our THR Frontrunners panel<\/a> this physical resemblance between you and Kafka, but she also said you had this soul and creative spirit that she was looking for. What do you think that was \u2014\u00a0your experience in theater? Your own relationship with Kafka?<\/p>\n\n\tWhen I read his books, I felt a weird connection to them. I love books that get out of the normal. I don\u2019t know how to describe it. It\u2019s like when I\u2019m reading Dostoyevsky or Chekhov\u2026 people who are really interesting to me, personally. So I don\u2019t know which way, but I directly felt the connection somehow, and then I had time for preparation. I tried to do a lot with my body, to work with my body, to create ticks and everything. I wouldn\u2019t say that I played him, you know? It was more the feeling \u2014 to search for him, because, I mean, how can you play a character who died? It\u2019s a great question. So I really tried to get very close to him. Agnieszka and me, we searched for him together during the shoot. Every day we got a bit closer to him.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-hollywoodreporter-2021\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tWeiss as Franz Kafka in \u2018Franz.\u2019<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of TIFF<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat\u2019s your first memory of Kafka \u2014\u00a0your introduction to him?<\/p>\n
\n\tWhen I read his book The Castle. I think he has a very, very great sense of humor. At the same time, it\u2019s very melancholic. After reading the first book and the next book, I really felt that he\u2019s a very funny and intelligent man. He built his own world somehow. So that was very interesting for me. [Yet], I realized that Kafka got a mark somehow as a depressive, crazy writer, and he was much more than this. He was very happy, he was very sensitive, and he thinks differently. He feels differently. It\u2019s the same with us human beings. We are all sensitive and we all have feelings and we are all connected to the world differently. So it was interesting for me to realize how similar we all are.<\/p>\n
\n\tHe\u2019s also, famously, a very elusive writer. And as you said, it\u2019s so hard to portray any historical figure. What conversations did you and Agnieszka have about the Kafka you wanted to depict?<\/p>\n
\n\tAgneiszka and I, we had conversations about some scenes or what Kafka means to her. At the same time, I tried to tell her what I think about him. We built something up \u2014\u00a0how we could go, together, through this movie and the ideas we have. We collected ideas. She mentioned Rafael Nadal, the tennis player, [and said] that he has some ticks and maybe I should look at how he plays tennis and his ticks. [Laughs.]<\/p>\n
\n\tI realized that I have to go out of my comfort zone, because that\u2019s what I\u2019m thinking as an actor: you have to go out of your comfort zone. You have to be uncomfortable, have to be weird or whatever. I think acting is not about staying comfortable. It\u2019s the opposite. So I really try to think, \u201cWhat can I do?\u201d And I tried to get [to] that darkness as well. I had a dialect coach for Czech, I learned Czech for five months, [did] rowing, read every book of his. I locked myself in my flat in Hamburg to get that feeling of dark energy somehow. I mean, not to go into a depressive character, but to go into a dark character. Every dark character has a kind of emptiness or sadness in a way. For me, it helped me a lot to just go out when the daylight was gone. [Laughs.] I really tried to create something interesting for the audience, not just for me to play.<\/p>\n
\n\tDo you feel like you understand him, or know him better now you\u2019ve embodied him?<\/p>\n
\n\tI think I learned one thing from him, and that is to stay awake. No matter how hard times [are] or how rough your life can be, it is always so important to stay awake, look around you and realize that everything can happen at any moment. Keep on going, no matter what comes against you or what people think about you. Obviously, he was writing every time [something happened to him].<\/p>\n
\n\tTalk to me about that experience of being on your first film set \u2014\u00a0with Agnieszka Holland of all people. Was it a very different life to being on stage?<\/p>\n
\n\tOne word: overwhelming! [Laughs.] No, to be honest, it was a fucking amazing experience. Because I come from theater and I learned so much from theater, and now I just want to make movies and to get a different kind of audience at the same time. To work with Agnieszka\u2026 she creates that kind of high-energy atmosphere [and] at the same time, you have so much freedom for improvisation and talking about the scenes. It was great, actually, that combination. You know you can do whatever you want, but there\u2019s a script which is very important. Agnieszka opens the space to talk about things\u2026 And that was a really great experience. I love the camera work. The camera man, he\u2019s just so talented and he had so much freedom in his head. I think him and Agnieszka really created that kind of shooting experience. I\u2019m looking forward more to my next projects now. I\u2019m very lucky.<\/p>\n
