754 - East of Eden with Zoe Kazan

Scriptnotes Podcast

John August interviews Zoe Kazan about her Netflix adaptation of Steinbeck's East of Eden. They discuss her personal connection to the material through her

Key takeaways

• Zoe Kazan discovered Steinbeck's East of Eden on her parents' bookshelf as a teen, later learning it was connected to her grandfather Elia Kazan's acclaimed 1955 film adaptation.
• She pitched the series to Anonymous Content and Fifth Season after years of grumbling about previous failed adaptation attempts, emphasizing its generational cyclical nature over a two-hour film format.

Main topics

• Adapting literary classics for television
• Period piece dialogue and naturalism vs. heightened language

Notable quotes

I think what makes a book a classic or like art stand the test of time and become canonical in some ways is usually how weird it is.

Conclusion

The episode offers valuable insights into the craft of literary adaptation, emphasizing the

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is episode 754 of Script Notes. It's a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. In 1952, John Steinbeck published East of Eden, his magnum opus, telling the interwoven story of two families set in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Central California, going all the way back to the Civil War. In 1955, the fourth and final part of that story was adapted into an acclaimed film. written by Paul Osborne and directed by Elia Kazan. Now in 2026, the book has been adapted as a seven-part limited series on Netflix by Elia Kazan's granddaughter, Zoe Kazan, herself an accomplished actor, screenwriter, and playwright. Welcome to Script Notes, Zoe Kazan. Speaker 2 (0:42) Thanks, long-time listener. Yay. First-time caller. Speaker 1 (0:46) It's so great to have you here. Thanks Speaker 2 (0:48) for having me. Speaker 1 (0:48) I'm really excited to talk to you about your series. We got a sneak peek, so we got to look at it ahead of time. Everyone else is to check it out. in a week or two as it comes out. October 1st. So everyone gets to see it. On Netflix. On Netflix. I want to talk about how you came to make it, the decision to make it, the weird connection you have to it, which is just so special and so strange. But I also want to really focus on some craft things because you've written great dialogue in this series, but you're also an actor who's had to perform a lot of dialogue. And I just want to talk about how you... Write dialogue that not only tells the story, but also fits in actors' mouths, which is an important aspect. I want to talk about archetypes because you could not get more archetypal than, you know, the Cain and Abel story that's at the heart of East of Eden. And in our bonus for premium members, if I can ask you about being the kid of two screenwriters, a unique situation, right? Growing up, you know, with two people who are like accomplished screenwriters themselves. And so what's all that's like? Speaker 2 (1:45) Yeah, I'd love to talk about those things. Fantastic. Speaker 1 (1:49) Well, let's get into the project itself. When were you first aware that East of Eden existed as a thing in the world? Speaker 2 (1:54) So I was like a pretty voracious reader, as so many writers are. It's such a stupid and boring thing to say. I had read Grapes of Wrath in school, and then that sent me, as it so often did, to my parents' bookshelf. And then I read Travels with Charlie and Of Mice and Men. And then I read East of Eden, which... was so surprising to me. It's like this massive doorstopper of a book. And I think we have this idea culturally about classics that they are dusty and boring and like eating our spinach. And like East of Eden is none of those things. Well, it's Speaker 1 (2:31) sexy. It's dramatic. It's very Speaker 2 (2:33) pulpy. And like, it's also really unexpected. I think actually what makes a book a classic or like art. stand the test of time and become canonical in some ways is usually how weird it is. Speaker 1 (2:44) And Speaker 2 (2:44) I think like it's a very strange book. It has like, it always works in dialectics. It's like this and then that, and then we synthesize those two things. And that can be anything from like, this character is evil and this character is good to like. this is my plot and here's me discursively thinking about communism for a little bit or here's me recounting the first time my mother went up in an airplane. You know, like he wrote it with this very autobiographical push. He's a Speaker 1 (3:12) character in it very late in the story, right? Yeah, he Speaker 2 (3:15) talks about himself as a little boy and all these memories that he had. He's sort of like delineating the history of his matrilinear line. And I think I was just shocked by it at 15 and like, really arrested by this character of Kathy Ames, who's so amoral. And like, I was such a good girl and she was so selfish. And there was a real like clarity to that quality for selfishness, which I found enthralling. So Speaker 1 (3:44) you picked up this book off your parents' bookshelf. At the time, did you know what your connection to it was? Speaker 2 (3:49) Not really. You know, it's one of these funny things where like every person