.
Zoe Kazan: Thank you!
Rhianna Dhillon: Thank you.