MUSSOLINI: SON OF THE CENTURY — Joe Wright gazes into the abyss

Joe Wright's known for Oscar-winning WWII epics like DARKEST HOUR. But his latest look at the era is a different animal: The nightmarish series MUSSOLINI: SON OF THE CENTURY, about the rise of the godfather of fascism. Joe tells host Rico Gagliano about the Italian dictator, the echoes he sees in politics today... and why he spent his own teen years blasting '30s pop tunes.

MUSSOLINI: SON OF THE CENTURY is now streaming on MUBI in the US, Canada, Latin America, Turkey and India. 

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Transcript

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Heads up, this episode includes some adult language and spoilers. The music was the first idea I had. As I was reading the book, I was thinking, I need to make sure that this has a modernity. I need to make sure that it speaks to what's happening now. So I asked Tom Rowlands, who I'd worked with before and have known for many years, one half of the Chemical Brothers, to do the music. That was the very first choice I made, and so the imagery came out of the music rather than the other way round. That is filmmaker Joe Wright. And yeah, his new streaming series is based on a book about the dark past. But as you can hear from this Tom Rowlands track definitely feels like the freaky present. The show is called<i>Mussolini: Son of the Century</i> about dictator Benito Mussolini and his violent rise from bitter, power hungry newspaper editor to founder of fascism, to strongman ruler of Italy. Its surreal, blackly comic and, for me, pretty unsettling. A few minutes into the opening episode, Mussolini looks right into the camera

