Zoe Kazan on Making ‘East of Eden’

Chris is joined by ‘East of Eden’ creator Zoe Kazan to discuss her deep connection to the John Steinbeck epic, the process of adapting such a monumental text for the screen, why the Lee character was so important for them to get right, how they landed on the stunning look of the show, what drew her to ‘Lonesome Dove,’ and much more (1:52). Subscribe to the Ringer TV YouTube channel here for full episodes of The Watch and so much more! Follow us on IG and TikTok! Host: Chris Ryan Guest: Zoe Kazan Producers: Kaya McMullen and Kai Grady Studio Production: Remy Hernandez Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:04Chris Ryan?

  Hello and welcome to The Watch, this special edition of the pod today. It's just me and it's just me and Zoe Kazan, who did the Netflix adaptation of East of Eden, John Steinbeck's East of Eden. The seven-episode series is streaming now. Andy and I have been talking about it over the last couple of weeks. It's, it's been a beguiling and intoxicating experience getting to see this book through her eyes and to watch these performances from Florence Pugh and Christopher Abbott and the company. It's just been fantastic. So I wanted to talk to the creator of the series and see, and see what she thought about it now that it was out into the world, how this experience has been for her as somebody who has a decades-long relationship to the text, a family connection to the text, and

• 1:49Chris Ryan?

  also such a deep connection to the series itself, which she's been working on for the better part of a decade. I think what she did was a monumental work of adaptation. So I really wanted to kind of get into the weeds with her about how one goes about killing their darlings when you're going through a massive text like Steinbeck's novel and excising some major plot points, changing some perspectives, finding the voice of the show, finding the performance voice of the show. Zoe was so articulate and wonderful and vulnerable and open with me, talking about the series and what it means to her. And it honestly makes me feel closer to the series itself, which is a rare occurrence when you're talking to creators, you know, not that there's a right or a wrong way to

• 2:34Chris Ryan?

  talk about your art, but you can tell that this really meant quite a bit to her. And as does Lonesome Dove, which we talked about at the end of the conversation. Thanks for listening and enjoy my interview with Zoe Kazan. Zoe, thank you so much for joining me on The Watch. Andy and I have been really like pretty ensorcelled by, by this series and it's just a great accomplishment. So I just wanted to congratulate you for one thing. And most of the press I've read from you and studied the interviews, it's all been pre-release promo. So I wanted to ask you how it feels to have this out in the world in totality and people are receiving it and talking about it and it's, it's living with them. So what's it like for you? Are you somebody who watches her act, own acting work?

• 3:19Chris Ryan?

  Like, do you have a different relationship to the stuff that you've written once it's out?

• 3:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I do. I mean, I think with the acting work, it's so different because somebody else is editing it. So you're, you're getting this like nice year-long, sometimes two-year-long break between making it and having it come out. And so, and there's also some uncanny experience of like, this has been in someone else's hands and someone else chose which takes of mine to use. And like, on this, I didn't finish post-production until March.

• 3:52Chris Ryan?

  Wow.

• 3:52Speaker 04

  So I've been like, I got like a tiny breather, but basically went right back into press.

• 4:01Speaker 04

  I've been working on this, I started this six years ago, almost seven years ago.

• 4:05Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  And like, I keep, I know this is going to sound really cheesy, but like, I remember when my daughter, my first child was born, people would come over and hold her and I would burst into tears.

• 4:19Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:20Speaker 04

  Because like, if someone else was holding my baby, I could see my baby. Whereas if she put my arms, it was like so overwhelming to be her mother that like, she would just, it was like, I couldn't see her.

• 4:31Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:31Speaker 04

  And then someone took a filter and I could see her. And that's a little bit how I feel right now, which is like, I'm trying to put myself on a real like strict mental health, don't read reviews, don't read what people are saying. Like, I'm trying to be really strict with myself, but when I peek, I'm like, even seeing people like disagree with me about something, I feel like there's something really beautiful about it because reading is so subjective.

• 4:57Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:58Speaker 04

  Everyone is coming to this with their own read of this material. And sometimes it feels like someone is really seeing what I'm seeing, but even when there's a little tension between the two things that we see, it helps me see what I've made better. I don't know, that's been a really productive feeling for me.

• 5:17Chris Ryan?

  That's amazing. I mean, I can imagine if, if this book has been in your life for decades and this project has been in your life for almost 10 years and, you know, you're, you're basically the experience of dropping this thing all at once and people are either able to watch it in two nights or, or two months.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  That's really overwhelming.

