Overview of The Watch’s Conversation with Zoe Kazan
In this special edition of The Watch, Zoe Kazan discusses her Netflix adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, reflecting on what it meant to bring a deeply personal, decade-long project into the world. The conversation explores the challenges of adapting a massive novel, the emotional weight of reshaping beloved material, and the collaborative craft behind the series’ look, performances, and thematic focus. Kazan is candid about the pressure, the creative tradeoffs, and the joy of finally seeing the work connect with audiences.
Key Takeaways
- Kazan has lived with East of Eden for most of her life and worked on the adaptation for nearly a decade.
- She sees adaptation as an “advanced form of reading” — a subjective interpretation of a text, not a literal transcription.
- The series required major structural choices, including cutting material she loved, to make the story work onscreen.
- She prioritized making the period feel immersive without turning it into a costume-drama showcase.
- The character of Lee became especially meaningful to her after becoming a parent, deepening her understanding of care, labor, and family.
- Much of the show’s power, for her, comes from collaboration: actors, directors, costume design, production design, and location work all shaped the final result.
- She is already thinking about future adaptations, including Lonesome Dove, even though she knows how daunting that is.
Adapting East of Eden
A Personal Relationship to the Book
Kazan explains that East of Eden is unlike any other book in her life. She first read it young, returned to it repeatedly, and later discovered a family connection to the material that added another layer of meaning. Because of that history, adapting it felt less like an assignment and more like a long emotional relationship.
“Killing Your Darlings”
She describes the adaptation process as having to make painful but necessary cuts, especially when it came to balancing the book’s sprawling storylines. One of the hardest decisions was letting go of the Hamilton/Charles side of the novel in the way she had initially imagined it, even though she had hoped to interweave the threads more fully.
Writing for the Form
Kazan says she approached the script by repeatedly rereading the relevant sections of the novel for each episode, which helped her find material she could relocate across the series. She prefers not to outline rigidly, but she did map the emotional and structural “chunks” of the novel to determine where each episode should land.
Building the World of the Series
A Period Piece That Feels Alive
A major goal for Kazan was making the world feel specific and authentic without drawing too much attention to the costume or production design itself. She wanted the period details to feel as natural to the characters as our modern world feels to us.
Shooting in New Zealand
Kazan originally wanted to shoot in California, but the production ultimately filmed in New Zealand. What initially felt like a compromise turned out to be an advantage:
- Victorian-era structures were still available and usable.
- The landscape and historical architecture fit the story unusually well.
- New Zealand’s artisans and crew brought exceptional craft and work ethic.
She emphasizes that the production’s beauty came not just from the cinematography, but from the physical objects, sets, and handmade details that filled the frame.
Performances and Character Work
Finding the Right Creative Language
Kazan talks about casting as one of the most important parts of achieving the right tone. Florence Pugh came on early, and Kazan was writing with her in mind. She also found strong alignment with Christopher Abbott, whose theater background and sensibility matched the show’s emotional and intellectual tone.
Avoiding Stiff Period Acting
She says she wanted the actors to feel natural rather than stagey or antiquated, even in a period setting. Conversations in pre-production helped establish a shared understanding of the characters, especially for emotionally complex roles like Faye, played by Martha Plimpton.
Hoon Lee’s Lee
Kazan is especially moved by Hoon Lee’s performance as Lee, a character she came to identify with much more deeply as an adult and a parent. She emphasizes:
- Lee’s daily labor as a caregiver and emotional center of the family.
- His importance as a humanist presence in a book and story shaped by conflict and imbalance.
- The value of expanding his world and honoring his intelligence, dignity, and interior life.
She notes that both Hoon Lee and writer Alexander Chee helped shape how she thought about Lee’s representation, especially around the character’s racial identity and the historical context of the story.
Thematic Ideas That Guided the Adaptation
Balance, Duality, and Human Nature
Kazan says the story is deeply interested in balance and imbalance — not just good and evil, but masculine and feminine energies, agency and surrender, care and violence. She wanted those tensions to be present across the series and in the character dynamics.
Reading as Interpretation
One of her strongest ideas is that every adaptation is a human reading of a text. There is no single “correct” version, only a set of choices shaped by the adapter’s perspective, values, and emotional connection to the work.
The Power of Bodies in Space
Kazan repeatedly returns to the magic of film and television: once actors are placed in a scene and a camera is trained on them, the material reveals layers that can’t always be accessed on the page.
Looking Ahead: Lonesome Dove
The conversation ends with Kazan discussing why she keeps being drawn to monumental Western stories like Lonesome Dove. She admits the prospect is intimidating, but says she is motivated by the chance to wrestle with big themes — mortality, myth, identity, and the West as an imagined space. For her, the size of the project matters less than the strength of her connection to it.
Notable Quotes and Ideas
- “Adaptation is an advanced form of reading.”
- She compares adaptation to selecting tiny frames from a painting: what matters is where each reader-creator chooses to look.
- She describes Lee as the figure who shows up every day to care for the family, in contrast to the destructive forces in the story.
- On large adaptations and ambition: “I love wrestling with a piece of text.”
Bottom Line
This interview is as much about the emotional experience of adaptation as the practical one. Kazan frames East of Eden not just as a literary project, but as a deeply personal act of interpretation — one shaped by memory, parenthood, collaboration, and the challenge of honoring a classic while making it feel immediate and alive onscreen.