Better the Devil You Know: Joe Wright on Mussolini: Son of the Century

A bulldog of a man bellows from the stage, whipping a crowd of hundreds into a frenzy. “A time always comes when a lost populace turns to simple ideas,” he proclaims. “I can feel their anger, their hatred. I only have them and they only have me.” It’s 1919, and resentment is running high in Milan following four years of war. The man on the stage is Benito Mussolini, erstwhile editor of the Italian Socialist Party’s official newspaper. Within three years, he will have brutally suppressed all political opposition, declared martial law, and implemented a dictatorship that would soon drag his country back to the battlefields.

Mussolini: Son of the Century, an eight-part miniseries from director Joe Wright, sets out to interrogate the power of seduction, to elucidate how a mesmerizing political operator corralled the forces of violence and charisma to sweep an entire nation into the stranglehold of totalitarianism. “Fascism, a beautiful creature, made up of passion, ideals, courage and change, that will conquer millions of hearts,” says Mussolini, laying out his wares in direct address to the viewer. “Yours too, I’m certain. Follow me, you’ll love me too. You’ll become Fascists too.”

Wright is best known for his period dramas, bringing adaptations of Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice and Ian McEwan's Atonement to the big screen. Where those works critiqued the social mores of the English gentry with a delicate sense of irony and cut-glass precision, Mussolini thunders through its epoch in jackboots. Accompanied by a techno score courtesy of The Chemical Brothers’s Tom Rowlands, Wright whips up a maelstrom of formal experimentation, folding a gamut of early-twentieth-century influences into his stylistic melting pot.

Front and center is a career-defining performance from Luca Marinelli. Vulgar in deportment, and kitted out in bald cap and paunch, Marinelli’s Mussolini bulldozes the screen’s fourth wall to single out the viewer as a mark for his oratorical drills. The ideological patter comes at lightning speed, as acolytes and non-believers alike stand discombobulated at the crossroads of repulsion and attraction, grimacing at his conspiratorial smile—the sugar that helps his toxic medicine go down.

Per William Faulkner’s adage that “the past is never dead, it isn’t even past,” Wright isn’t shy about drawing contemporary parallels with the rise of the populist right. On the eve of the series’ Los Angeles premiere, I sat down with the director to discuss the complexities of mounting eight hours of television, the fear of humanizing a monster, and the rise of toxic masculinity as a political force.

MUBI: How did you come to be involved with Mussolini?

JOE WRIGHT: I met [producer] Lorenzo Mieli, and was a big fan of the films he’d been making with Paolo Sorrentino. He told me that he was developing a show about Mussolini. I remember, as a teenager, seeing some footage of Mussolini and laughing at him—this clown. At the time, we used to go around calling the police and our school teachers “fascists,” without really knowing what the word meant. 

Since 2016, I suppose, that word had reemerged in the public consciousness, but I still didn’t have a full understanding of its etymology. I felt like it was my responsibility to try to understand it. So I wholeheartedly embraced the idea of making this show to try to educate myself. But I wasn’t interested in only directing a couple of episodes. I felt that if I was going to do it as television, I wanted to do the whole thing. So I took on all eight episodes, and that was the beginning of two years of work.

MUBI: How does the preparation for eight hours of television differ from that of a feature film?

WRIGHT: You can’t prepare in the same way for a six-month shoot as you would for a ten- or twelve-week shoot. And that was quite good for me. I’m probably a bit of a control freak—like most directors, I imagine. With a movie I try to plan out everything to the last detail in preproduction. I storyboard a lot; I rehearse everything. With this, I was forced to work more intuitively and to improvise more. So I prepared as much as I could, but I didn’t have storyboards, and I didn’t know how I was going to shoot every single scene. And I really enjoyed it! It was a bit of a revelation. The demands were extreme, but really exciting.

MUBI: In previous interviews, you’ve spoken about how much you like to have your shot lists ready for each day of production. Did you have to forgo that kind of preparatory structure this time?

WRIGHT: We had an idea for every scene. We had a central concept that came from the thematics: We’d start with the theme and then work out how that translates moment to moment. So for every day, and every scene, we’d have our central image, but how that would connect—through the blocking of the actors, for instance—would be something that we’d come up with on the day.