• 5:37Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:38Speaker 04

  That's like, that's the thing that I can't get my brain around at all, is that I'm like, oh, like, I guess somebody, I guess somebody could watch this in the first seven hours that exists in the world. And like, I don't know, it's a little like that, when that reporter had worked for all that time on that thing and then just tweeted it out.

• 5:57Chris Ryan?

  He just tweeted it out.

• 5:58Speaker 04

  It feels a little bit like that.

• 5:59Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, you just used to be eden it out.

• 6:02Speaker 04

  Totally, totally. I don't know. I mean, like, I think that's the hard thing about letting go of anything that you make is that you have no control over how people watch it, how people receive it. Like, I think, you know, this has been in a lot of ways really warmly received and a lot of people are watching it and coming from like a tiny independent film and theater background where like, I think probably hundreds of people saw my plays.

• 6:29Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 6:31Speaker 04

  It feels really different to like, you know, have people actually watch it. It feels, it feels good.

• 6:37Chris Ryan?

  Do you remember a moment early on in production, whether it was pre-production or actually on set, that was like your first pinch me moment of like, oh my God, that's Kathy or oh my God, like that's King City or whatever it might've been that you were just like, I can't believe that this thing that's been living in my brain is now happening in front of me.

• 6:59Speaker 04

  Great question. I mean, during the camera test, we, like, that was a real moment, getting to see them all in their costumes and with, under the lights and everything for the first time. But weirdly, the thing that comes to mind for me is that like, I know this is, this is going to sound really dark and terrible, but so in the second episode, there's that scene where Mr. Edwards runs after her and beats the hell out of her, out of Kathy. And I had writ, that had been a really hard scene for me to write. It's one of the few scenes that I never went back and rewrote.

• 7:38Speaker 04

  Partially because I knew that stunts was going to have a lot to do with it, but partially because like, I have my own experiences of violence and, um, I had a, I, the first person that I had met at Yale was murdered by her ex-boyfriend.

• 7:55Chris Ryan?

  Oh my God.

• 7:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And, um, Lyric Benson. And I was on this road in New Zealand, thinking about Lyric and thinking, I'm so lucky to be alive and I'm so lucky to be here standing on this road. And like, I've been carrying this thing with me for so long and I wasn't even aware that I was putting this part of myself into it. And it felt like, here we are, like doing this kind of scrappy thing. Like, we have like these stunt people and we've built this costume and we've built it multiple ways so that it can be torn and like bloodied and there are like six copies

• 8:40Speaker 04

  of this costume and all of these people have lit this in this beautiful way and shown up here in freaking New Zealand and like, moon is rising and I just had this feeling of like, oh, this, actually my whole life is contained in this moment.

• 8:57Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 8:57Speaker 04

  And I don't know, little moments like that. We had a crew of like over 600 people and going into the workshops and seeing people tadding lace and dying garments to make them look as if they were sweat stained and painting that portrait of Cyrus Trask, which I made her, which I like, artist was so lovely and I kept being like, can you do it again? Can you change this part? And, you know, like, we, I just felt that like, I don't know, my favorite thing about making film and television is that it's a group sport. And so like, there, I was in that moment, having this very personal experience that's totally based in my own life experience.

• 9:39Speaker 04

  And, and at the same time, it's this part of this big machine with all these people bringing all their different art forms to it. Just having moments like that over and over again was really meaningful to me.

• 9:51Chris Ryan?

  I think it's probably also a testament to the, the role the book has probably played for you in terms of, I, I've just been so touched by reading and watching you talk about East of Eden as a text, because you're getting at something that I think lots of readers feel about their favorite books, which is that you can find yourself almost anywhere in them. And I feel that way about East of Eden. I feel that way about Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, you know, like I can find it in a lot of my favorite reading experiences. You said something to The Hollywood Reporter that I thought was fascinating about the idea of adaptation as an advanced form of reading. And I was wondering if I could ask you a little bit more about that.

• 10:34Chris Ryan?

  I'm fascinated by how adapting something changes your relationship to a text as a reader. Because I wonder whether or not like you almost have to get rid of East of Eden as like a, a favorite book, once you start to interrogate it as something that you're going to be adapting.

• 10:56Speaker 04

  Maybe. I don't know. I mean,

• 11:01Speaker 04

  So my relationship to this book is unlike almost any other relation. Like I think there is no other book that I have this specific relationship with.

• 11:11Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 11:12Speaker 04

  Just to say that I fell in love with it so young. And every time I've come back to it, it's offered something new for me. And also this family connection, which was not the reason that I was drawn to the book, but adds this meta textual element, right? So like often I would, you know, Steinbeck called this the book. That's also sort of how I feel about it in some strange way. Especially now, having sunk six years.

• 11:41Chris Ryan?

