East Of Eden creator Zoe Kazan has opened up about putting together the show’s poignant final scene.
As well as executive producing the new Netflix miniseries, Zoe also wrote all seven episodes of East Of Eden, based on John Steinbeck’s classic American novel of the same name, which was first adapted for the screen by her grandfather, Elia Kazan, in the 1950s.
While Zoe made numerous choices to differentiate her show from the source material and other adaptations over the years, when it came to its final moments, she told Variety that she wanted to follow the author’s lead.
She explained: “What’s in the book created such a clear map. Man, Steinbeck really killed it with that last scene.
“I knew that I was writing towards that the whole time. Knowing that that scene was coming actually was a North Star for me in how I wrote the rest of the series: ‘I know I need to have Samuel Hamilton and Lee tell the story of Cain and Abel, so how do I make that palatable to a contemporary audience?’.”
As for what happens when the screen fades to black, Zoe is leaving that up to interpretation.
“I don’t know where we leave them,” she claimed. “Steinbeck’s original conception of the book would’ve gone through another generation.”
She added: “I, for one, don’t know if I could have taken another tragic Trask generation of men, so I’m glad he decided to cut it off where he did.”
During the same interview, Zoe discussed some of the tweaks she had to make to her original script, and specific plotlines she had to cut from the original story to make the whole thing fit into seven episodes.
“There’s so much in this book, I couldn’t fit it all in, so I had to really kill some darlings,” she previously told People magazine.
She also pointed out to The Independent that in the original novel, “there’s so much treasure in it that you couldn’t possibly put it all into seven hours” admitting that “there are things I had to leave behind that hurt my heart”.
East Of Eden is now streaming on Netflix.
