'I want audiences to be seduced': series on rise of Mussolini aims to touch a nerve

He built up violent paramilitary gangs and terrorised political opponents, suspended democracy in favour of a dictatorship that would inspire nazism, and plunged his country into a bloody war.

- Philip Oltermann

But a new biographical series about Benito Mussolini dares us to feel sympathy for the bull-necked Italian dictator, if only to demonstrate his diabolical charm.

In his first interview about his series M: Son of the Century, the British director Joe Wright told the Guardian: "What I hoped to do in the show is sometimes allow the audience to be seduced by Mussolini and to get excited by what he's doing.

"To demonise these characters absolves us of moral responsibility and I think that's really, really dangerous," added the director, who is best known for the period dramas Atonement and Pride and Prejudice.

The eight-part series will premiere at the Venice film festival on 5September before being released by Sky next spring. It does not so much analyse fascism's origins as dunk the viewer straight into the bath of blood, sweat and testosterone that gave rise to the cult around the man his followers called Il Duce.

Mussolini, a former editor of the Italian Socialist party's official newspaper who fell out with the left over his support for the first world war, is shown as a morally corrupt individual, but also as a canny political operator who is able to temper his taste for violence in order to achieve strategic gains.

The torchlit night-time rallies of the brutish, black-shirted fascisti are underscored by an intoxicating techno soundtrack courtesy of Tom Rowlands, one half of the British electronic music duo the Chemical Brothers. Stylistically, Wright said, the biopic had become "a mashup of Scarface, Man With a Movie Camera and 90s rave culture".