  It better be the book.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  Um, and in some ways like, I'm like, it's like first love or something. I'm like, well, I'll never feel this way again. Like I'll feel other ways. I'll love things in other ways, but like first love is first love, right? Um, the way that I was like describing adaptation to my daughter who's eight is like, I was like, imagine the Mona Lisa, a painting everyone knows. And if you gave someone seven tiny frames, like the size of an index card, and told them, frame the most important parts of the painting. Like, we would probably all put a frame around her mouth. We'd probably all put a frame around at least one of her eyes.

• 12:24Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 12:24Speaker 04

  But after that, where you place those frames is like incredibly subjective. And it has everything to do with like, who you are as a reader, what you're bringing to the text, what only you would bring to the text, right? Like, there would be people that would just do the landscape in the back. And that would be valid. Like, that's a valid way of looking at that painting, because like every way of looking at a painting is valid.

• 12:49Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 12:49Speaker 04

  Right? I think the thing about working on this for so long is that I had a lot of time to like, react to what I was doing in other episodes. That's the thing that I feel like really grateful for that was like completely a product of when I was adapting this. Like the fact that it was pandemic. I got all this time to like, think about, okay, well, if I'm giving this language to Kathy, how do I have to balance this someplace else? I also think this is a really specific kind of book for adaptation because it's too big to adapt.

• 13:21Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 13:21Speaker 04

  All of Paul and I adapted this book Wildlife by Richard Ford together. And that book is very slim and like, we're basically using the whole book. And like, it's really much more a matter of how do you translate his prose into images?

• 13:36Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 13:36Speaker 04

  Into blog and less of like, what do you pick and choose? But like, I'm not transcribing like a third of that book.

• 13:45Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  Right? And I had to really make peace with the fact that like, my book, my version of East of Eden, my book, right? Is going to be different than this series.

• 13:55Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 13:56Speaker 04

  And that's a feature, not a bug.

• 13:58Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, obviously that that comes with the decision to, I guess, excise or not use the Hamilton side of things. Was there ever a dream scenario where it was a more complete or a more to like, it's every page and it's 16 episodes or whatever it was going to be?

• 14:15Speaker 04

  I think my dream was to interweave the two storylines. And when I got into the actual work of adaptation, it became clear to me that if I did that, it was going to be like a survey course of American history.

• 14:26Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 14:27Speaker 04

  And I think every adaptation is, like, if you, if we just wanted a transcription, now we could go to ChatGPT for that, right?

• 14:37Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 14:38Speaker 04

  I think that the thing that's wonderful about an adaptation is that it's through a human lens. Like, it's how that person reads the book or those people read the book. That said, like, the Hamilton storyline was really hard to let go of. And I had to find ways to make peace with that by being like, the themes that are inside of the Hamilton storyline will still be present in this thing. And now if someone goes and reads the book after they see the series, they will still have so much treasure to find.

• 15:09Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 15:10Speaker 04

  That was a series.

• 15:11Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, if you like, if you respond to Karen Heinz's performance, you're in a lot of luck if you read the book. When you were adapting it, I'm fascinated by the idea, especially with a book that you have such a deep personal relationship with, whether you open final draft and start with the first page of East of Eden, or are there scenes that you wrote way in advance? Are there scenes that were part of like writing exercises for you? What, was it a linear process or was it kind of all over the place?

• 15:39Speaker 04

  So I wrote this on assignment, right? Like I, I got hired to do this by the people that had the rights who are anonymous. So they hired me to write the first two episodes. So I knew that I was starting there. I went through the book, I reread the whole book.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  And then for every episode, I would just reread till the portion, till the end of that episode, basically. So every time I would restart at the top of the book and read through. And what that allowed me to do was like, find things that I hadn't used and use them elsewhere, basically. But when I started, I started like two documents. One was an episode one document and one was an episode two document. Because I think the book worked so much in dialectics.

• 16:25Chris Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:25Speaker 04

  And I knew that like, episode one was going to be very different than episode two. So when I first got hired to do this, I was like, can I turn in both drafts? Like both episodes together instead of giving you one and then the other? Because I think you'll see a lot better what I'm going to be doing. Um, but like episode one used to start with a really different scene that's no longer even in the series. And like, I don't know, there was like a lot of stuff that, and also I, for budget reasons, I ended up having to cut like 10 pages out of every episode. Plus cut a full episode really late in the development process. So like, there's a lot that was there that isn't there anymore.

• 17:08Speaker 04

  I do think like, yeah, you sort of, I mean, for me, I started at the beginning. I knew where every episode would leave off. Like I had, I don't actually like to outline, but I had broken the book. Like I had, I knew what chunks belonged where and where each episode would end.

