Interviews With "East Of Eden" Star Hoon Lee & Director Garth Davis

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

You are listening to The Next Best Picture Podcast, and these are Geovideo Lagos' interviews with the director for East Of Eden, Garth Davis, and the star, Hoon Lee.

SPEAKER_2 (0:09)

I believe there are monsters born in this world to human parents.

A monster is a variation from the accepted normal. A child may be born perfect, but without kindness or conscience.

Hoon Lee (0:29)

Can you tell me your name?

SPEAKER_2 (0:31)

You may call me Cathy.

Hoon Lee (0:37)

You've hardly left this room and still you brighten the whole house.

SPEAKER_2 (0:40)

You're so kind to me.

Giovanni Lago (0:42)

Brother, a girl like that doesn't just fall out of the sky.

SPEAKER_2 (0:46)

Cathy, if you would marry me, I can protect you. You will be happy.

Evil is not always apparent at first glance. It can come cloaked in goodness or beauty or love, the heart of our oldest stories. Hello, everyone.

Giovanni Lago (1:11)

I'm Giovanni Lago from The Next Best Picture Podcast. In this case, The Next Best Series Podcast, because we are talking about the wonderful East Of Eden adaptation, and I am lucky to be joined by one of the directors of the series, Garth Davis. Garth, thank you so much for joining me today.

Garth Davis (1:25)

My pleasure, Mike.

Giovanni Lago (1:26)

I would love to actually start back with Top of the Lake, which is a brilliant series, and almost 13 years ago that series aired. I'm not trying to date anyone here, but it's been a while since you've worked in television, you've been working in features, you're a liar and a foe. What made you want to come back? Was it the familiarity with Steinbeck's text? Was it just the vision that Zoe Kazan had for the project? I'm very curious.

Garth Davis (1:56)

Well, yeah, I'm not looking to do a lot of television personally, but I think that some stories deserve to be in a television frame, and that's like the cinematic novel.

I think when I got my head around that, that was very exciting to basically treat it like a movie, but you can kind of meander with certain characters in a way that, because a film is more like a poem, and TV for me is more like a novel. So, I guess as long as it has a cinematic quality, I'm interested. So, Top Of The Lake was definitely that, and that was such a beautiful way, I think, to tell a story. When I read Zoe's scripts, it felt like that to me. It just felt very cinematic. It wasn't formulaic, it was just very gorgeous, powerful, ambitious, subtle. Yeah, it was right up my alley. I just actually fell in love with it. I thought her scripts were incredible.

Giovanni Lago (2:49)

I think also, East Of Eden has such, aside from the text in terms of Hollywood and cinema, Golden Age filmmaking, James Dean, Elliot Kazan, and you think of cinema scope and the beautiful colors here. I'm curious, what were the conversations you had in terms of bringing the visual aesthetic into this one? It's a bit harsher, it's just earthier tones. It feels more in line with the text compared to you very much classic-age Hollywood productions that feel a bit romanticized.

Garth Davis (3:20)

Yeah. Well, I think one of the first things that I asked for was the 65 Digital, because I've really felt like we needed that scope. I mean, I do love the classics. I do love the scope of the classic films, but I definitely felt that my experience, the 65, just captures that intimacy and epicness so effortlessly and self-consciously. It's not self-conscious, sorry. So yeah, that was one thing that I really was pushing for. Of course, there's a deep lot of work gone into the visual thematics.

How do we traverse from this primordial dark Connecticut to this more kind of ochre sun-bleached journey from east to west?

Each of the characters has a visual thematic working through it as well. So all these layers start to build. So I guess you're basically just finding the truth and the beauty within each of it, and you're weaving that across the story. I mean, that's how I work. Also, God is a part of this. It's a very mythical tale, the Cain and Abel, the Good and Evil. And there are moments where the camera takes on, like the opening shot is like a point of view of God, like an intervention of sorts. So yeah, I mean, it just had such depth for me to work with and kind of bring that visual language.

Giovanni Lago (4:42)

I think also you mentioned it earlier with television, especially when the trend of adapting novels, there is the benefit of getting time to breathe, letting to explore different facets of it. I think, especially East Of Eden, it's such a behemoth of a work. It's over 600 pages, there's all these different families, all these characters, it's spanning decades, and it follows a far more linear storytelling. I know with Zoe's writing here, it's a bit more of a non-linear formatting in terms of how you're able to parse through these decades and get people left to speed these characters, which I found very focused. I'm curious from a director's standpoint, does it feel like there's an ease taken off your shoulders a bit, that you're not having to put as much of the railroad work, like the tracks are already there, you're able to just glide for you?