Mm.

But, like, what else do you include, and what are you omitting? And then that makes a new picture, and it's related to the original, but it's not the original.

I think of adaptation a little like that.

I also think of it as like an advanced form of reading.

Like, the way that you read East of Eden is gonna be different than how I read East of Eden, like, because of everything that we're bringing to the page, right? And then also, like our viewpoint, our imaginations, our creativity.

A novelist's tools are like incredibly different than a dramatist's tools.

Like, a novelist can bring you so deep into someone's head, it can like, a novelist can describe an apple on the table for 20 pages and you can learn everything about a character through the way that they're looking at that apple, right? In drama, like you have to have- you have to tell everything through dialogue and picture and performance.

Mm-hmm.

What do you want us to understand about the generational trauma that parents pass on to their children, the parents' wounds that become a child's inheritance?

I have a friend who once said about a different family story, without love, it's not painful.

And that was really like the thing that I carried with me through this, which is that these people are actually trying to love each other and they damage each other so terribly in the pursuit of that.

And I think it's so interesting the way that parents can burden their children with stories, stories about themselves or stories about their families.

And I think one of the things that's really moving about this story to me is that these people do try to change and they try to break those cycles.

And I think that's a thing that we can all relate to.

I want to talk about Kathy Ames,

How did you do that? Because I just, I love this

What strikes you about the difference between today's audience and a readership or movie audience from the 50s? And how did you want to approach that with the kind of modern sensibility but without making it a modern adaptation? It's a really good question.

I think at his heart, Steinbeck is a humanist.

That was a guiding principle for me in thinking about how can I honor that impulse while sort of freeing up the material from anything that mires it in white mid-century America.

That was quite easy to do, actually.

It meant maybe looking a little past the margins of the page in some places or rethinking the context for other things.

But I think this is a very faithful adaptation and we weren't trying to modernize it or change it profoundly.

I think our relationship with our attention span is very different.

From all of those departments, obviously you've both worked across film and TV for a long time, but which do you really, because it's not necessarily your area of expertise working with all these HODs, which do you really love sinking your teeth into because you don't necessarily get to do that on a day-to-day?

Tell me what made you decide to do this.

You know, I read the book when I was 15 and you know, I think at that age, books, movies, like they can hit you really hard.

They can feel really personal.

And I just fell in love with it.

And like, strangely, I had never seen any of my grandfather's work.

So the book was my entry to this material.

I fell in love with all these characters, especially Cathy Ames.

There was not a clinker in the group.

I

will.

What I was going to say, though, is that the strike happened right after.

So Netflix bought it.

I wrote the final episodes later.

I had my son, my second child, and then the strikes both hit.

And in a way, that was like wonderful timing.

It just, it feels natural.

So my

parents went and saw this play when I was a kid.

Oh, God, I'm going to cry when I talk about this.

OK, I'm trying not to.

And, you know, the AIDS crisis was a shadow story.

over my childhood i had two teachers who died of aids i remember my mother like describing it to me she was like it's like every one who made the world beautiful and interesting got on a plane and the plane crashed like And my parents were completely transported by this play.

They had gone to New York especially to see it.

So...