• 17:26Chris Ryan?

  Do you read generally and start to see things through a camera viewfinder as you're reading? Like when you see imagery, like, yeah, is that a gift or a curse, you think?

• 17:39Speaker 04

  I think it's a gift.

• 17:40Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

• 17:43Speaker 04

  I mean, I think I'm also like, you know, I've written four plays and I think that my brain does not naturally come up with stage pictures. Like it is much harder for me to write a play than it is for me to write a screenplay. I think the way that I understand writing a screenplay is thinking in pictures and then writing them down. And like, if I'm not thinking in pictures, I know something is wrong. Like I know that I'm not ready to write the thing yet, or that like, my tack on the scene is wrong. Or like, that's kind of like a, a north star for me. There are like more and less cinematic writers. Like when I read Tolstoy, I'm like, I can't believe he's writing this before it really, like, he would have seen a movie.

• 18:26Speaker 04

  Like, I can't believe he's like before the advent of the film camera. Because the way that he writes feels like a person directing a film to me. And then there are books like Wildlife, which has so little imagery in it. Where you're like really having to be like, I am supplying pictures in my mind that these words are suggesting to me. I don't know. I, I love reading so much. I love the fact that like, you read a book, I read a book, we each get a different picture in our head.

• 18:54Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, I think the turning point for me was probably when I read No Country. And when I saw the movie, I, I was almost spooked. I was like, that's what it looks like. You, you know what I mean? Like, you can have an experience where you're, you're almost, you, you can almost overly direct a story while you're reading it, because you start to think like, oh, you know, like, I bet this would be Tommy Lee Jones. And then it's Tommy Lee Jones and you're like, of course it's Tommy Lee Jones. Like, look at that. Like, so I, I've always had this thing in the back of my mind. The Tolstoy thing is so fascinating. I mean, I would love to go back and know how novels changed after film editing is invented. And like whether cross cutting becomes like more prevalent in, in novels than.

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• 21:40Chris Ryan?

  I was curious whether or not there were any adaptations specifically that inspired you. Things that you had seen that you were like, um, I'm particularly moved or enchanted by like the choices that this person made, the, the way that it was rendered, because it feels fresh, but it also feels like it's paying tribute to the source material.

• 21:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, The Ice Storm is always a movie I come back to. I don't know if you've ever read the Rick Moody book, but it's incredibly different than the film, but it's also a really faithful adaptation is also another great one where like, the book is really different than the movie, but the movie has the book inside of it. Those aren't like direct inspirations for this. I think I had a picture in my mind of, you know, I read this book at 15 and I hadn't seen any of my grandfather's films at that point. And when I saw the film, I was so surprised because so much of what I loved about the book wasn't in it.

• 22:39Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 22:40Speaker 04

  And in that moment, I had a really clear picture in my mind of like, not exactly this, but like, someone someday has to do the thing that I see in my head. And like, I think that that percolated for like 20 years. You know, and so a lot of it was like more inchoate, like not direct, I mean, like I referenced like Days of Heaven and Hitchcock's film Notorious and Klute and The Deer Hunter, like these were like things that I-

• 23:17Chris Ryan?

  You just did the festival at American Cinematech was wonderful. Yeah, I saw the, the programming for that. Yeah.

• 23:23Speaker 04

  So a lot of those movies were movies that I had brought up particularly with our directors and DPs of like, steal a shot. Like what I'm stealing from, but I think it was so much itself to me that I wasn't really like, but those are two adaptations I love. I also love like Cabaret. I think that's a totally brilliant adaptation, both of the book and of the stage play.

• 23:44Chris Ryan?

  You know, Andy and I were talking about the last batch of episodes the other day, and I can't remember when I brought it up, but I had said that this series reminded me in a, in a very positive way of the version of Howard's End that Kenneth Lonergan did a few years ago.

• 24:00Speaker 04

  I never saw that.

• 24:01Chris Ryan?

  It was great.

• 24:01Speaker 04

  I love the old Howard's End.

• 24:03Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 24:03Speaker 04

  I love the Merchant Ivory Howard's End.

• 24:06Chris Ryan?

  Which is a fantastic rendition of it. And this was just like, I think it was about finding themes in the work that felt incredibly contemporary and incredibly present without hammering it too hard and without being like, just like today, right? You know, and also-

• 24:27Speaker 04

  Obstacles.

• 24:27Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. And making it feel very, not modern, because it's modern, but modern, because like this is still something that people think about all the time. And having the stuff that was maybe a little bit more period, like its background and it's there, but it's not, it's not like the main focus of the, of the storytelling. So I, I really, I thought that you did that really-

• 24:47Speaker 04

  I can say that because that was a thing that I, it was a thing that I said like from my first pitch all the way through production. And I would say it to every department head and to our directors and like, that we want everything to be period appropriate, but we can't have people walking away from this, talking about the costumes and the hairstyles.

