Timing, they say, is everything. Stefan Ruzowitzky's couldn't have been worse. The Austrian director, best known for the 2007 Oscar-winning Holocaust drama The Counterfeiters, saw his new film, Narcissus & Goldmund, released in Germany on Thursday, March 12, a wide bow from Sony Pictures.
By Friday, March 13, every theater in Germany, and Austria, was shut down due to coronavirus. "It was a disaster!" he groans, shaking his head in disbelief, via video from his home in Vienna. "It was the worst-possible result for the movie." Sony was counting on major box office for the period epic, which Ruzowitzky adapted from the literary classic by German writer Hermann Hesse.