This Might Be the Most Ambitious and Delirious Thing Joe Wright Has Ever Done

“I’ve been watching the rise of the far right across the world,� says the M. Son of a Century director, “and have been very, very concerned.� Photo: Sky TV

Director Joe Wright first fell in love with Italy during a trip following the production of his debut feature, Pride & Prejudice (2005). He’d always wanted to make a film there, which he accomplished with the 2022 musical Cyrano. But then producer Lorenzo Mieli came to him with an even crazier idea: M. Son of the Century, a miniseries, in Italian, about the rise to power of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. Wright was intrigued, because he was concerned about the rise of the far right all across the world, but he also saw in the project a chance to pay homage to Italian cinema, one of his great loves.

The resulting eight-part miniseries, which just played the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals and has yet to find a distributor in the U.S., might be the most ambitious and delirious thing Wright has ever done. Based on the 2018 novel by Antonio Scurati, M. Son of the Century is filled to bursting with the kinds of ornate, fevered, rhythmic sequences that have become his trademark. Sets turn in on themselves, rear projections abound, fascist rallies turn into raves. At one point, Mussolini (played by the great Italian actor and heartthrob Luca Marinelli) does a stage dive in an act of victorious euphoria. The series has a you-are-there immediacy crossed with flights of formal daring that flirt with abstraction; it both pulls us in and spits us out. As such, it walks a fine line, with Wright using a deliberately anachronistic style to convey the power of fascism while also not shying away from showing its brutality. “We want to ask the audience to apply some critical distance and consider their own response to Mussolini and how they became seduced,� the director explains, “to understand that we all have choices.�

You made an entire TV show in Italian. So, how is your Italian? 
Pathetic. My Italian is pathetic, it’s dreadful, but luckily, Italian actors are so expressive that you can kind of understand what they’re saying and whether they’re telling the truth just by the melody of their voice and the actions of their hands. If I didn’t speak English and I was trying to do this with British actors, who are so text-based and far less expressive, it might not have worked. Or with American actors, who are so psychoanalysis-based.

With the Italians, their roots going all the way back to Commedia dell’arte and this very performative sense physically and musically, it felt possible. I obviously had the English translation and the Italian script side-by-side. But I remembered Danny Boyle doing Slumdog Millionaire and much of that being in Hindi. I thought, If he can do that in Hindi, I think I can do this in Italian.

I have this theory that, because the dialogue in Italian cinema was for so long post-synchronized, a more physical tradition of film acting emerged there. Actors knew that their line deliveries wouldn’t necessarily carry on to the finished product, so they focused more on the physical aspects of their performance.  
I think that also works because of a tradition that goes all the way back. Many of the great Italian actors come from Naples. Have you been to Naples? The whole city is a theater. It’s so performative. It’s so expressive. I think that’s probably why. It’s very much a kind of southern Italian thing rather than a northern Italian thing.

How did you come to M. Son of the Century?
I’ve been watching the rise of the far right across the world and have been very, very concerned. I remember when I was growing up, when I was a teenager in the ’80s, using this word “fascist� against the police or Margaret Thatcher or my schoolteachers without really understanding its meaning or its root. When producer Lorenzo Mieli asked if I’d be interested in working with him on this, I jumped at it as an opportunity to educate myself really on the foundations of what I saw happening, what we see happening around the world now.

Tell me about working with Italian actor Luca Marinelli.
Luca is up there with Gary Oldman. He is one of the greatest actors of his generation, if not the greatest actor of his generation. He’s completely transformative. He wore no prosthetics. He shaved his head, and he wore contact lenses, and he had two pieces of — I don’t even know what they were really, they were like two pieces of tube he put in his nostrils, just to expand his nose a little bit because his nose is thinner than Mussolini’s. But that was it. And his own mother didn’t recognize him on set! His imagination is so powerful that it can transfer itself over to the audience, so that it engages their imagination to believe that they’re looking at Mussolini. If filmmaking has no other purpose, it is to engage and empower an audience’s imagination. Not necessarily empathy, because empathy can be dangerous. We want to engage an audience’s imagination for them to be able to imagine a better world for themselves.

I haven’t read the book. Is the book as gonzo as what you’ve created?
There’s less humor in it, but it’s also very detailed. It’s a kind of collage of newspaper articles, letters, telegrams, fictionized scenes. That was a big inspiration in terms of the aesthetics of the piece. This idea that we would mix between black-and-white, color, newsreels, direct address, almost musical numbers, it felt kind of like an appropriate expression of the novel’s form.

Obviously, you’ve turned this into something that feels very much like your work. And it sounds like a lot of the basic materials were there. But how do you decide how far to take it? Mussolini stage diving, I’m assuming, is not in the book. But it does feel like something that would be in one of your movies.
Yeah. Mussolini, I don’t think in the book stage dives. But again, it’s finding the cinematic expression of what I’m specifically trying to say about any given moment, and his joy at that moment felt best expressed by him flying, basically. Stage dive seemed to be the appropriate thing. But also I’m using the Chemical Brothers music, and the whole thing is a mashup between Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera and Howard Hawks’s Scarface and ’90s rave culture — it’s really an attempt to express the energy and the dynamism and the kinetic momentum of the period. I thought about using period music, but I was worried it would just feel old-fashioned. What I want the audience to experience is what it felt like to be there at the time, and how extraordinary it must have felt, and how thrilling it must have felt. The seduction of fascism.

That’s a very interesting and fine line that you walk in the, uh — I keep calling it a film — the show.
It’s a film!