• 25:09Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 25:09Speaker 04

  But like, all of that period detail has to just exist for these people, the way that our world exists for us. Um, so I'm glad it's in that way to you.

• 25:18Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. I mean, I don't, I, did you shoot this all at magic hour? Like this was nuts. Like the way it looks is so specific. And what I loved about it was, I don't necessarily need it to be a postcard of Salinas from the turn of the century. I just need it to look like something, like it needs to have a specificity. And what did you see in the, in the locations that you, you wound up traveling to that brought that out?

• 25:45Speaker 04

  Wow. We really had to, yeah, that's such a nice thing to say. We had incredible location people who worked so hard. And, um, I'm, I'm so, I really, really, really didn't want to shoot this in New Zealand. I was really stubborn about like, we have to shoot this in California. And it just wasn't a reality for us. Like it just was never going to happen. And so when I got on a plane to go to New Zealand, I think I went with a lot of trepidation. And over and over again, in this process, I've had to learn that like, just because I feel like it's not going to be right, doesn't mean that it's not going

• 26:26Speaker 04

  to be right. Like I've found so many silver linings and things that first seemed to be obstacles. And this was one of them where like, New Zealand actually turned out to be, I think in some ways, the only place we could have done this, like not just because of the landscapes, but because there was a huge influx of money right at the Victorian era there with the gold rush. And then because like, there was no other wave of money that came through in the same way, a lot of those structures are still standing.

• 26:55Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 26:55Speaker 04

  So we had just towns full of Victorian architecture that was intact and like historic homes that we could redress or that were dressed completely appropriately for us. And we just had to pull a couple of things out, like, and then also Peter Jackson has like created multiple generations of artisans, like in New Zealand that are so hardworking and take for granted that like, they're going to have to work harder because it's harder to get costumes there and it's harder to get props there. Like everything has to come on a boat and, or on an airplane. And so just people that are really willing to work

• 27:35Speaker 04

  really hard in this artisanal way and have so much skill. And like, we had the best crew, like, yes, we have incredible directors and incredible DPs. And that's part of the reason that it looks beautiful and specific in that way that you're talking about. But it's also because the things that were filling the frame were beautiful and specific. And like, I mean, I'm really, I'm really grateful for the like village that created this.

• 28:05Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, there's moments, um, I think there's one that's been circulating a lot because people are pointing to it as like, oh, look at these two great performers, really at the top of their game, but it's, it's Kathy and, and Charles, as he's sort of like hanging tobacco leaves or whatever he's doing. And she's just like, I brought you dinner, but you, and I don't, I don't know what the hell the light was in that scene, but it's, it's just like, these, these two people look like they're acting on the moon. This is unbelievable. But like, it serves as such a beautiful moment of like, in the twilight, these two people are kind of being real with each other here.

• 28:43Speaker 04

  That's partially like our director, Garth Davis, pushing to shoot it at that time of day. It's partially Stuart Dryberg, our DP, like lighting the hell out of it and extending that magic hour for us. It's partially like, New Zealand at that time of year has a really long magic hour that was working in our favor. And it's also partially like, I mean, like, we weren't allowed to plant tobacco. Tobacco is not a crop that they have in New Zealand and we could not bring those plants in. And so our, our scenic department painted banana leaves and created leaves out of paper mache and made them look

• 29:23Speaker 04

  like they were dried tobacco leaves. And then, you know, effects came in and made them even more that way.

• 29:30Chris Ryan?

  More tobaccoey. Yeah.

• 29:32Speaker 04

  More tobaccoey, a little drier. Um, and then you have these two beautiful actors. Like, I don't know. It's like one of those things where, yeah, that's one of my favorite scenes in the series. And part of the reason is that, like, I can see all of, and like Kirsty Cameron, who did the costumes, like the dress that Florence is wearing there is a dress that Adam's, Adam and Charles's mother wears in the first episode, because I had said to her, where is she getting her clothes at this time? It would have been, it would have been Alice Trask's clothes, like who's now dead at this point, and they've been keeping them in a trunk. And like, so we fit it to this other actress and it's big on her, which is why she's like having to carry it. Like she has it sort of like

• 30:16Speaker 04

  scooped up at her, in her arm at the beginning of that scene, because she can't actually walk in it without lifting up the hem.

• 30:22Chris Ryan?

