Director Joe Wright On Confronting The Seeds Of Fascism In 'Mussolini: Son of the Century'
The celebrated director on the parallels from 1920s Italy to todays authoritarian figures...
Mussolini: Son of the Century recently started streaming on MUBI, following its premiere at last year's Venice Film Festival and subsequent airing on Sky Atlantic. A kinetic trip through the formative years of Benito Mussolini and the formation of Italy's Fascist Party. An eight-episode series directed by Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, Hanna, Darkest Hour) that glides through a kaleidoscopic array of images set to the pulsing sounds of Tom Rowlands. Wright recently spoke to Immersive about this massive undertaking.
[This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.]
So let's talk Mussolini. How did you first get involved with this?
Lorenzo Mieli approached me and asked if I was interested. I was very quick in responding. I really wanted to try to understand where this thing called fascism came from, especially with the reemergence of the far right around the world. I tried to understand its roots. And I've had a very long love affair with Italian cinema. So that felt like a dream come true to me to go to Italy and make this show.
What was it like shooting at Cinecittà Studios?
It's as if you are walking among the ghosts of the greats of cinema, and there's a stage, number five, which is where Fellini shot most of his movies. I went and kissed the ground of that stage. It's a truly special and magical place.
That's amazing. So when you got involved, how put-together was this? Was the script already there?
There was one episode written, or rather, a draft of the first episode, and that was it. We had the book and an English translation of the book. We dived into developing those scripts, and they were first written in Italian, then translated into English, and finally translated back into Italian. It was quite an arduous process.
At what point did you know it was going to be eight episodes?
It was conceived as eight episodes. There was also an outline for the show, and it was always intended to be eight episodes.
Luca Marinelli is pretty incredible in this. Talking about casting then working with him...
Luca is quite well known in Italy. He made a film called Martin Eden, which I'm a huge fan of. He's an incredible actor. One of the greatest world actors of his generation. He has such an extraordinary ordinary imagination, and it's a creative power that somehow bewitches an audience so that whatever he's imagining, we imagine too.
I knew that he had the talent and the power for it. It was a 127-day shoot, so I needed to make sure that I had a partner who was going to be good to work with. So, I went to Berlin and met him, and discovered that he was as far from the characters he plays and about as far from Mussolini as one could imagine. He's a very gentle, sweet, funny guy. So when I met him, I sort of immediately fell in love with him and understood that he was someone who I was gonna have a really good time working with.
Excellent. Let's discuss the look of the series. There's a lot of movement, and it's very immediate. Talk about collaborating again with Seamus McGarvey...
The first idea I had was the music. I had the idea of using Tom Rowlands (The Chemical Brothers) to create a score that would convey the kinetic dynamism of the period. So, with that music in mind, everything was informed and very much shaped by the imagery. Seamus and I were listening to that music a lot, and Tom was writing a lot of music during production for us to work with. It really informed everything. The imagery was a kind of mashup between Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera and Howard Hawks' Scarface, as well as nineties rave culture.
There's also the editing. How long did it take to piece together, editing-wise? Were all the episodes edited together...
Yeah. How did we have everything together? I was very lucky. Instrumental in the whole project was Valerio Bonelli, my editor, who is Italian and has been working with me since before Darkest Hour. I could not have made this show without him. I leaned on him very heavily. Obviously, his understanding of Italian and the nuances of the language allowed him to move into my house in England for six months, and we worked together very intensively over that period.
Talk a little bit about this in contrast with your other work... People know you for films like Atonement and Pride and Prejudice. How does this stand in contrast with those projects?
It's interesting. I have two sides to my cultural life. One of these kinds of fairytales. I think of Pride and Prejudice as being a fairytale. I grew up with fairy tales at home. When I was confronted by the outside world in London, the eighties were quite a scary place, especially the neighborhood I grew up in. That was a lot more brutal. Then I discovered rave culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and I was off on a different trajectory. It's really about bringing those two elements together. Some of the movies lean more into the fairytale world, and some, like Hanna, lean more into the other space.
What sort of feedback have you received on this, particularly in Italy? The second part is about your premiere on MUBI. It's gonna have new people watching it. The word of mouth has been really good so far. What's it like being on the other end of this experience?
It's been a very long and fascinating journey, as there has been a certain fear associated with it. One interested streamer was very excited by it, but unfortunately, it was too controversial for them. That made me ask the inevitable question: since when did fascism or anti-fascism become controversial? As far as I can remember, our grandparents or great-grandparents died fighting fascism. It's been a fascinating journey.
The response in Italy was pretty cathartic. I've never seen television reviews on the front pages of national newspapers. There's currently a far-right populist leader whose roots are actually within the fascist party in Italy. The response was kind of divided. There was certainly a lot of pushback from the right wing in Italy. I'm extremely excited to be partnering with MUBI and to have the show finally reach a broader audience. I think the movie's youthful demographic is exciting.
Mussolini: Son of the Century is currently streaming on MUBI.