Joe Wright, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker behind Atonement (2007), The Soloist (2009), Hanna (2011), Anna Karenina (2012), and The Darkest Hour (2017), is back with a new miniseries premiering Sept. 10 on MUBI. M: Son of the Century is an eight-part series tracking the rise of Benito Mussolini and the spread of fascism in Italy and beyond. Luca Marinelli stars as Mussolini, with the series following his trajectory from power-hungry young man to fearsome fascist. As is Wright’s approach, the series is anything but straightforward, with Mussolini often breaking the fourth wall to address the audience amidst a pulsating score by The Chemical Brothers. As such, it feels a bit like TheWolf of Wall Street crossed with The Zone of Interest.
The series marks something of a return for Wright, who has kept a relatively low profile for the last few years. After directing Gary Oldman to a Best Actor Oscar win for his performance as Winston Churchill in The Darkest Hour, Wright helmed The Woman in the Window, an adaptation of A.J. Finn’s best-seller. It was originally set to premiere theatrically in 2019 but ended up debuting on Netflix in 2021 after an extensive post-production process that resulted in a radically different film than the one Wright intended to make, an experience which he told Men’s Journal left him feeling “burned.” Wright followed that up with Cyrano, a lush musical reimagining of Cyrano de Bergerac, which the director laments “didn’t reach the audience we all hoped it would” when it was released, also in 2021, during the second wave of the pandemic.
In a wide-ranging interview, Wright spoke to Men’s Journal about what drove him to tell Mussolini’s story, reuniting with The Chemical Brothers for the show’s unexpected score, why he loves working with Gary Oldman, his favorite projects, and the ones he hopes to make in the future.
I want to start by saying I loved M: Son of the Century. It’s one of my favorite things you’ve done in years, and it felt to me like a classical Joe Wright project, subversive and edgy and unexpected. Obviously, it came out last year in Europe and England, and since then, I’ve read a lot of stuff saying that you were an odd choice to direct this material. But it felt to me very much in conversation with the rest of your work, in that you’ve always approached projects from an outsider’s perspective. Is that what drew you to this production, in particular?
Yeah, I’m always drawn to things that scare me. I don’t like to just play it safe or repeat myself. I mean, you can’t help but repeat yourself, I guess, thematically. But I like to challenge myself and take the opportunity to really go on an adventure unlike anything I’d been on before and yet.
Also, you know, [to] explore themes that I felt very close to and really affected me. I felt, especially politically, that to understand the etymology of fascism was an opportunity to educate myself and really learn. And that is something that goes through every project, this kind of desire to better educate myself.
Around the time that The Darkest Hour came out in 2017, you said that you made that movie as a rebuke to Donald Trump, Brexit, and the rise of far-right ideology. M feels like a bit of a companion piece to that, albeit a darker one. How did the evolution of that right-wing movement within the last eight years impact M?
It’s been a massive influence. You know, I was quite a political person in my twenties, and I guess teens as well, and then I, I think, you know, family and other concerns kind of took over a little bit. And then with Brexit in 2016 and what I saw happening around the world, not just in America, unfortunately, but this kind of far-right reemergence. I felt like it was my responsibility to really re-engage and to try and take some kind of responsibility. I guess this is just my way of taking that responsibility, trying to understand the ideology. Which, ironically, I discovered that there is no ideology there.
There’s a great big vacuum at the center of fascism. There’s an absence, really, rather than an ideology, and they stand against many, many things, but not really for anything. Essentially, I came to view fascism as being the kind of politicization of toxic masculinity that can play out domestically or in one’s relationship with oneself or local social friendship groups, or indeed, on a national level.
So it’s essentially about masculinity, you know?
You’ve said previously that, with this series, you didn’t want to “lecture” the audience but rather “hold up a mirror” to current events. When you’re directing a piece as loaded as this, how do you walk such a fine line?
In the research of the show and in the, you know, the development of the scripts, at first I was so shocked and struck by the parallels to contemporary far-right politicians that I was highlighting all of them.
And actually, what I realized later was that if I was to be quite so forceful in that, it might repel an audience. Actually, I should respect the intelligence of the audience enough to allow them to discover their own parallels, because in a way that makes the experience more [impactful]. That gives them a more experiential process, you know, if you experience something, it goes deeper than just being told something, right? I kind of cut away at a lot of the more didactic stuff.
And then also, it was sort of important to see beyond the icon or the demon or the persona and try and get to who this character really was and what those sort of masculine impulses are. And the only way to do that was by looking inward and trying to kind of look at my own relationship to my own masculinity, and think about the shadow self and what that looks like, and the choices that we have available to us as men.