  Speaking of the performances, you know, there's a, um, there, the three main ones, uh, obviously like the powerhouse, sort of Christopher and Mike and Florence, and then these sort of very beautiful, gentle performances, like kind of wringing it with, with, uh, whom Lee and Kieran. I was curious about working with the actors and finding the, the same kind of energy that you're going to bring to the look of the production, the writing of the production, finding that kind of, these people have like a naturalism that would fit in 2026 or 1956 or 1906 or whatever, without it feeling, um, too modern, but,

• 31:07Chris Ryan?

  and also avoiding like any of the antiquated period piece kind of staginess. What were the kind of conversations that you were having with those performers to find that, that hymn book that everybody sang from?

• 31:19Speaker 04

  What a beautiful question. I mean, I honestly, I think a lot of it is in casting for me. Which is to say, like, I had Florence in mind from very early. She came on very early in the process. So I knew I was writing to her, but I didn't have any other actors in mind. And I didn't have anyone else that I was like writing toward. Mike and Chris, both are New York theater actors. Like Chris and I came up at about the same time. And I had seen his work forever. And I knew that we shared like a vocabulary and a taste level.

• 31:58Speaker 04

  And I knew that like both of them liked the same kinds of things that I liked. Like, which actually became a question that I asked. Yeah, like when we were auditioning our young actors to play Cal and Erin. When we got pretty far into the process, I asked to meet with our like top candidates. And I was like, who's acting do you like? Because I think it like, it says a lot about what you're aiming toward. And I don't know, I, I felt like really aligned with these guys in terms of how they think about their work and what's important to them. We had incredible casting directors.

• 32:37Speaker 04

  Um, Ellen Lewis led a, a sort of international group of local casting directors to find all of these people. Um, and one of the greatest joys for me in this was getting to find so many actors whose work I hadn't known before. But then you're having conversations, like, especially in pre-production of like, just making sure that you're on the same page. Like, I remember with Martha Plimpton, who plays Faye so beautifully. I was like, I was like, I think about so much of this book, of this material as being like, about, about people trying to find a balance within themselves of like, or, or not. But like, it's, it's asking this question about like,

• 33:21Speaker 04

  the balance of all these forces inside ourselves, not just good and evil, but also like masculine and feminine and like, what happens when a person becomes unbalanced? And I was like, I think Faye is like almost toxically feminine. And I was like, this is what we're doing. Like, I was, you know, be, just because of timing, like, we had already started building costumes. We had already started building sets before we had cast that role. So I was like showing her swatches of like what the costumes were going to be and swatches of what the sets were and like, having those conversations about like, a person who has disavowed any of her, in a Jungian sense, masculine energy. Like, and who has given up agency because of that.

• 34:04Speaker 04

  And like, like for that character, one of the things that I said to her was like, she has had to take care of so much. She's been the madam of this house and she's been her own boss. And I think that the seductive thing that Kathy is offering her is to be taken care of. And like, I think she is attracted to that because she has been so strong and independent, not because she has been so infantilized in her life. And so like, having those kinds of like heady conversations ahead of time so that you're not on set going like, trying to change, make some adjustments.

• 34:37Chris Ryan?

  Like getting into Jungian stuff. We're like, yeah.

• 34:40Speaker 04

  Well, that's, but also like, I think if an actor has a conception of a character that's like vastly different than your own, you can get into like really terrible power struggles on set.

• 34:50Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 34:51Speaker 04

  And I just never wanted to be in that position.

• 34:55Chris Ryan?

  Well, I think, I mean, I, I would imagine there are some episodes that I love that, I mean, I, I love the first episode and Tracy's in it for, you know, just that. And you're just like, he had to come in, Martha had to come in and do these episodes that aren't necessarily going to be like Hoon Lee's, where you're going to watch this arc over the course of hours and hours. You just get this one shot to come out of the bullpen and it's tough.

• 35:18Speaker 04

  But it's, it's also really funny because every actor, I mean, I love actors so much. And having spent like 20 years as an actor and a good portion of that in the theater, like, I've had so many conversations with actors. Um, but like, Hoon comes in and he has 10,000 questions about Lee and wants to go line by line through the script and interrogate every moment. And like, you, you shut, like, that is such a gift. And at the same time, another gift is having Tracy Let's show up. Do you have any questions? And he's like, nope. And I'm like, do you want to see the house, your house? And he's like, not really. And I'm like, okay, what do you want to talk about? And he was like, how did you get the rights to this?

• 36:04Speaker 04

  I was like, okay, we can talk about that.

• 36:07Chris Ryan?

