East Of Eden Creator Opens Up About Planned Episode She Had To Cut From Netflix Series

East Of Eden creator Zoe Kazan is shedding more light on the scenes she had to remove from her original script for the miniseries adaptation.

Zoe previously shared that she had originally planned for her version of East Of Eden – which was previously adapted for the screen by her grandfather Elia Kazan in the 1950s – to consist of eight episodes.

However, when Netflix picked up the show, they only ordered seven, meaning big changes had to be made, including the dramatic reduction of the Hamilton family’s roles in the story.

During a recent interview with Variety, Zoe confirmed that another big cut was to pull an episode that would have almost entirely focused on Hoon Lee’s character, Lee, travelling to San Francisco to pursue his dreams.

“No matter how many resources we were given, I can’t imagine a number that would’ve been enough for us to do all the things that we originally wanted to do,” Zoe told the US outlet.

“It’s just a very ambitious project – so many locations, so many actors, spanning over 50 years, it’s period. There’s a lot that made this very expensive.

“So, I cut about 10 pages out of every episode, and then on top of that, it became clear that we did not have the budget to build San Francisco in 1912. Because it was a standalone episode, there were so many locations that we were never going to use again, and it would’ve scaled up our budget by a third.”

Meanwhile, in a separate interview with Time, Zoe admitted that while she was “sad to lose that episode”, she conceded that the show was “stronger for it”.

“He’s not siloed,” she said of Lee. “He’s part of the cohesive story.” 

For her version of East Of Eden, Zoe made the decision to shift antihero Cathy Ames, played in the Netflix series by Florence Pugh, to the centre of the story.

Critics have also been heaping praise on East Of Eden, which is sitting at the top of Netflix’s most-watched right now list at the time of writing.