Agnieszka Holland is one of the more seasoned directors vying for this year’s Best International Feature Oscar. But then, she’s always been ahead of the curve: two years before Titanic, she cast a rising actor called Leonardo DiCaprio as French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud in her 1995 film Total Eclipse, a very bohemian love story set in 19th century Paris. For her new film Franz, Holland has chosen another literary antihero, casting Idan Weiss as Franz Kafka, author of such cult, paranoid classics as The Trial (1925), in which an innocent man named Josef K is arrested for a crime he hasn’t committed and put through a labyrinthine, bureaucratic hell to punish him for it. Kafka, who died in 1924 aged just 40, saw the way the wind in Europe was blowing, and, when the dust settled after World War II, it was assumed his uncanny foresight had seen — at best — just a few years into the future by predicting the manipulative rise of the Nazis.
If only that had been the case. Nowadays, the adjective “Kafkaesque” is more loaded than ever; like the word “Orwellian” it serves to encapsulate the insanity of the post-truth world we now live in and are expected to take for granted, where politicians tell us that up is down, right is left, and war is peace. As she explains here, Holland discovered Kafka in her early teens, and it explains a lot about her subsequent career, making films about people who get lost in, or who are marginalized by, the machinations of unchecked authority. Now 77, she is reaching the top of the Best International Feature totem pole, with three Oscar nominations to date — for Angry Harvest (1985), Europa Europa (1990) and In Darkness (2011) — but the pointed snub from Poland’s selection committee, not to mention the wrath of its government, for her angry 2023 immigrant drama Green Border proves that she will not be bowing out quietly. Indeed, as she once said of herself, “I have the impression I will constantly be in trouble.”
DEADLINE: You’ve made biopics before, but your idea of a biopic is not everybody else’s. What attracts you to that genre, and what kinds of stories do you want to tell?
AGNIESZKA HOLLAND: When I decide to tell a story — which mostly is very instinctive — it just comes to me. I feel, suddenly, that it’s story I have to tell, that I probably know how to tell, or that, at least, I am suited for trying to tell it, because it is relevant somehow. Relevant on many levels, not only a political level or a social level, but also to the state of mind we’re in, the state of the world. Sometimes I feel the story is small but reflects a lot, and sometimes I try to tell a story with a wider scope.
It has to be personal story. But that doesn’t mean that it’s autobiographical. I never did a film that was openly autobiographical. At the same time, those films reflect my point of view, and my view of the world when I’m making them. Which means that something can be important to me one day, and then, in three years’ time, I might not want to tell that story. Some stories stay with me for longer. Some stories are somehow the heritage of my entire personality. They are like the fountain of my imagination.
DEADLINE: Have you always admired Kafka? When did you discover him?
HOLLAND: Very early. I was 14 when I read him for the first time, and it was a great discovery to me, because it was a shock. I was like, Wow, it’s possible to write that way, and it’s possible to tell a story that doesn’t have the psychological causality or the simple realism that we saw in the great novels of 19th century. And yet, at the same time, it says something so important and new about where we are as people.
So, that was a shock, and after that I read everything of his that was translated into Polish, his letters also. And when I read the letters, and his diaries, I felt a kind of closeness, that he was like a brother to me, that he was somebody I could maybe not understand completely, but help at least. I’ve always seen him as someone very fragile, who needs protection, and at the same time is totally lost in the world, totally apart. He doesn’t fit into any kind of News. But at the same time, he had the strength that allowed him to write what he wrote, despite the fact that, apart from some close friends, no one was interested.
DEADLINE: The legend is that he was a cool, enigmatic person — and you show that, obviously — but you also make him seem kind of warm and even endearing.
HOLLAND: His entire family was killed — as you know, probably — during the Shoah, but one of the children of his sister Ottilie was married to a Czech guy. She survived, and I was able to talk to the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Ottilie, who live in Prague, and one I met in Paris. They are very nice, very smart, very warm people, very modest. They had some stories about Kafka, told to them by their grandmother, and in those memories he was warm, a little funny, and always playing with the kids, like a favorite uncle.
They gave me the impression that he was kind of a kid himself, so that’s the image I wanted to put into the film, especially because I think that that the stereotype of him is that he was gloomy, always depressed, in the shadows, and hiding in the corners. I wanted to break down that stereotype. I wanted to find some life. I wanted to bring him to us regardless of all the things we think we know about him — all the piles and piles of books and documents and interpretations — and look into his eyes.
By an incredible chance we found the actor who had it in him, who could be so believable as Franz Kafka. I’ve been talking to Steven Daldry, to Christopher Hampton, and recently Peter Sarsgaard. They all are big fans of the film, and they also are very interested in Kafka. Peter thought that I’d found the actor first, and that after that I’d had the idea to make the film, but it was other way round. We’d just been waiting for each other.
