Zoe Kazan is screenwriter and showrunner of East of Eden, a limited series from the 1952 novel by John Steinbeck.
Her grandfather Elia Kazan had directed a movie version starring James Dean in 1955.
I interviewed Zoe about this passion project, that she had been working on since 2020, wrote an an article for Best Movie, the Italian film monthly. Read English version at this link.
Zoe Kazan’s parents, Nick Kazan and Robin Swicord, are both screenwriters, her younger sister Maya is an actress.
I then watched a panel at the Atlantic Festival, where Zoe answered questions with Florence Pugh, who plays the central character of Cathy, and Bela Bajaria from Netflix.
I selected some relevant quotes. You may watch the entire talk here.
“Steinbeck’s impulse in writing this book is that he’s trying to wrestle with what makes us human. I really tried to honor that humanism. while stripping away some of the inevitable mid-century white male racism and misogyny. I don’t hold it against him, but I am trying to free up his better instincts, to honor the book’s pursuit of this question that, since we all have some good and some evil inside us, can we change, break generational patterns?”
As to the issue that her grandfather Elia Kazan, a Greek immigrant, was criticized in Hollywood after he named names before the House Un-American Activities Commission in 1952, Zoe replied: “My family history is inextricably tied to the history of this country and what happened during the Red Scare. I would have to be an ostrich with my head in the sand not to see the parallels to what’s happening right now. I share the opinion that my grandfather did the wrong thing. I also believe deeply that we won’t learn anything from his actions if we think of them in an acontextual way. The context was what this country was doing to him as an immigrant, asking him to prove his Americanness by putting him in one of the worst positions I can imagine being put in. That context is incredibly important, without exculpating what he did, at all. And as I’m raising my children, I think deeply about that and what’s happening in the world today.”
Zoe delivered this humorous comment about John Steinbeck: “He wasn’t just a person who’s become engraved in the literary canon, he was also a guy who was doing his best. And I loved reading his journals while I was working on these scripts, because he would struggle and bash his head and have the same sort of feelings that I had. And what I would say to him is “Okay, yeah, but I had to do it with two kids crawling all over me, while yours kids lived in a townhouse with their mother somewhere else!”
Zoe Kazan is the mother of two young children whose father is her long-time partner, fellow actor Paul Dano.
I first interviewed Zoe Kazan in 2012 about Ruby Sparks, a movie she wrote and starred in with Paul Dano.
She said: “I flashed to the Greek myth of Pygmalion about the sculptor whose statue comes to life because he loves it so much. Calvin (Dano) is very lonely and feels unlovable, so he dreams of a person who could love him. Movies that I looked to while working on this script were Groundhog Day (1992 by Harold Ramis), Tootsie (1982 by Sydney Pollack), Annie Hall (1977 by Woody Allen).”
She was close to her grandfather and often spent weekends at his house, while she was in college at Yale, “and those conversations I’ll always treasure.” Of his movies, she liked America, America (1963) best, “It was very close to my heart because it was experimental and obviously very personal for him. But recently I’ve been gravitating more towards East of Eden, from one of my favorite books.”
I met Zoe Kazan again in 2017 to talk about The Big Sick, where she played the wife of Kumail Nanjiani. I asked her who were the actors she looked up to: “Jane Fonda is a big one, and obviously Gena Rowlands. Denzel Washington is one of the greatest actors of all time and so is Tom Hanks. I always admire character actors like Robert Duvall or Jason Robards.”
In 2022 Zoe Kazan played Jodi Kantor opposite Carey Mulligan as Megan Twohey in She Said about the New York Times journalists who investigated Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuses against women.
During a panel at the New York Film festival, Zoe said: “ We felt the need to do justice to this story and to all of the brave women who spoke to Jodi and Megan in order to bring this piece of journalism into the world.”
“Anybody reading the newspaper headlines would know that we’re still living in a oppressive patriarchy. But what has happened as a result of this reporting and the wave of the #MeToo movement is that there is now a conversation that is open and not just behind closed doors.”
In 2020 I interviewed Zoe Kazan and John Turturro about the TV miniseries The Plot Against America. Both interviews were published in the June 2020 issue of Best Movie.
Zoe said: “Philip Roth wrote the book in 2003. It’s his own childhood memories growing up in New Jersey against the backdrop of a fictional timeline of the United States in which Charles Lindbergh wins the presidency in 1940 and ushers anti-Semitism into the mainstream. This would have made it a reaction to George Bush being elected President in 2000, to 9/11 in 2001, and to a jingoistic America at that time. For me, reading it in 2018, it speaks so much to the moment that we’re living right now. It’s about the slow creep of Fascism into the way that people think and what a leader, like our President today (Donald Trump), might do by equivocating and saying things like he said after Charlottesville, that there are good people on both sides.
“I am hoping that the political divisions that Trump is capitalizing on and promoting are eased, as we face trying to save the livability of our planet, and that we can start as a country to listen to each other.”