I mean, I still woke up at five o’clock in the morning to do my shot lists for the day. But I think it was good for me! It really loosened me up.

MUBI: The visual design of the film seems to have been inspired by the cinema of the 1910s and 1920s—films that were contemporaneous to the period you’re depicting on screen. How much of this was also conceived on the fly?

WRIGHT: There was a prepared visual concept which was then applied on the fly each day. I guess that’s the best way of putting it. We had ideas about, say, Dutch angles prior to shooting, but it was as we were making it that I became more and more enamored by them. We kind of developed a vocabulary as we were working. Once you know the language of the thing you’re making, then you can start applying all those motifs each day. That was the fun of it.

Very early in my career, when I was doing television, I made a thing with Timothy Spall that was shot by the great Polish cinematographer, Ryszard Lenczewski. He was a great teacher for me. He always said that you have to set yourself certain limitations. So on the show we did together, we decided that we were only going to shoot on a 18mm lens and a 90mm lens, or something. And it was those limitations which gave the thing a very specific aesthetic. As he used to say, it stopped the thing turning into scrambled eggs. I’ve applied that logic ever since: The rules you set yourself actually end up liberating you, because within those thematically motivated limitations you can go anywhere you like. Otherwise you’re often just stuck with options paralysis.

MUBI: Your adaptation of Anna Karenina [2012] came with a bold conceptual gambit: staging the film within a dilapidated theatre as a means of underscoring its artifice. Mussolini pushes those ideas even further. Tell me a little about the show’s conceptual development.

WRIGHT: A few years ago I did a production of Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo at the Young Vic theater in London. I’d always been drawn to him, but it was that show that really allowed me to research his ideas. I became really interested in the idea of artifice, and because Brecht was working at the same time as Mussolini was set, it seemed like a set of aesthetic guidelines that would allow me to present this show in its best form.

I guess, in a way, I was nervous about Mussolini becoming too seductive. So this idea of playing with empathy, and playing with breaking the fourth wall, allowed the audience to sometimes be seduced and other times be reminded that they are watching an actor playing Mussolini in a series about true historical events. This would then pull them out of any empathy they might be feeling and force them to apply some critical distance. It would ask them to question their own response to Mussolini. That was a really interesting idea to me: allow them to be seduced then ask them to question that seduction, to question how they allowed themselves to be seduced.

MUBI: Were you confident about the extent of the fourth-wall breaking from the very beginning, or did this concept go through different iterations?

WRIGHT: Well, at one point, we discussed the idea of him speaking in English whenever he directly addressed the audience, with the rest of the dialogue in Italian. But then, during production, the populist candidate Giorgia Meloni won the general election, and the next morning—which also happened to be Luca’s birthday, I think—I came in and said that I wanted every single Italian to understand every single word of what Mussolini was saying. That felt really important, and it was a direct reaction to that election result.

We talked a lot about who he was talking to, and we came up with various grand ideas, like he’s talking to history or he’s talking to himself. In the end, we settled on something far simpler, which was that just like an actor would address the audience in the theater, so would Mussolini talk directly to the viewer who is watching their screen at home. And it was that simple. Sometimes you have to go through a lot of complex theorizing to arrive at the simplest solution.

It was about him trying to control the narrative. He starts off by saying to the audience, “I’m going to make you a Fascist, you’ll join me too,” and then as the show develops, he slowly loses control of his own narrative. As he gains power, he also loses control, which I thought was a really interesting paradox.

MUBI: Mussolini does say one line to the audience in English: “Make Italy great again.” Were you nervous about making such pointed contemporary allusions?

WRIGHT: I was, and there were a lot more when we started out. When I was initially developing the show, I kept being shocked by the parallels between how he operated and how contemporary politicians operate today. I jumped on these moments and highlighted them in bold in the initial script. And then, the more I looked, the more these parallels became apparent, and I realized that it would be far more effective to let the audience discover them for themselves. Somehow, that creates a level of audience participation, and anything in which the audience is drawn to participate allows for a richer experience, a less passive experience.

MUBI: What was the biggest thing you took away from all your research into Mussolini?