DEADLINE: Idan Weiss, your Franz, looks astonishingly like the real thing. How did you find him?
HOLLAND: He was totally unknown. A woman who was a legend in German casting, Ms. Simone Barr, sent me Idan as a first proposal, and I went crazy, not only because of the likeness, but also because he had [the right] mix of sadness, that spark of humor, and that shy and quiet sincerity, so I wrote back to her immediately that I had to meet him. She didn’t answer me, and after three weeks I got a bit angry and I called the producer. They told me that she’d died. We didn’t know she was sick — she had cancer. I told myself that Idan was her gift to all of us.
DEADLIEN: How special is the Czech Republic to you?
HOLLAND: I studied in Czechoslovakia, and I spent five or six very formative years there, because I went to the school when I was 17. I was there during the Prague Spring, that “carnival of freedom”, as Milan Kundera called it. Unfortunately, I was also there at the beginning of the normalization of the New Stalinization, and I spent some time in prison there, so it was a very stormy time for me. One of the reasons I went there was because it was Franz Kafka’s city, and I wanted to follow his footsteps. But Kafka, like other writers of his generation — avant-garde writers or underground writers — was practically unknown to Czech readers in that time of the communist [regime].
After the Prague Spring, they started to publish Kafka again, and he was published quite a lot during the next two, three years of relative freedom. But after the New Stalinization came, he became — again — kind of a degenerate writer. The Czechs didn’t know him so well, and they didn’t know any of the other writers of that generation. So, when freedom came in ’89, and the communist [regime] fell apart, there was an explosion of the things that had been forbidden before, but there was also the explosion of the free market, and suddenly the Czechs realized that Kafka was tourist gold, and they could really capitalize on it. We created our own museum for our film, but the Franz Kafka Museum really exists in Prague, and there are several monuments to him. There are a lot of gadgets in the souvenir shops, and tours, and cafes. For a short time, there was even a Kafka Burger restaurant, but now I think it’s Kafka Falafel. It became, for me, very inspiring somehow, because I tried to imagine him [in the present day] and guess what his reaction would be to all of that.
I mean, he wanted not to survive after his death. He asked his friends to burn his manuscripts. He didn’t want fame, or a life after dying, and then he became an icon. Most of the people who worship him have never read him and never will. It was an interesting, ironic combination, and it triggered a desire in me to try to find him under all those things.
DEADLINE: It’s interesting that you include the avant-garde art scene of the early 20th century. He isn’t working in a vacuum.
HOLLAND: I think he was very receptive. Everything had an influence on him, but at the same time… [Pause.] After the Second World War, he was considered to be some kind of political prophet, in that he anticipated the Holocaust, the Nazis, and so on. But, at the same time, he was not interested in politics at all. In his diaries, on the day the First World War started, [he wrote] something like, “Today Germany declares war on Russia.” Or the other way round, I don’t remember. In the afternoon? “Swimming pool.” I didn’t want to politicize him. I wanted to just show how those things were going into him and what was going out.
DEADLINE: You only dramatize one of his works. Instead of Metamorphosis, or The Trial, you use a short story, The Penal Colony. Why did you choose that?
HOLLAND: Well, we see him reading The Trial, and he’s laughing with his friends. It was important for me to show that they saw that it was grotesque and funny. The Penal Colony was very important after the Second World War, partly because it was proof of his clairvoyance. But it was not the only reason. The other reason was that it was one of the first pieces he read in public, and the reaction was like the scene you see in the film. People were shocked and disgusted, so it became my ambition to shoot it in a way that would recreate the same kind of feeling, which is much more difficult today because we are so [saturated] with images of violence. But it works. To my great satisfaction, it works. Some people hate that scene, which I totally respect. But it proved that I achieved what I wanted to do. We’re so used to images of violence, and a t the same time, we are reluctant to face real violence. That’s why I try, in the film, to break the [fourth] wall several times; I have characters speaking directly to the camera, or Franz looking straight into the lens.
All of this is in The Trial, which — because I adopted it in the ’80s for Polish television — is a novel that I feel that I really know really well. It has become very relevant again, at a time when the illusion of liberal democracy, of the state of law, and of human rights, is vanishing like smoke, and the institution of justice is becoming, again, totally unjust, dehumanized, arbitrary, absurd, and at the same time totally inefficient. We see it in America. And the accused? They are not a human being. They are [Josef] K. They are a letter, or a number, or whatever. So, again, a hundred years after his death, he becomes prophetic.
DEADLINE: Is Kafka someone that you think of often in your career? You went to prison as a young activist, and your work still manages to be controversial.
HOLLAND: I think so, yes. But at the same time, I don’t like it when he’s reduced to that political level, exactly, because I think [his work] is very existential, also. It’s about the human condition, about alienation. He was the god of alienation for existentialistic writers and philosophers like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.
