00:00I felt this sort of fire inside of me that somebody has to make this someday in the way that
00:05I saw it in my head.
00:07I didn't presume to think I would be that person.
00:10I believe there is one story in the world, and only one.
00:14Humans are caught in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions,
00:20in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity, too.
00:25In a net of good and evil.
00:28East of Eden is the story of the Trask family.
00:30It moves from three generations, from right after the Civil War until World War I.
00:36But for me, it feels like a really present tense story about what it means to be human.
00:41I fear father damned us to the wrong fates.
00:45I should have been out wandering the world, and you should have been here.
00:50My grandfather directed the film, and now I'm re-adapting it for series.
00:55In a lot of ways, my grandfather's film is a self-portrait of his own relationship with his father and
01:00trying to be a different kind of father to his sons.
01:03And no disrespect to it, but it is not a faithful adaptation of this book.
01:08Kathy and Lee and Charles, these characters that I had found so dynamic on the page weren't in the movie
01:15at all, really.
01:15Zoe inviting me to help create this world with them was just, it was such an honor.
01:20It really stepped off with Kathy's POV of the world.
01:25What Zoe accomplished with these scripts is masterful.
01:29There's still only word for it.
01:31I knew it was going to be as epic as it is because, you know, she has such a reverence
01:35for the work.
01:36I wanted to give her everything that I possibly could because I know how important it all is to her.
01:41I don't know what I've done to earn your distrust.
01:44Well, maybe kind just recognizes kind.
01:46We're taking a big swing.
01:49Something isn't right here.
01:50A girl like that doesn't just fall out of the sky.
01:52The story is dangerous and alive.
01:55When I learned that Steinbeck had written this in the early 50s, I was absolutely blown away.
01:59It's just much more personal.
02:00He's writing some sort of darker truth about himself.
02:03You can't even imagine the things that I could do to you.
02:08Do you want me to show you?
02:09I joked around that it was, I think it was something I was supposed to read in high school, but
02:12skipped it.
02:12We all have a kind of aversion to eating our spinach.
02:16But this is like not a spinach eating experience.
02:19It's become one of my favorite books.
02:21No one wants it to feel like it's far away.
02:24Everybody wants it to feel like you can jump in that world and be a part of that life with
02:29them.
02:29It's about like the kind of guts of what it means to be a person.
02:33Everyone can relate to that.
02:35I didn't want to come here.
02:36I don't intend to stay here.
02:38Attacking these episodes, they are huge.
02:40We have landscape.
02:41They're epic.
02:42The story is complex.
02:44And it was hard, but it was fun.
02:46So fun to do.
02:47You just get on the horse and you tackle it head on and you just decide to dive in.
02:52It's a big, epic arc to track, but that's sort of like the beauty of the art of it.
02:57My father made a mold and he forced me into it.
03:01I was a bad casting.
03:03This is a story about these people that are dealing with their own inner demons.
03:09Every generation, there are new limits.
03:11When we have done the worst possible thing, how do we move on from that?
03:15Are we capable of change?
03:16Can we escape the past?
03:18Can we make something new?
03:19We are as humans cast out of Eden, but if we stayed in Eden, no change would be possible.
