Agnieszka Holland, the director of Oscar nominated films like “Angry Harvest,” “Europa Europa” and “In Darkness,” has completed post on her latest film, Franz Kafka biopic “Franz,” and will launch it at a fall festival, but which one exactly she will not say.
Speaking exclusively to Variety in her suite at the baroque Grandhotel Pupp in Czech spa town Karlovy Vary – an establishment reminiscent of the hotel in “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and a key location in James Bond movie “Casino Royale” – Holland explains how the film took shape, and her take on Kafka, best known for “The Metamorphosis,” “The Trial” and “The Castle.”
The Polish filmmaker, whose varied career has included directing multiple episodes of prestigious U.S. shows like “The Wire,” “The Killing,” “Cold Case,” “Treme,” “The Affair” and “House of Cards,” says that Kafka’s work is becoming more and more relevant today as “the dehumanization of society, the despisal of [certain groups of people], and alienation are once again becoming the main communicative tools,” she says, before pausing to add, “but I don’t want to give an interpretation like that.”
She ponders a little, before observing, “Kafka has been interpreted in so many ways, as is shown in the film, but when you compare what he wrote with what was written about him they are poles apart. So, we didn’t want to reinterpret Kafka; we wanted to make him alive.”
She explains that she first read Kafka, who was born in Prague in 1883, when she was a teenager living in Communist-era Poland. “When I was 14, and in the following years, I read not only his novels and other literary works, but also his letters, and some books about him, and somehow I felt that I was connected to him, that he is like my brother, a brother who I have to take care of … that he is exceptional, but fragile. And then I went to Prague to study [at the city’s film school, FAMU], and one of the reasons was that it would be like living in the same world he did.”
In 1981, she adapted Kafka’s “The Trial” for Polish television. “When you deconstruct a novel, and then reconstruct it, you find your own interpretation; you learn about the mechanism of his thinking, much more than when you are just reading,” she says.
Despite her fascination with the author, it would be decades before she thought the time was right to tackle a broader look at his life and work. “When I started working with Czech producer Šárka Cimbalová [with whom she collaborated on 2020’s “Charlatan” and 2023’s “Green Border”], we decided that that was the moment for us, together, to try it. But I knew that I couldn’t do a classical biopic, that it had to be somehow fragmented. I was looking for Franz … in fact the title [of the film] could be ‘Looking for Franz.’ ”
She adds, “I don’t like the cliché of Kafka being dark, moody and depressed. I see him as having much in common with contemporary young people, with all the atypical behavior, the fear of face-to-face communication, and the fear of and attraction to the opposite sex at the same time … many things that psychologically and sociologically are very relevant now. So, we have tried to make him accessible for a contemporary audience, and I think it works with a younger audience.”
The structure of the film has been described as a “mosaic” – is that an accurate description? “Well, probably. It has several layers of narration, but at the same time, it is quite accessible. It’s not heavily experimental. It’s playful. As a structure, I would say it is more associative than linear.”
Among the major themes in Kafka’s life that Holland explores in “Franz” is his relationship with his father, but also his relationships with two women. Although he was in relationships with several women, the film focuses on those with Felice Bauer and Milena Jesenská, “who were probably the most important in terms of his life choices.” It looks at his intellectual relationship with them, as well as tracking his long friendship with Max Brod, who was largely responsible for promoting the work of Kafka – at that time virtually unknown – after the author’s death due to tuberculosis at the age of 40 in 1924. “It is all there – all those themes, subjects, but at the same time it is not exactly linear. It’s more like fragments, pieces of a puzzle, maybe.”
Kafka’s identity was multi-faceted. He was a German-speaking Jewish subject of the Kingdom of Bohemia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, later to become Czechoslovakia in 1918. His affiliation to Judaism and Jewish culture more broadly is mentioned in the film, but, Holland adds: “He had a very ambiguous relationship to that. He didn’t want to belong to any kind of identity, and felt that all of them [the various groups to which he belonged] were part of him, but he still felt like a stranger among the Germans, the Czechs and Jewish people alike, especially after World War I when nationalistic fascism started to rise in practically every part of Europe, like is happening again today.
“Yeah, he felt a stranger to everybody because he was a German-speaking Jew in the new Czechoslovakia, where they didn’t want Jews or Germans. For Germans, he was a Jew, and for Jews, he was too cosmopolitan, too non-religious.
“However, Kafka was fascinated by a Jewish actor who performed in Yiddish, and he became very close to him for a while. By the end of his life, he was learning Hebrew, and he said he wanted to go to Palestine, but I think it was just a fantasy, because he was deathly sick in those final moments. It was more like a fantasy about escaping to some kind of paradise, where it would be possible to survive.
“Some of the elements are touched on symbolically only; some are not touched on at all.”
Referring to Idan Weiss, who stars as Kafka, she says, “It was important to me to find a German-Jewish actor to play Kafka. It is some kind of miracle that he was presented to me, and that no one had cast him as Kafka before, because there were two movies in German about Kafka in 2024 because it was the anniversary of Kafka’s death. They both cast German actors to play Kafka, but they didn’t find Idan, and he was waiting for me.”
As for the accessibility of “Franz” for a mainstream cinema audience, she says, “We didn’t want the film to be too intellectual in terms of being attractive only to literary buffs, but we didn’t want to over-simplify either. So, it was difficult to find a balance. I think we found it, but of course it’s up to the viewers to decide.”
For some people, Kafka is regarded as almost a comic writer in some ways. “We’ve got this scene which really happened, when he was reading fragments of ‘The Trial’ to other writers and everybody was laughing crazily. I think he considered himself to be funny, and his work is funny. It’s black humor of course.”
The period and place in which the film takes place, the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, before it was swept away by World War I, was pivotal in European history as the region had been remarkably diverse, cosmopolitan and relatively stable in comparison with what was to follow in the 1930s and 40s.
“Well, many people think that it was the biggest tragedy of Europe – when the empire fell apart – which is probably true. It was like a prefiguration of the European Union, which can fall apart as well. That will be the next disaster. It really was some kind of cultural melting pot, also linguistically, and it produced incredible results in terms of German literature. But the film is not so deeply rooted historically.”
Next up for Holland is a film about Polish novelist Jerzy Kosiński, whose works include “The Painted Bird” and “Being There.”
The film, “Rabbit Garden,” is based on a script by Jamie Dawson, and is being produced by David Permut and Fred Bernstein, who was a producer on Holland’s “Green Border.”
The film centers on Kosiński at a time when his life and literary career unravelled after having the authenticity of his work called into question by two reporters from The Village Voice. He died by suicide in 1991 in New York City.
The son of Jewish parents in Poland, Kosiński had survived the Nazi occupation and Holocaust.
“At some point, the American journalists found out that he was using a ghost writer or ghost translator, and that when he had said that his book [‘The Painted Bird’] was autobiographical, it wasn’t exactly true. Anyway, they cancelled him,” Holland says.
“And it is a question, you know, what is more important: the artistic truth or the literal truth? How easy it is to cancel somebody because he doesn’t fit into the rules?
“He committed suicide in 1991, exactly when I was promoting ‘Europa Europa’ in New York, and I met him on the last day of his life. It was a big, incredible rise and a very brutal fall. But at the same time, there is the mystery of why he killed himself. If it was because of that fall, or maybe it was because of the trauma of his childhood.”
variety.com
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