is only living their life, right? Speaker 1 (3:53) So Speaker 2 (3:54) like I grew up in a household where Like John Steinbeck had been an adult in my father's life. Like he had been a, you know, a very beloved person to my father. And so there were like photographs of him on our wall of family photographs. So like I understood in some ways. And then in other ways, I had no cognizance. And at that point, I had never seen one of my grandfather's films. And so it just like, it didn't seem very important to me. Speaker 1 (4:20) But Speaker 2 (4:21) the book is all about family. And like I said, it has this like... autobiographical push to it. And it's all about like what we inherit and what we do with it. And so after I read it, my parents were like, well, do you want to see your grandpa's movie? And did Speaker 1 (4:36) you watch it on VHS? Did you watch it on DVD? Did you go to screen? I Speaker 2 (4:39) watched it on Speaker 1 (4:39) DVD at Speaker 2 (4:40) home. All Speaker 1 (4:41) right. Speaker 2 (4:41) And I think, or actually, I think we rented the DVD from Vidiot's, which was down the road from where I grew up. And I was like quite disappointed by it in a lot of ways. Because of Speaker 1 (4:52) all the omissions. Largely because you have this sense of what the sprawl is of this story. It's an intergenerational saga. And instead he's locking down to one little small part of it and a limited focus. I Speaker 2 (5:03) think also like the things that I was interested in about the book weren't in the movie. And I think that Steinbeck was in a way making... a portrait of himself in this book. And I think my grandfather was making a portrait of himself, like, you know, his interest in father-son relationships and in the sort of like pull of good and evil in yourself. And I think I was just interested in a very different thing. And so I sort of carried it around like a little grudge for a long time of feeling like, well, someone has to. Speaker 1 (5:36) Yeah, Speaker 2 (5:36) exactly. Speaker 1 (5:38) We Speaker 2 (5:38) had Speaker 1 (5:39) Greta Gerwig on the show and we were talking about her adaptation of Little Women and that her adaptation was very much informed by her memory of what Little Women was to her at that time. And so she was approaching it as an adult, but she also still carried her memory of what it was like to read it for the first time. And I think in that episode, I talked about how with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I had such a specific view of that story from when I read it in third grade and when I wrote to Roald Dahl and... how I remembered that being. And so it's that struggle of carrying that initial instinct, the freshness that you feel for, like what was the spark into the actual work of adapting this to the screen and making it make sense for a piece of filmed entertainment. Speaker 2 (6:22) Yeah. Speaker 1 (6:22) When did you first conceive of like, oh, maybe I'm the person who should do right by this book? Speaker 2 (6:28) You know, it's one of these things, I think, there are books that just kind of grab hold of you and like, I don't always even think that it has to be a book you particularly love. Like, I read Jane Eyre, I cannot tell you how many times as a young person. And like, I don't even know if I like it, but I was fascinated by it and like, really wanted to understand it. And something kept calling to me. And I've sort of felt that this way about that. We're like. I don't know how many times I reread it, maybe four or five times, even before I started even thinking about adapting it. And every time they would like announce like, oh, this person's going to make a movie of it. Speaker 1 (7:06) I Speaker 2 (7:06) would like grumble to my partner like, that's not how Speaker 1 (7:09) you're going to do it. Speaker 2 (7:11) And he would kind of like be like, what's that about? Like, why do you have this impulse? And then eventually I texted my agents and I was Speaker 1 (7:19) like, grumble, grumble. rights Speaker 2 (7:22) ever come up to this? Like, can I go in and pitch? And then like a few years later, they texted me saying the rights are with anonymous content and fifth season. And do you want to go in and pitch? And I like joked, I had been training my whole life for it, you know, but I had. You had. Speaker 1 (7:38) Well, let's talk about the grumbles with the other adaptations you would see being announced because were they filmmakers who didn't think that it had the right approach or was it the fact that you didn't think it could fit into a two hour piece of film entertainment? Because it's just. you're going to cut so much in order to make it fit into a movie shape. Speaker 2 (7:54) Yeah, it was mostly that. I had no problem with these filmmakers. You know, it was really just that I thought they kept denouncing it as like a film or maybe two films. And I think I really felt like the power of this material is in the reiteration across generations and how like the butterfly effects have changed. Yeah, absolutely. Speaker 1 (8:15) The fact that it's a cycle and you can't really get to a cycle. as naturally or as easily in a movie as you can in something that's episodic. Speaker 2 (8:23) Well, like even within the