  That sounds like Tracy. I, I sometimes podcast with Tracy about old movies and stuff. So that, that does sound reminiscent. Um, I, you know, Hoon Lee is somebody I just, I would feel terrible if I let this podcast end without talking about his specifically, um, departure and, and, um, The Great Try and what he does over that course of those two episodes. Um, I think in some ways, like, you, you know, that's a character in the book that I liked, but did not probably think about deeply, you know, if I'm, if I'm being honest. And the enormous, like, heart that he brings to this show

• 36:49Chris Ryan?

  and like, the soul that he becomes for this family that I think a lot of things have, have tried to rip the soul out of that family. And he kind of acts as a furnace almost in it. I, I just, I don't even know if I have a question. It's just like, I know that that, a lot of that was like, we have to think about what this person would be going through. And, you know, he plays such an instrumental role in this family. It kind of almost warrants more investigation. Can you tell me a little bit about writing the Lee character?

• 37:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, you know, I think the surprise for me coming back to this book in my 30s, I was 36 when I started writing this. And I, I had a 18 month old child when I started writing this. She's eight now. I was shocked at how much identification I felt with Lee, who I think when I was a young person, like, registered to me as a grown up in the book. And like, less interesting therefore than the teenage characters probably. Um, and at 36, I was like, oh, I am Lee. Like, or inside me are two wolves and one is Kathy, like throw the babies in the well. And the other one is Lee showing up every day and wiping their butts and teaching them how to eat and cook and care for themselves and care for others.

• 38:03Speaker 04

  And trying to help them not be the worst versions of themselves. And I felt the dailiness of his care. Like, I think particularly having become a mother and like, how daily the work is, how every day you have to show up and be that kid's mother. And he really is a parent to these children. And I, so like, for one thing, like, what, it was really important to me to have that montage that's in episode five of all of his work around the house. Like, everything that it takes to, to run that house. And how that is folded in, like, every piece of it is folded into another. So he's caring for the kids as he's weeding the vegetable gardens,

• 38:47Speaker 04

  as he's, he's making dinner, as he's teaching them how to, you know, do their homework. Like, I think that there's this kind of lump of work that he's carrying around with him at all times. I think the book, I mean, I think Steinbeck really was a humanist. And I think that the book is a surprising portrait of an Asian American man, given the time that he was writing it in. I think there, there are things, there are elements of this that Hoon Lee commented on, that Alexander Chi, who I brought in to help me kind of explore Lee's world in San Francisco, which is dispensed with within two pages in the book. Like, he goes to San Francisco and he comes back and we never find out what, what has happened there.

• 39:32Speaker 04

  Alexander Chi and Hoon Lee both were surprised by the code switching scene where we first meet Lee and Samuel. Both of them were shocked to find that in this book from 1953. And then in other places in the book, I see the kind of like, maybe inevitable, maybe not, mid-century white racism.

• 39:50Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 39:51Speaker 04

  Um, particularly in like descriptions of Lee's face. And I think for me, it felt like, okay, I need to honor the human, like, the, the humanitarian impulse here, the like, the humanist impulse that is here. And not worry about carrying too much of this other baggage.

• 40:14Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 40:15Speaker 04

  And then also, it is important to know that Lee is existing in a world that is deeply racist. So like, carrying in the sheriff character who calls him by a racial slur, right?

• 40:29Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 40:29Speaker 04

  That's an important element because without that, we can't, especially I think for a contemporary audience, understand in a deep way what he's facing every day. Um, I mean, I love, both Hoon Lee's perspective and Alexander Chi's perspective were invaluable in this. I think for me personally, it was becoming a parent that really opened that door. Like, there's a moment in the series where Lee comes, comes back and he tucks the children in and Cal is like, did, you're home? And he's like, yeah, I came home. And that was a moment that I stole from my life when I had gone away to scout for this. And I had come back and my two-year-old had, then not quite two-year-old,

• 41:13Speaker 04

  had cried in the night and I had come back while he was asleep. And I went in there. So it was like the first time he had seen me, but we were in the dark. And he like patted my whole face.

• 41:22Chris Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 41:23Speaker 04

  And it was me. And I like, was like, okay. Like the next morning, I went to my computer, like sat down, was like, adding scene, like, yeah.

• 41:33Chris Ryan?

  I love the, the nuances of, of his relationship to different members of that family. I mean, I think it's in, I think it's in Tim Scholl. No, no, it's in the, it's in the scene when he is describing what Tim Scholl means. And, yeah, and he's talking to Samuel and Cal is like kind of off to the side. And I believe that's when Cal is like, he doesn't talk to me like that. You know, he, he almost feels.

• 42:00Speaker 04

  Or Adam is off to the side.

• 42:02Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, Adam is off to the side and, and, um, sorry, and Adam says.

