Pietro Scalia

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Pietro Scalia

Born Pietro Scalia
March 17, 1960(1960-03-17)
Sicily

Pietro Scalia (born March 17, 1960) is an Academy Award winning Italian-American film editor.

He was born in Sicily, but later he moved to Switzerland with his parents and attended Swiss-German schools until high school. After graduation he decided to move to the United States to pursue his college education. He has spent two years at the University at Albany, The State University of New York, after which he was accepted as an undergraduate at UCLA. The Swiss government's scholarship helped him though five years of UCLA and in 1985 he earned his Master of Fine Arts from the UCLA Film School.

After his MFA, a couple of short films, a screenplay, two video documentaries, and a 16mm thesis film, he returned to Europe to pursue his desire to become a film director. Shortly afterwards, he returned to United States on a work visa to pursue his career in Hollywood as a film editor. He began as an editor on Andrei Konchalovski's Shy People. Later, he received an assistant editor position working with Oliver Stone. However, it wasn't easy to get the job. Scalia admired Oliver Stone's work, especially Salvador, so he decided he wanted to work with that director. He got a contact through the sister of one of the assistant editors. Scalia worked on such films like Wall Street (1987) and Talk Radio (1988). He later continued as an associate editor on Born on the Fourth of July and as an additional editor on The Doors.

After five years of working with Oliver Stone, Scalia was finally asked to fully edit a film. It was JFK, for which Scalia and his co-editor, Joe Hutshing, were honored with an Academy Award for Film Editing. Craig McKay was nominated the same year for editing The Silence of the Lambs. Interestingly enough, Scalia would edit a sequel to the movie, Hannibal ten years later. He also received a BAFTA Award and A.C.E. Award for his work.

Pietro Scalia worked with Bernardo Bertolucci on Little Buddha (1993) and Stealing Beauty (1996), as well as with Sam Raimi on The Quick and the Dead (1995). He earned two more Academy Award nominations: first in 1997 for Good Will Hunting and second in 2000 for Gladiator, and a second Academy Award for director Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down. He also edited G.I. Jane and a pilot episode of a TV series American Gothic in late 1990s.

In the recent years, Scalia edited such movies as Levity (2003) directed by Ed Solomon, a documentary entitled Ashes and Snow, The Great Raid directed by John Dahl, and Memoirs of a Geisha, one of the most publicized movies of 2005, directed by Rob Marshall. He recently finished Hannibal Rising, a movie that tells a story of teenagers Hannibal and Mischa Lecter after their parents are killed in World War II. It was directed by Peter Webber and released in 2006. Most recently, he worked with director Ridley Scott on American Gangster, which was released in late 2007.

[edit] Filmography

As film editor:

[edit] Oscar nominations & wins

[edit] External links and references

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Academy Award for Best Editing

Stephen Mirrione (2000) · Pietro Scalia (2001) · Martin Walsh (2002) · Jamie Selkirk (2003) · Thelma Schoonmaker (2004) · Hughes Winborne (2005) · Thelma Schoonmaker (2006) · Christopher Rouse (2007)