and says: 1:23

"I'm like an animal."I can smell the times ahead, and this is my time." He's talking about the run up to World War Two, but also the times ahead could be right now. I'm Rico Gagliano. Welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI's the global film company that champions great cinema. On this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema. Thanks to Simran Hans for her fabulous job guest hosting last season. I couldn't be happier to be back and cooking up season ten for you. That is coming in November. But first this special episode. It is my interview with Joe Wright about <i>Mussolini: Son of the Century</i>. You can watch every episode on MUBI right now in the US, Canada, Latin America and many other countries. But a few weeks back before it debuted, we screened the first two episodes here in LA at the American Cinematheque Los Feliz 3 cinema. Afterwards, I spoke to Joe live on stage and you are about to hear the conversation. I started with a rundown of his impressive resume. He is the director of <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>,<i>Atonement</i>, <i>Hanna</i>,<i>Darkest Hour</i>, that's just a few. His movies have been nominated for 22 Oscars and won four. Please welcome the director of <i>M: Son of the Century</i>, Joe Wright.- Hi.- That's Joe. Hello. Hello. That's the audience. Hello. So, just to address the elephant in the room right off the bat, you have said straight up that you wanted to do a movie about fascism because of the kind of rise of the right wing around the world. And I'm wondering at what moment the story of Mussolini became the lens that you were going to tell that story through. Like what brought you to Mussolini? Lorenzo Mieli. Lorenzo Mieli is the Italian producer of Paolo Sorrentino's movies and some of Guadagninos movies, and so I wanted to work with him. I was a big fan of his work and also the show <i>Gomorrah</i>, which was written by Stefano Bises, the same writer. About the Mafia? Yeah. And so we started talking around-- I was releasing <i>Cyrano</i> and he was releasing <i>Hand of God</i>. And so we kept on sort of bumping into each other around the place, and we started talking, and that was the beginning of it. What did you know of Mussolini at that time? I mean, to what extent were you familiar. Not a huge amount, to be honest with you. He kind of, he was always just a bit of a comical figure. I remember seeing some film of him when I was a teenager and sort of impersonating him, these sort of ridiculous gestures and so on. And in a way, I feel like, you know, as teenagers, we used to go around calling any authoritarian figure fascist, you know, we'd call the police fascists and we'd call our teachers fascists. And and we kind of trivialized the word. And then sort of, I guess around 2016, when the word started to reemerge in the public consciousness, and I felt it was sort of incumbent upon... us all really to understand what it was and the etymology of the word, where it came from. And so this was an opportunity to educate myself. It's interesting that you were talking about how he's seen as a goof,'cause that was my sum total knowledge of like, somehow he is like the fascist, the less scary fascist of that era, somehow. Why? How is it that he clearly terribly dangerous and violent person, got this reputation as being the kind of clown of that era? Is it just like by virtue of not having had a Holocaust? I think it's partly by virtue of his delivery, his speeches. You know, they are so kind of absurd, the way he spoke and moved. I think also there's some kind of racism in there as well, possibly towards the Italians, you know, in the 20s and 30s and so on. I mean, if you look at Howard Hawks'<i>Scarface</i> and the way people thought about Italians, they were kind of a joke. Do you think that's why there are so few?'Cause the other thing I was trying to think of was like, how many movies really grapple with Mussolini as a figure?- None.- Yeah. And not even Italian movies. There's a great film by Marco Bellocchio called <i>Vincere</i>, which is sort of about one of his mistresses, more than it's about him, but that's basically it. There's a <i>Tea with Mussolini</i> which deals with him indirectly, but I think the Italians, you know, after the fascist period, after the Second World War, brushed the whole thing under the carpet. There was no Nuremberg trials, there was no truth and reconciliation. There were a few kind of, quite a lot of localized retributions, but there was no national kind of accountability, really, which is why also I think that latent fascism was allowed to keep going, you know, and I was really shocked when making this in Italy, talking to people, you know, lots of people talking about how, you know, "He was okay, Mussolini."He was, you know, he was all right. He fell in with this guy, Hitler."He was a bad apple, you know. Spoiled him." But Mussolini himself was okay. This was prevalent? Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. Even thinking, like, within kind of like filmmaking circles and like showbiz circles.- I mean?