Agnieszka Holland On Directing ‘Franz’, Poland’s Oscar Submission

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 19 th 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 du