What’s interesting to me now is that I’ve been showing the film in several countries, having Q&As and meeting different audiences in different cities, and practically every time, some person — mostly quite young — will come to me and tell me that the film is about herself or himself. One young man said, “You made a film about the most famous autistic person in the world. Are you one of us?” And suddenly I could see that around Kafka — especially as presented in our movie — there’s a circle of different people on the spectrum. Neurodivergent people are recognizing themselves [in the film]. They are recognizing themselves in him being different.
DEADLINE: Did you see that yourself, or did that come after making the movie?
When I was preparing the film — when I reread many of the letters, and the diaries, and some biographies again — yeah, I found that, certainly, he had that condition, that he was neurodivergent for sure. But I didn’t want to diagnose him. It’s impossible, he’s not here anymore. But I didn’t hide it in the film.
DEADLINE: A lot of your films deal with the Holocaust, and one of the many interesting things about Franz is that his writing could easily have disappeared if it hadn’t been smuggled out of the country in 1939. Was it important for you to put that in?
HOLLAND: He was blessed to die so early, I think, because if he’d lived till 60, he would have been killed in the Holocaust. He was spared that. He wasn’t a survivor at all. He wasn’t the kind of the person who could have found a way to escape and save himself. But, for me, it was quite obvious that I’d have to include a notion of that in the film. I wanted to mix the times — Kafka when he was alive and the Kafka after his death, existing on different levels. It’s a bit like in quantum physics, space and time are mixing together.
DEADLINE: Do you consider yourself to be a political artist?
HOLLAND: I’m a political person for sure. It means I’m sensitive to the state of society and to the ideologies that are leading us to a kind of slavery, that are denying us human rights, that are denying us the rights to dignity and safety that belong to every human being. So, I’m sensitive to that, and I’m interested in political mechanisms as well, even if they are quite repetitive. They aren’t as special as every single human being is. Every single human being is different. Those mechanisms [aren’t so interesting], but I become engaged with them when I see injustice, or if I see that history is coming back — if I see that things we thought we’d resolved, that we thought were in the past, are suddenly back in front of our eyes again. I feel, in that moment, that I have to tell the story, as some kind of warning.
Recently [for me], it was with two films. The first was Mr. Jones [2019], which was about the famine in Ukrainian, inflicted by Stalin, which killed millions of people and was silenced by the corrupt Western media and by politicians. It’s a situation that is, unfortunately, very relevant right now. I made that film six, seven years ago, because I felt that it [reflected] what was going on. Now, it’s like that serpent’s egg has grown up completely. Now, everybody sees it. Same with my film Green Border [2023], a contemporary film about immigration and the Polish border. When I made the film, I had the impression that maybe it could make a little change, if only in my own country. And it did, for a little while. But after that, things not only came back to normal, the next step was made by the government to deny human rights to the migrants.
DEADLINE: Ironically, Green Border wasn’t selected as the Polish Oscar submission, and yet Franz is…
HOLLAND: [Laughs.] It’s Polish, but it’s not Polish. It’s a Czech film in German. But it was exactly the same with Franz Kafka. He was a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but he wasn’t Austrian and he wasn’t Hungarian. After independence, he was a Czechoslovakian citizen, but he was not considered by the Czechs as a Czech but a German Jew — and the Jews thought he was a bad Jew because he was not religious. So, I love him because of all that floating identity, I feel very connected to that.
DEADLINE: As a European, what do the Oscars mean to you?
HOLLAND: Well, I was nominated three times, and [in 2020] I was shortlisted for the Czech movie Charlatan. It’s an honor, always, when the country puts you forward, but, at the same time, it’s weight on your shoulders. It’s like being a player in a cup final, playing tennis for your country. It’s always much better to play tennis for yourself. But, at the same time, competitions like the Oscars are the best way to promote a film, because we know that the space for independent, experimental, ambitious cinema is very limited. So, it’s good to have access to any tool you can find to put a spotlight on your film. Personally, my career is at a point where nothing can really help it or destroy it. I am who I am, and I’ve reached a point when I have to think how many more films I can do, knowing that time is short.
DEADLINE: What are you doing next?
HOLLAND: I have a script which we are now trying to put together, but I’m not sure if it will go. I will not be talking about it before we cast it, and everything depends on the cast.
DEADLINE: Do you have any dream projects?
HOLLAND: No. It’s always changing. There were some projects I didn’t do, mostly for financial reasons, but I don’t have a dream project. Right now, I’m looking forward. I would like to make something that will maybe give people hope, because dystopias have been so popular for last 15 years or longer. It doesn’t make sense to make these types of films anymore, because we are now living in a kind of dystopia — it became reality. Instead, I’m thinking about making a utopic story, and I’m thinking about maybe trying to do a miniseries, something that will reach a wider audience, that will create a kind of realistic but at the same time surprising utopia. I’m still looking for that.