seven hours that we have in our series, I'm omitting at least like half the book. Yeah. There's this whole other story of the Hamilton family that I couldn't even bring into here because I would need another at least three episodes to do that. Like, so yeah, I felt like if you're going to, my grandfather's adaptation is a classic and is... beloved by so many for, I think, good reason. So if you're going to do it again, you should do it differently. So Speaker 1 (8:52) talk to us about going into Fit Season Anonymous content and what your pitch is for it. And so you show up just describing your enthusiasm or did you come in with a deck? Did you come in with a whole plan? Like what did it look like? And what was that first meeting like? Speaker 2 (9:04) Yeah. I mean, I had very little time to prepare. I got the call and within a week I had to pitch. I was in Australia filming a TV show as an actor. I had a one and a half year old and I was coming back to LA for Christmas break on our TV show. And I knew I had this like 17 hour plane ride, but I had a one and a half year old. So it's not like I was going to get to be like. Not Speaker 1 (9:30) a joyful plane ride. No, Speaker 2 (9:31) no. I think it's Speaker 1 (9:33) a Speaker 2 (9:33) really particularly difficult age to be in a long plane ride because they don't have the. attention span to put them down in front of Louie. Yeah, Speaker 1 (9:40) they have the mobility, but not the actual self-control. I Speaker 2 (9:43) tried, like, you know, I had read it multiple times, but I was like, I really wanted to read it again before I went in. I did not have time. I tried the audio book, but like, I actually had a real issue with, Speaker 1 (9:54) I'm Speaker 2 (9:55) very particular about audio books. And so I, anyways, I sort of like skimmed it on my phone while like chasing my child down the aisle of the plane, came home, showered. Went to sleep, woke up the next day and went into my meeting. And so I'd had like no time to do the things that you normally do. My dad had loaned me his car and there was like a parking envelope in there. And I like got to the anonymous content parking lot and like broke it on this envelope, like longhand, which is again, like not ideal. But at least it's Speaker 1 (10:32) fresh in your head. Sometimes Speaker 2 (10:34) you have like these moments where you like hit flow state unexpectedly. And I felt as if like, I don't know, like the clouds parted and light beams came down and it was like, I know how I would do this. I broke it in eight, but we ended up not having the budget for eight. So it ended up being seven. But I went in and it was like, it was just one of these magical meetings where all the things came out of my head. Speaker 1 (11:00) But one Speaker 2 (11:00) of the things I was talking about in that meeting was like, we're all carrying around our family histories. And like, I was relating it to like, we're all carrying around the history of this country, whether or not we like it. And I think that one of the things that the book is talking about is how do we carry those things that are like shameful or harmful or hurtful in our past. that we may or may not be responsible for? And how do we like feel the ability to carry it without being so burdened by it that you cannot affect change, Speaker 1 (11:35) but Speaker 2 (11:35) also carry it in a way that acknowledges what happened? And I was relating this to my family history and my grandfather's history with HUAC. And I think they just weren't expecting all that. Speaker 1 (11:48) But, you Speaker 2 (11:49) know, I think it's a shadow that I've really like not wanted to walk into. And I think the thing that I felt with this was like so called to this story that I had to, but also I really felt the memetic quality of my relationship to my family history and Steinbeck's relationship to this book and my relationship to this book. Speaker 1 (12:09) I can understand like you say a shadow you didn't want to be called into and yet it is the hero's quest. It's the call to adventure. Like, well, this is the time when you have to do this thing. I'm thinking about it from the other side of the room as they're listening to you talk about it because they know you as a playwright and they've read you as that. What has you written that looked anything like this, that looked the shape of a series? Speaker 2 (12:34) Yeah, actually, you know, it was like in some strange way the payoff of like a long form conversation with David Levine at Anonymous Content. So David used to be at HBO and I met him there. He had read some of my plays. I went in and met with him and then... He was seeking the rights to Easter Parade by Richard Yates, which is one of my favorite novels. And I had gone in incredibly pregnant with my first child and done this pitch on that. And then we tried to make that work, but the rights fell apart. I had adapted this book, this Richard Ford book, Wildlife, with my partner, Paul Dano, which is like mid-century and much closer to that book. I mean, it wasn't written in the mid-century, but it's set in that era. And so I think there was like a kind of one-to-one on that. But I think it was much more like David being familiar with my, Speaker 1 (13:25) I've