You’ve said that, along with Gary Oldman, Luca Marinelli is your favorite actor with whom you’ve worked. What are the qualities that make them such favored collaborators of yours?
They’re very, very different. They’re very different. I think they’re both 150 percent committed. I mean, there is no holding back at all. They are all out there, and they’re incredibly brave. And I find that really exciting. You know, on a detailed note, there’s never a sense of them tiptoeing into a line or a scene, or a choice to see if it works and if it doesn’t. [Other actors] can quickly retreat [at that]. [Oldman and Marinelli] really dive straight in with a hundred percent commitment.
M marks a reunion between yourself and the Chemical Brothers, who scored Hanna (2011). What was your impetus to reunite with them on this project in particular?
Well, actually, it’s not the first time I’ve reunited [with the band]. I did a theater piece with them in London, a production of Brecht on the life of Galileo. Also, a very political piece. And I was partly inspired by that, and also inspired by the futurist painters and poets during the period in which Mussolini was rising. [His] work was all about momentum and energy and violence. I wanted to convey that energy for a modern audience. If I used period music, it might feel a bit kind of stuffy and old-fashioned, whereas if I used the kind of modern EDM music, it might convey that feeling better.
There are certain movies you’ve done, I’m thinking of Pan or Woman in the Window, where you’ve admitted they were compromised beyond your original vision. Has that deterred you at all from working within a more mainstream system? And was it perhaps one of the reasons that you took on an Italian-language production about Mussolini, to regain a bit of that freedom?
The short answer is yes. But, you know, I should be honest and take responsibility. Not every film you make can work. As an artist, it’s important to accept that you’re gonna try things sometimes and they’re not gonna work, and that’s okay. You kind of have a right to fail if you are making bold choices, if you’re trying things. Although producers or financiers might throw their hands up in horror at the idea of a right to fail. (Laughs) I think it’s true, and I think as an artist you have to accept that.
So, I can’t absolve myself of the responsibility of those films not working. However, neither of the films worked out as I had originally envisaged, and I bear responsibility for that too. But after Woman in the Window, I did feel a bit burned.
But, then I made Cyrano, which is a film I was incredibly proud of, but because of the pandemic and so on, the timing of the release was pretty bad, and so that didn’t reach the audience we all hoped it would. Although it’s a movie I’m very proud of, that I love very much.
It was actually while I was on the [promotional] circuit for Cyrano that I met Lorenzo Mieli, the producer of Mussolini. We started talking and I was telling him about my love of Italy and Italian cinema, and he was the one who then suggested that I might be interested in Mussolini.
And there was a kind of freedom to it, not necessarily because of the constraints put on me from finances or producers, but…you have to approach it very differently when you’re doing a movie [versus a miniseries]. It’s two hours long, and it’s almost that one can get too precious and try and be controlling of every micro aspect. You can plan two hours, in a way, down to every shot and frame. Whereas with eight hours and a 127-day shoot, that’s impossible. So it did require a kind of loosening of my craft, and that was really good for me. That was exciting. I’ll be interested to see how that plays out in the future, in subsequent work.
To what you said about taking swings, one of my favorite things about your career is that it’s consistently unexpected. You never approach material from the obvious point. My favorite films of yours are Cyrano and Hanna because they’re stories we’ve seen before, but then you twist them so uniquely. Hanna feels like the epitome of a Joe Wright movie, and it’s influenced so many films that have come in its wake, yet it’s a bit of an outlier in your filmography. I’m not suggesting that you would do a sequel to Hanna, but would you ever return to the action-thriller genre?
Yeah, I really enjoyed making Hanna. It was also quite a loose production. It had kind of a loose aesthetic that I enjoyed. I like thrillers. To be honest with you, I watch a lot of thrillers. They’re the kind of my go-to movies. I’m constantly rewatching the [Alan] Pakula paranoia films. I watch All the President’s Men at least once a year.
I think there was an interesting fairytale [aspect] to Hanna. It was partly a kind of expression of my love for David Lynch. That movie and the kind of fairytale, this sort of strange fairytale aspect to it, was something I really got a kick out of.
As we’re wrapping up, I’m curious what project you would choose to make if someone came to you with a blank check and said, “Make whatever you’d like.” What would that project be?
I’d probably make a pile of s–t if someone did that to me. (Laughs) I think that might absolutely finish me off. I think it’s quite good to work within limitations. I would tell them they were crazy and send them away.
I think that’s probably the right answer.
(Laughs)
Are there any projects that you’re particularly keen to get off the ground?
There are a few. There’s an adaptation of Pat Barker’s book The Silence of the Girls that I’d really like to do. I’ve always loved a book called The Passion by Jeanette Winterson. There are lots of things, and we’ll see where the Road of Happy Destiny leads.