- It's where you go as well, you know. But I mean, you know, every year at Mussolini's grave, there are large gatherings of neo fascists doing the salute, you know. What do you attribute that to that? You know, whereas in Germany, obviously there was a huge reckoning and continues to be. I don't know. I don't know why I don't know why there wasn't that reckoning. I guess the focus was really on the Nazis and not so much on the Italians. When you were doing this research, it makes me wonder if you've come across stuff that surprised you beyond that. It's all pretty extraordinary, really. The classic fascist salute which they attributed to the Romans. But actually the Romans never saluted like that. I like that one.- Where did it come from?- They made it up. I mean, they kind of thought it was a bit like a Roman one, but it wasn't. But it's the same deal. It's the you know, they harked back to their Roman roots as the, you know, Nazis harked back to their Teutonic kind of glory days. It's that kind of reactionary feeling that you get with these ultra right wing people. And there is some sort of obvious through lines between all these kind of strongman figures throughout history. What do you think is the kind of baseline background maybe that was in Mussolini's background that runs through all of these kind of guys? Toxic masculinity, really. What I kind of ended up feeling-- for a start, I was trying to figure out what fascism really was. And at the end of the day, there is a great big void at the center of it, and there is nothing there. But what it does seem to me to be the politicization of toxic masculinity, and that can exist in a relationship or in a family or in a small community, or it can exist on a national level, as it does in the case of fascism. Do you know how that manifested itself in him to start with? Like where that came from with him? Bitterness and resentment and a feeling like, people didn't take him seriously enough. I know that he thought of himself as a kind of intellectual. Was there a point where he wasn't taken seriously, as... He was never an intellectual. Really. I mean, he was incredibly smart in some ways. His manipulation of media, he invented that, really the kind of modern manipulation of media. But, he was a school teacher for a while. He was just someone who felt like he'd been hard done by, really and wanted to set out to prove himself. But I think at the center of him was a great you know, as I said about fascism, at the center of him was also a great big void of nothingness. And he tried to fill that with power and glory, which worked for a while. And then it didn't.- Yes. Usually ends up that way.- Yeah. You've grappled with this era before this kind of lead up to World War Two in <i>Atonement</i>, and then in <i>Darkest Hour</i>. First of all, what attracts you to that era? I don't know. It's like, I think I feel like I was born in the wrong time. When I was a kid, like 13, I became obsessed with Noel Coward, and... and I used to kind of, you know, carry around a boombox playing Noel Coward and wearing cravats. Which didn't go down very well in my inner city environment.- This would be like the 80s, right?- Yeah.- Yeah.- Really, really cool. Really like 1983-4. You're blasting<i>Why Do the Wrong People Travel?</i> Yes, <i>I'm Mad About the Boy</i>. Got the shit kicked out of me.- Where the hell did that come...?- By the local fascists. I don't know. I mean, my dad was born in 1906. He was 65 when I was born, so I kind of felt like, I did the maths, and I kind of thought, well, maybe I should have been born in, like, you know, the late 20s and...- Spiritually.- Yeah. And also, I guess it's a way of getting to figure out who he was, you know, trying to understand him through the times he lived.- Your dad?- Yeah. So but I mean, just kind of culturally you were kind of interested in the music... I loved all of that, you know? I mean, I was also I used to go to, we didn't have a TV, and there was a wonderful woman called Joan who lived around the corner. And every Friday her husband would cook me fish and chips, and Joan and I would watch, you know, Greta Garbo and Errol Flynn and all those wonderful movies, you know, Boulting Brothers,<i>Brighton Rock</i>.<i>Brief Encounter</i> was a big one. You know? These are I mean, these are all the wonderful aspects of that era, but you're dealing with very specifically, like the lead up to war, like one of the most horrific things that's ever happened to the world. Yeah, yeah, I know it's weird, isn't it? I mean, it's kind of, I think probably I had a certain romance about the period as well. You know, I think, I think I probably liked the sense in which things were very-- seemed simpler. But I feel like your movies are kind of revealing that that's not the case. Yeah, I think that's true. Do you think that this is an exercise in kind of disabusing yourself of nostalgia?- Maybe on some level?- Yeah, I think that's true. I think because also, I mean, you know, I was brought up in this weird kind of fairy tale home with this kind of venerated older father. And then you go into the streets of London in the 80s and there were, you know, on one side of the street you had the socialists selling their newspaper, and on the other side of the street you had the fascists, the National Front selling their newspaper.