• 42:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, that's from the book.

• 42:06Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. But I just love the way Abbott played that. Cause I was like, this is, it gives you so much like geometry to the relationship of he's like, you're going to take care of my kids, but I'm still actually a little annoyed that you don't come to me for this kind of like intellectually rigorous conversation, even though I give nothing to anyone else.

• 42:25Speaker 04

  Totally. Well, I think one of the things that's funny about, like, and I have said this over and over again in our press, but like, I think there are things that.

• 42:36Speaker 04

  That are true in the book too, like that scene or like there's this moment in the book where Cal's been arrested and brought home and from the Fantan game and Adam says, I've been a terrible father to you. And he says, no, you haven't. And he says, well, how would you know, you've never had any other kind. And like to have that on the page is one thing. When you put bodies in space and one of those bodies in the room is Lee, who is clearly a father to this boy, like then all of a sudden you can see something that you can't see maybe as clearly on the page. And I don't know, I just think that there's something so magical about that transmutation. Like, I don't know, I'll never get over it. Like

• 43:20Speaker 04

  you put bodies in space and you put a camera there with them and you can see all kinds of things that you can't see any other way.

• 43:25Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that the the greatest compliment I could give to you about that is is just the last scene of the show, which I think transcends kind of like even my wildest imagination of how that would feel to see that rendered on screen. So I would be remiss as as as we here at the pod are very, very ardent Lonesome Dove fans. And I just want to ask you, why are you doing this to yourself after East of Eden?

• 43:53Speaker 04

  Well, that's a really good question.

• 43:56Chris Ryan?

  Well, I just I should also say, I would like, cut your hand off to switch places with you. But after hearing you talk about East of Eden and like the enormous weight you were carrying with this.

• 44:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:08Chris Ryan?

  It's like, can we do Wildlife 2? Still Wild?

• 44:12Speaker 04

  I don't know. Still Wild? Oh, my God. Still Wild after all these years?

• 44:17Chris Ryan?

  They still have forest fires out there? We could do something.

• 44:20Speaker 04

  It's such a good question. And it is a question I ask myself, too. I'm like, do I really hate myself that much? I don't know, man. I, I, I always think about this line from Angels in America where I think, I think it's Lewis. He says, I need something big to lift me up. I think after, so after I had my first kid, I realized, like in the first months of her life, I was like, oh, every time I write from now on, I have to pay someone to take care of her.

• 44:50Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 44:51Speaker 04

  And like, what is worth that to me? And it's, the answer is not always East of Eden. But that is what gave me the impetus to reach out to my agents and be like, if the rights to East of Eden ever come up, can you please put me up for this? And I think I sort of had that feeling about Lonesome Dove where like, I had just read the book when I got the call being like, do you want to pitch on this? And I think I felt kind of crazy saying, yes, I want to pitch on this. Like, I was still in the early stages of post-production and I knew I had, I mean, we had a full year of post. So like, I, I knew I had a big meal left there. But I don't know, I kind of, I love to touch the face of God.

• 45:34Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 45:35Speaker 04

  Like, you know, like, these are the, I love wrestling with a piece of text. And I feel like kind of in some weird way, drawn over and over to stories of the West, like not just in my writing work, but in my acting work of like, I think there's something about people imagining a world that is completely different than the one that they live in, but is very moving to me. And also like just sparked so much curiosity in me. I also think like all great Westerns, it's really about death.

• 46:08Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 46:10Speaker 04

  And facing yourself in the face of mortality and like, those characters are so rich. I don't know. I'm, I'm really like, it is so daunting and I am so scared. A healthy thing to be scared.

• 46:26Chris Ryan?

  I think it's, that's a great answer. If you were just like, yeah, like, I could just knock out, like, you know, some chamber drama, but like, you would, like, is that worth, like, leaving your kid for? No, I mean, like.

• 46:37Speaker 04

  But it probably, if, if there was something, like, if there was something that I felt that passionately about, it doesn't really matter the size of it, right? Like, it matters the passion for it. I have like six more tabs open on my final draft of like, passion projects that probably will be years more in the making. So it won't be the only thing I'm doing. But I don't know, I kind of ask myself, why not?

• 47:03Chris Ryan?

  I mean, you're, you're living the dream. To be able to, to be able to like, take on those characters and, and I think actually in, in the way that you'll probably be able to depict it, given how, how people read that book, I think actually matches to like, watching this massive piece, maybe even at once, if not in big chunks. I think, I think it's going to be incredible. Especially based on what we saw with East of Eden. Zoe, thank you so much for joining me. It was really a pleasure talking to you.

• 47:32Speaker 04

  Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

• 47:34Speaker 06

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