The new screen adaptation of John Steinbeck's "East of Eden" was filmed in New Zealand, with the country's South Island standing in for California's Salinas Valley, the production confirmed.
The town of Salinas — shown when Adam and Cathy first arrive in California and again in later brothel scenes — was portrayed by Oamaru, a Victorian-era port town on the Otago coast whose 19th-century commercial buildings required almost no digital alteration.
For the farmland itself, location scouts settled on the foothills of the Hawkdun Range, a dry inland district in Otago. "We found a really good place in the foothills of the Hawkdun Range, which is a district in Otago like Salinas," a member of the production said.
The choice came down to water — or the lack of it. Steinbeck's Salinas Valley of the early 1900s was a dry, unforgiving place where families scratched out a living before irrigation transformed the region. "Well, it needs to be dry, because you know there's always a water problem on a farm until they dig wells and things," the production said of the location brief.
New Zealand's Otago region offered that aridity without the cost of building a set from scratch. The production also noted there was "nothing to paint out" — no modern infrastructure, billboards, or power lines intruding on the period frame.
Oamaru's whitestone buildings date largely to the 1870s and 1880s, when the town was a booming grain port. That architecture has made it a recurring stand-in for historic American and European towns, and its grid of preserved storefronts gave the production a ready-made early-20th-century main street.
New Zealand has become a frequent substitute for American landscapes in film production, aided by a favorable exchange rate, tax rebates of up to 25 percent on qualifying productions, and a geography that compresses mountains, coastline, and dry plains within a few hours' drive. The country's film industry has expanded well beyond the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy that put it on the map, with Wellington and Auckland now hosting major studio and streaming projects year-round.
Steinbeck's novel, published in 1952, follows two generations of the Trask family as they settle in the Salinas Valley. Elia Kazan's 1955 film version, starring James Dean, was shot largely in California.
