John Steinbeck’s East of Eden is perhaps the quintessential California novel, so it may come as a surprise that Zoe Kazan’s new limited series adaptation was filmed far from the Salinas Valley. The East of Eden crew and cast (including Florence Pugh, Christopher Abbott, and Mike Faist) picked up shop and moved more than 6,000 miles away, to the island country of New Zealand. 

PHOTO BY KIRSTY GRIFFIN

“I’d never been to New Zealand, but always wanted to go,” Pugh told Netflix. “Thankfully, I'm friends with Taika [Waititi], so he just welcomed me in and introduced me to all of his friends. The culture is amazing. The respect to ancestry and to the land is something that I just want to take forward into my life every day. I actually was even considering, ‘How do I actually move here?’”

The shift came with some surprising advantages. “Not to get too nerdy about the history of New Zealand, but there was a big influx of money because of a gold rush in the Victorian era in New Zealand,” Kazan says. “There's a tremendous amount of Victorian architecture that never got torn down, and so there were many more locations available to us than there would've been easily in one place in the States.”

What Lies East of Eden

The natural landscape was also an appealing draw; East of Eden is set primarily in California’s Salinas Valley, a major agricultural region that has changed a great deal since the time Steinbeck wrote about it. “There’s a lot of unspoiled landscape in a way that would be much harder to find here,” Kazan says. “The actual Salinas Valley doesn't look the way that it did anymore.”

The production also built sets from scratch, including the Trask family homes in Connecticut and later in the Salinas Valley. Production designer Grant Major often included small details that even Kazan had to squint to notice. “Going up to the ranch in Salinas, he had put fake bird poop all over underneath the rafters, because birds would've been nesting,” she says. “And then there would be a nail hole in the wall with a slight fading where somebody had put a picture from a different generation and then taken that picture away. Just so much detail to these spaces that he built and so much history in them.”

PHOTO BY GEOFFREY SHORT

Ultimately, East of Eden built its own California on the other side of the Pacific. “New Zealand gave us so much,” Kazan says. “Now I feel like we couldn't have done it anywhere else.”

East of Eden is now streaming on Netflix.