The film is most famous now for making James Dean a household name. But to a Steinbeck-head, it actually leaves a lot to be desired. “I remember feeling really surprised by how loose an interpretation it is,” says the younger Kazan. The movie covers only a small portion of the text; “some of my favorite characters are not really in it or are really marginalized. It struck me immediately as being a completely different beast than the book.”

So Kazan watched, and waited, until she became an established actor and writer herself. She told her agent that if the rights ever became available, she wanted to be considered for a new adaptation, though trying to claim the material for herself felt scary at the time. Even after she pitched her vision and sold the project to Netflix, she thought she needed an A-list director to helm the series. “Someone to hide behind,” she says. “It has really required something of me to take ownership of it.”

Which is also a very East of Eden-y thing to say. The book follows the intertwining stories of two families, the Hamiltons (who emigrate from Ireland to Steinbeck’s beloved Salinas Valley) and the Trasks (who move to California from the East Coast), over the course of several generations. It’s also loosely inspired by the book of Genesis, featuring not one but two pairs of brothers whose stories echo the tale of Cain and Abel: Charles and Adam Trask, and Adam’s twins, Cal and Aron.

The story’s primary antagonist is Cal and Aron’s mother, Cathy Ames, whom Steinbeck gives an unforgettable introduction: “I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents,” he writes. “If a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?” Cathy is just such a monster, in the guise of a beautiful, innocent girl—according to Steinbeck, anyway.

Kazan sees her differently. The character, she says, “was unlike anyone I’d ever read before. There’s a real clarity to the quality of her selfishness, which I found completely fascinating.” She was also fascinated by Steinbeck’s relationship to his creation, which took on a power that caught even the author by surprise. In letters Steinbeck wrote to his editor that were later collected for a volume called Journal of a Novel, “he starts out by being like, ‘I’m gonna write a monster unlike any you’ve ever seen before,’” Kazan explains. “And within 80 pages in those diaries, he’s saying, ‘I think I am Cathy. Cathy is me. Maybe I am the monster.’ Her agency was so strong, and she kind of took over the book.” By the end of the novel, Steinbeck seems to be wrestling with her overpowering force: “I think he punishes her, in a way, for having so much agency. It feels like he’s trying to put her in her place.”

In adapting the book, Kazan set out to give Cathy her due—not to make a revisionist version of East of Eden, but to center Cathy’s perspective and really try to understand what might make a person do the horrible things she does. (And she does some pretty horrible things.) To accomplish this, she needed an actor capable of breathing life into a particularly complex, often misunderstood woman.