\n\tIt is such clever camera work. I loved the surrealism: the dramatization of In the Penal Colony and jumps forward to modern day, where we saw Franz Kafka the commercial brand in 2025. Would he be mortified by the commodification of his legacy?<\/p>\n
\n\tYou never know. [Laughs]. No, it\u2019s very important to tell what Agnieszka was trying to tell: those people who are doing something different and, when they die, they\u2019re [becoming] a brand, which is so ironic. Max Brod published all of [Kafka\u2019s] books. He never wanted the books getting published in any way and wanted the books burned. I think life can be so ironic, so Agnieszka wanted to try and tell that a bit, but also there was one sentence she said in an interview which I really resonated with. She said that, actually, we live in a time where people are getting less and less important. They are fitting more into the system. I think that\u2019s about Kafka, in a way. At the end of the day, he\u2019s just a sensitive human being who\u2019s trying to connect with the world, who is looking for someone who understands him, and none of that happened.<\/p>\n
\n\tSo somehow, the movie gives hope, because so many people can connect differently to it. Also the father and son relationship is in every family and a very interesting topic \u2014\u00a0you also can [apply] it to a daughter and father relationship\u2026 But I think for Agnieszka, [Kafka] was kind of a childhood hero. Maybe it\u2019s her last movie, she told me.<\/p>\n
\n\tI certainly hope not\u2026 What do you think his relevance is today? Why is this such an important film to be out in the world right now?<\/p>\n
\n\tI think that so many young people can connect to him, because now we are in times where social media has taken over. Social media is to show yourself, to promote yourself and people are looking to find people who understand them. Kafka was the same. That\u2019s why everyone is somehow connected to the movie and to Kafka, because\u2026 he just wanted to be understood. All the young people who grew up during the COVID times and are in school now and on Instagram \u2014 we and they are just looking for attention; to be understood.<\/p>\n
\n\tTo go from anonymity to Franz\u2026 How have you found the attention?<\/p>\n
\n\tOverwhelming! [Laughs.] No, it\u2019s a great experience, to have your first role, first movie [be] an international movie in different languages and all. You can show so much of your soul and try so many [different things]. I appreciate it. I\u2019m very thankful for that. To get this kind of attention, for me personally, is very confusing. But to get this kind of acceptance for what you did is really heartwarming. To [go to] all those movie festivals, it\u2019s great and overwhelming for sure. But the last three months were completely crazy looking back now.<\/p>\n
\n\tCan you talk to me about anything that you have lined up? Has this opened a lot of a lot of doors?<\/p>\n
\n\tYeah, I have to be honest: This movie changed my my life. I\u2019m getting very interesting roles now. When I did all the auditions, I had so many different different castings because nobody could put me in a box and say, \u201cOkay, it\u2019s Idan. He can play this.\u201d So I\u2019d get so many different kind of castings, it\u2019s crazy. But now I can play with that. Everyone is like, \u201cOkay, Idan can be everything,\u201d and that\u2019s great.<\/p>\n
\n\tI have a great movie called Save Our Souls. It\u2019s my first English movie, and it\u2019s an eco-thriller drama about three young people who are committing suicide together on a container ship as a climate protest. The script is amazing and the director is a friend of mine. I think it\u2019s great movie. I\u2019m getting out of my comfort zone. That\u2019s [what] it\u2019s all about, at the end of the day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sitting in Idan Weiss\u2019 drafts folder is an email to his agent. He declares he\u2019s going to quit…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":174817,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[6334,8511,156,8512,1223,1019,409,111,139,69,2584,36526,6365],"class_list":{"0":"post-174816","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-academy-awards","9":"tag-agnieszka-holland","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-franz-kafka","12":"tag-germany","13":"tag-international","14":"tag-movies","15":"tag-new-zealand","16":"tag-newzealand","17":"tag-nz","18":"tag-oscars","19":"tag-oscars-2026","20":"tag-poland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174816\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}