Agnieszka Holland Talks Bringing Franz Kafka To Life In ‘Franz’ & Neurodivergence Questions – Contenders International

Agnieszka Holland’s biopic Franz world premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September and has since played a raft of festivals and been named as Poland’s official entry for the International Feature Film Oscar race.

The Polish director revisits the life of the iconic writer, born into a German-speaking Czech Jewish family in Prague in 1883, from his teen years to his untimely death at just 40. 

She first discovered his works as a teenager when she read his posthumously published novel The Trial.

“I was between 14 and 15 years old. … It was such a shock to me and such a discovery that I decided to read everything of his and everything about him. … He has followed me throughout my life,” said Holland, who would go on to direct a TV adaptation of the book. 

“I wanted to find the way to connect to him, to make him alive again,” she says of her desire to make the film

Idan Weiss stars as Kafka, a young man trapped in a nightmare of bureaucratic daily life who escapes into a world of irony, absurdity and imagination to create works that will make him one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

Finding Weiss was a stroke of luck, Holland said during the Franz panel at Deadline’s Contenders Film: International.

“When you are directing movies, the first thing you need is luck. He was presented to me by the late Simone Barr, the famous German casting director, and I immediately knew that we’d found our man,” she recounted. 

Some reviewers have questioned whether Holland’s portrait of Kafka is suggesting that the writer was neurodivergent.

“Well, I didn’t want to make the diagnosis of Franz Kafka, but yeah, somehow some of his behavior, some of his problems he had with society and with connection with other people, it showed that he was in some way on the spectrum,” she said. 

Check back Monday for the panel video.