You want to convey Mussolini’s charisma and his energy, but he’s certainly not a likable character. Quite beyond the fact that we already know what he will become and what he will do, he’s not presented a pleasant person to spend time with. And yet, we’re going to spend something like eight hours with this guy. How do you manage that?
I think for Luca and I, the important thing was to make sure that we were dealing with a human. That we didn’t demonize him, we didn’t allow ourselves the safety of suggesting that he’s other. He wasn’t other. He came from us. He’s a human being. I always remember when George W. Bush, after the terrible Abu Ghraib abuses, went on TV and said of the Americans who tortured prisoners, “These people are evil. They have sickness in their souls,� and somehow that absolved him and us all of responsibility. Oh, okay, they’re other, that’s all right. Then we don’t have to look at ourselves.

I think the important thing in humanizing Mussolini is to look at ourselves and look at our own responsibility, look at the parts of us that are less than the higher self. However, we don’t want to seduce the audience to the point where they’re going to go, “Oh, I think I might be a fascist.� The idea was to employ a Brechtian form in which we allow the audience to be seduced by his charisma just as he seduced an entire nation and much of the world — Churchill was a fan of Mussolini before the war — and then pull the rug from underneath their feet. We want to ask the audience to apply some critical distance and consider their own response to Mussolini and how they became seduced, to understand that we all have choices.

I imagine form must play an important role in that, because so much of the seductive power of M. comes from the way you stage these scenes, almost like musical numbers. We’ve discussed this before, but even before you made Cyrano, a lot of your films felt like musicals that just didn’t happen to have singing and dancing. There was always a musicality to your films. 
Rhythm for me is the elemental foundation of all filmmaking. When I’m conceiving a scene, when I’m staging a scene, I’m always thinking about the rhythms of it. I think with this piece, that love of rhythm has found an exciting sweet spot. Because with rhythm, you can almost subconsciously lead the audience to a state of euphoria, or a state of ecstasy. And then you can drop them off the cliff rhythmically. I think this comes a lot from my love of DJs and great DJ house music of the ’90s. I was watching a film the other day and thinking, Where’s the beat drop? I don’t want to say what film. But it’s like, you build, you build, and it’s great — but where’s the beat drop? Give us the beat drop! That’s a purely house-music, techno term, but that explosion, that moment, is just heaven.

M. has many unhinged sequences that seem elaborately choreographed and conceived. How do you go about creating sequences like that? Do you have to spend a ton of time planning? Can you fly by the seat of your pants? 
I can’t. I do extensive planning prior, weeks of prep. And planning when you’re dealing with a 127-day shoot becomes much more difficult. Then, every morning I wake up two hours before I have to leave the hotel, I drink a really strong cup of coffee and I make a shot list. It’s really a matter of shutting my eyes and imagining the scene play out in my head. I have to write down what I see in my head — which is the reason why I do it in the morning, because I’m closer to a dream state than I am at night. I have to do this as soon as I wake up, so that I’m not judging myself. I’m still in that kind of borderland between subconscious and conscious thinking. But then you are sort of finding it on the floor as well. A lot of the preparation is just about trying to placate my fear that I’m not going to be inspired on the day, so that I have a safety net of the planning. If on the day the actors suggest something, or the light suggests something, I’m always open to changing it.

Have you gotten better at that as you’ve made more films?
I’ve gotten more confident. But also, your craft develops and you get better at it, like a carpenter. My craft is my higher power. My craft always humbles me because my craft is always better than I am — it’s what I aspire to. In the case of this, what was truly gratifying was to put myself and my craft at the service of something bigger and more important because the piece is a howl against the far right, and that I deem to be far more important than me.

Speaking of that importance, does it feel like we’re living in a moment when some people are too afraid to make or consume things about detestable people? I assume there will be people who say, “Oh my God, why would you make a show about Mussolini?�
The only bad review we had in Italy was a far-right paper that said, “Why would you make a show about Mussolini?� And they said that politics should stay out of television. I do think Hollywood has become incredibly apolitical. I think it’s important to take control of the narrative, and we as storytellers have a responsibility to do that. I’m by no means suggesting that a piece of television can change the world, necessarily, but we can do our bit. Because in Italy and the world, there has been a false narrative spread for 75 years. You meet people on the street in Italy, or cab drivers or whoever, and they’ll say, “Well, Mussolini was okay. Mussolini did a lot of good for the country, but then he fell in with this rotten apple Hitler, and that was a big shame. But until then, he was great.� It’s a false narrative! It’s not true, and we need to counter those false narratives.

And when Hollywood does get political, it often feels so mild and predictable. But in M., you’re not afraid to show Mussolini’s charisma and get the audience to understand his appeal.  
We need nuance, and nuance is something that has been lost, I think, from a lot of discourse. Either it’s good or bad, evil or good, right or wrong. I think that’s unhelpful. Also, I think it’s underestimating an audience’s intelligence. Because people get it. People aren’t stupid. Okay, maybe a tiny fraction of people are stupid — but generally, they get it.

Cyrano was one of my favorite films the year it came out, but it was frustrating to see it die theatrically. A number of musicals around then didn’t quite hit — even something like West Side Story. Now, it feels like we are somehow simultaneously getting more musicals, but at the same time the marketing hides the fact that they’re musicals. It is a very strange situation the industry is in with that genre. 
There is a kind of aversion to musicals. But I saw last night, Emilia Perez, and I was just blown away by it. It’s one of the most beautiful, exquisite pieces of filmmaking. Jacques Audiard might be my favorite director. I’ve worshipped him since A Self-Made Hero really. To see that last night, and to be in that audience and experience that kind of wonder at the movies again. It’s the same kind of wonder that one had when one first saw The Red Shoes or Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Taxi Driver — that sense of joy and profound love and humanity. And without being syrupy or wet. Audiard’s technical craft is so sublime, and then you couple that with this fierce love for humanity. It just makes me want to kneel at his feet and kiss them.