WRIGHT: I think I developed an understanding that Fascism is ultimately the politicization of toxic masculinity, and that it has the potential to exist in all of us. It’s almost like the shadow of masculinity; the dark side of masculinity. So on a personal level, it allowed me to deepen, and resolve even further, my determination to not be like that. It helped me understand what I don’t want to be.

I think there was always a fear of humanizing the character. But that’s also the point. By humanizing him we take responsibility for that which exists, and has the potential to exist, in all of us. That’s an important responsibility to take on, and it was humbling and also powerful. So the making of the show changed and deepened my relationship with what I think is good about masculinity.

MUBI: Did making the show change the way you think about contemporary politics?

WRIGHT: It really did. I thought a lot about the way he was enabled by so many of those around him. He didn’t exist in a void. Sure, there were those who embraced his ideology and went with him, but there were also those that just remained silent, and they are as complicit as any.

The Socialists kept protesting his policies by staging a walkout. They’d say, “This is outrageous, we’re walking out!” Thereby taking themselves out of the conversation. That seems to me to be a great lesson for history: Stay in the room. Fight. Use your voice. 

The very last scene of the very last episode is about that. It’s about the silence of those who enabled him. It’s about their responsibility as much as his—and that responsibility now falls on us.

MUBI: Antonio Scurati wrote five volumes of the Mussolini biography that served as the source material for the show. Have you had any conversations about further adaptations?

WRIGHT: Yeah, and I’d like to, certainly. But we’ll see. There are conversations happening. I’d quite like to do a movie. I’d like to do books two and three as a single film.

MUBI: How familiar were you with Luca’s previous work before you cast him as Mussolini?

WRIGHT: Not very. He was recommended to me by Lorenzo Mieli. He suggested I look back at his work, and I was immediately struck by his imagination. That’s what you want from an actor, a great imagination. Luca has such a powerful imagination that if he imagines something, the audience sees it too. It’s an incredible magic act that he performs.

I fell in love with Italian acting in general. The heritage of the commedia dell’arte means that a wonderful physicality exists in Italian acting. It works really well with the Brechtian stuff we were talking about.

MUBI: You’ve previously described the veneration of naturalism as ruinous for the art of screen acting. Luca gives a “big” performance here, one that is matched by your directorial choices. It must take a certain fearlessness to take those kinds of big swings.

WRIGHT: Knowing that I had eight hours to play with is really freeing. It meant we could try things, and if they didn’t work, we had another seven hours and 55 minutes to redeem ourselves. We gave ourselves a right to fail. When you’re making a movie you’re kind of scared every second that something is not going to work, but with this that fear seemed to be lifted. 

It started with my decision to ask Tom Rowlands of The Chemical Brothers to do the score. That was one of the first choices I made. I’d started looking at the Futurists and that whole aesthetic, and thought that having a techno score could convey the energy of the time to a contemporary audience in a way that period music couldn’t. So the music was in place before I even had a single image in my head, and that decision drove a lot of the subsequent visual decisions.

MUBI: I smiled when I saw the puppet dream sequence in episode two. Your family are all puppeteers, right? Did they work on that set piece for you?

WRIGHT: Yeah! Gotta look after the family. My mum made the puppets and my sister came and operated them. My mum makes a prop or a puppet for every thing I do; she’s like my good luck talisman. In fact, the projects that she hasn’t contributed to have been less successful, somehow. It’s a family affair, but I also just wanted to bring everything I had into this.

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I used to work for a company called Vegetable Vision. We used to do the light shows for raves, including The Chemical Brothers’s early gigs. All the color and psychedelia in Mussolini really comes from those early years. I had such freedom on the show, and it’s a testament to Lorenzo and the production company that they let me do my thing. I brought all those different references in from all the different periods of my life: puppetry and light shows, rave culture and period dramas, my love of early silent movies and Howard Hawks’s Scarface [1932]. These all played a very big part in it. Luchino Visconti’s The Damned [1969] was a huge point of reference. It’s really just one big cultural, aesthetic melting pot, and the challenge was just to make sure that it was tonally coherent.

But then, saying that, my experience of life is not tonally coherent! If I’m trying to express the experience of life, then I’m not going to be tonally coherent. That’s a creative battle that I’ve been fighting for a very long time.