How Zoe Kazan Made East of Eden Her Own

Zoe Kazan —Kirsty Griffin—Netflix In June 2024, Zoe Kazan boarded a flight to New Zealand.

She was excited.

For a mother of small children, a quiet solo flight is a vacation unto itself.

She scrolled through the in-flight movies.

“They had East of Eden , and I was like, ‘I guess the gods are conspiring,’” she says.

She pressed play.

Until then she had been avoiding rewatching her grandfather Elia Kazan’s 1955 masterpiece.

She was flying halfway across the world to scout locations for her own version of East of Eden , a seven-part adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel that premieres on Netflix on Oct.

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She hadn’t wanted the film to influence her.

But her script, which she’d begun working on in 2020, was finally turned in.

As the end credits rolled, she sighed in relief.

“It was less like the book than I remembered,” she says.

The film, which introduced a brooding James Dean to cinema, is more inspired by the novel than a direct adaptation of it: It covers only the last third, crucial characters have been excised, and famous lines are missing.