And then at about 4: 12:51

00, when the market was over, they'd put their papers down and have a fight. And it was quite a violent world, kind of. So it's always trying to reconcile those two things, really, those two experiences. I mean, fascinating that you then make a movie about fascists and socialists literally fighting. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. The thing that I think that really connects all three of these movies is- that they're about the lead up to a war.- Yeah. And you seem less interested in the war part. There's a little bit of it in <i>Atonement</i>. Kind of the middle act of <i>Atonement</i> has some battle scenes. But it's about the lead up and the aftermath. What do you think? It's that really strange period. And it's the Noel Coward period, you know? It's the <i>Bright Young Things</i>, period. It's this, it was this kind of strange fever dream period of, you know, Otto Dix and... Who's that? Isherwood, and Otto Dix was a German painter, and he painted these kind of grotesque cabaret paintings and etchings. And it's this kind of strange, expressionistic period that I find really fascinating. And then also you have, there's all the lies around it as well. You know, there's all the kind of bullshit that suggests that Britain was, you know, always against fascism, which was rubbish. You know, there was a huge I mean, even the royal family were pretty fascist at the time. I mean, Churchill wrote letters of congratulation to Mussolini when he took power after the march on Rome. There's a kind of really strange myth that's told about Britain at that time. And I find that whole kind of period dark and and strange and fascinating. The first inkling that I got that that existed, I'm going to forget the name of the series it's about the detective in Britain during this period. Oh, yeah. <i>Foyle's war</i>.<i>- Foyle's War</i>.- Yeah, yeah. Where it's like this guy investigating things while there's a war going on. And it's the first inkling that I ever had as an American that like, oh, yeah, there were UK people who were really into Nazis during World War Two. Yeah, absolutely. You know, oh, we have a long history of fascism in Britain.- We'll get more into that in a second.- Yeah. You have said that you have, one of the things that you had a hard time with or that you wanted to do with this was find this balance in portraying Mussolini. You didn't want to portray him without charm, because then Italians would seem like they were idiots to have been enthralled by him. But then you don't want to make him too charming, because you don't want to create this character that on some level is, like, relatable and like you feel like is cool. What was the moment, like the scene or the sequence in this that was hardest to kind of strike that balance? I guess the idea, I'm quite into Bertolt Brecht having directed<i>Life of Galileo</i> on stage in London, and I quite liked the idea of playing with the kind of balance between critical distance and empathy. And I felt very strongly that he needed to seduce the audience at times. And then the challenge was to flip that and have the audience catch themselves empathizing. So really, as the show goes on at about the kind of change from episode 4 to 5, it takes on a very different tone and becomes a lot less funny and much, much darker. And that's really the tipping point. But I'll say that this does not strike me as like, not dark. Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah. It gets darker. On first watch that may seem hard to believe because in the first two episodes, there are shocking, brutal battles between Mussolini's fascists and their political enemies, the socialists. Like, in an early scene, Mussolini's eating dinner at a restaurant with his crew of thugs when all around them diners defiantly rise and start singing the socialist anthem. With a nod, Mussolini sends his thugs to beat them senseless. One of them knocks a guy to the ground and kicks him viciously again and again and again."Savage, fluid, necessary" Mussolini says, gazing directly into the camera. The way violence should always be. It'll triumph. To me, in this first two episodes, the portrayal of violence really struck me because it's excessive in a way that it's not in, I would say in a lot of your work. It seems, it's like a real choice to sort of like have us confront it. Why that choice and what led you to that? I think violence well, for a start, a lot of the Italians don't understand how violent he was. And to an extent, one was making it for an Italian audience.- Really?- Yeah. Giorgia Meloni came to power during pre-production. At one point, we were going to have all the direct address stuff spoken in English, and the dialog between characters in Italian.- Wow.- And then... the morning after her election victory, I realized that I wanted every single Italian to understand every single word. But a lot of the Italians don't kind of understand how violent his rise was, and they all thought it was democratic, you know, that he won the election. So therefore he was, you know, chosen by the people, which wasn't really the case. So I felt it was important to, to really stress just how violent he and his, you know, fascists were. I feel like this is not just endemic to Italy. I feel like there's a lot of I mean, just, like, casually, I hear this on, you know, many sides of the political spectrum. It's like, "You know, there's going to be a civil war." And like, do you know what that means? It means that the guy down the street is going to try to kill your kid.- Like, this is for real.- Yeah. I'm wondering if that's the kind of thing that was going through your head. Very much so. It's real and it's terrifying. But also, they had a very different relationship with violence. I mean, coming out of the First World War, they and, you know, the futurist Marinetti and so on, they had this idea that violence was somehow cleansing. I think we have now post the Second World War and post the Holocaust, have a very different relationship with violence.- How so?- For us, I feel like violence is unequivocally bad. There's a line drawn there. Whereas I think for them and he speaks about it. D'Annunzio also talked about it. There's this sense in which life was a bit cheaper and that violence was somehow a purifying force or could be rational violence, so to speak, was cleansing. You think that's less so now?- I mean, like, I get what you're saying.- Yeah, I do. I think we have a different relationship with violence now. Do you think that maybe, like, as some of these countries go towards full right wing, that maybe is this pie in the sky task or will we avoid it?- Avoid the violence?- Yeah. No, no, of course not. You know, and I think that what's shocking I mean, listen, I'm not an ethicist or a politician or, you know, so what do I know? But the-- I think the further we get from the events of the Second World War and from these events, the more we're able to forget. So it feels important to remember. To that extent was there something when you're researching this and you're making this movie, were there mistakes that you saw made back then that maybe you feel like we could avoid now? Yeah, people didn't speak up. People thought that someone else would deal with it, that it's not really my responsibility. And in fact, the very, you know, the very last scene of the last episode is really about our collective responsibility and that he didn't exist and a void. And there were those that actually actively supported him, certainly. But there were also, you know, a vast majority who just didn't speak, didn't respond, didn't speak up, didn't fight back. And even the socialists, in government. When there still were some, they would stage a protest, and the protest would be that they would stage a walkout and they'd walk out and they'd stand on the steps and they'd sort of wave their placards, but they weren't there for the crucial votes, and they weren't there for the debates, and they weren't there to raise their voices, you know? I don't think I'm giving too much away by saying that the last word of the entire eight hours is <i>silencio</i>. Joe Wright, he directed the series<i>Mussolini: Son of the Century</i>. It's showing now on MUBI in the US, Canada and many more countries. Check the show notes for details on how to watch. Meanwhile, follow us for more episodes about great films and great filmmakers. Next time I travel to a modern day place where some filmmakers are grappling with an authoritarian regime right now and making great movies anyway. It's my journey to Turkey and the cinema scene of its main city, Istanbul. Don't miss it. And hey, if you love the show, do leave a five star review wherever you listen. It helps others find and love us too. Also, if you've got questions, comments or tickets to see The Chemical Brothers, you just want to send my way, our email is podcast@mubi.com And now let's roll credits. This episode was hosted, written and edited by me, Rico Gagliano. Ciara McEniff is our producer with help from assistant producer Kat Kowalczyk. Stephen Colon mastered this episode. Our end credit music is by Yuri Suzuki. Thanks this week to everyone at the American Cinematheque and the Los Feliz 3 cinema. The show is executive produced by me along with Efe Çakarel Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca. And finally, to watch the best in cinema subscribe to MUBI at mubi.com Thanks for listening, go watch some movies, right after you register to vote.