Pietro Scalia

Biography

Pietro Scalia was born in Sicily in 1960. Later he moved to Switzerland with his parents and attended Swiss-German schools until high school. After graduation he decided to move to United States to pursue his college education. He has spent two years at the State University of New York in Albany, after which he was accepted as an undergraduate to the UCLA Film Department. Swiss government’s scholarship helped him though five years of UCLA and in 1985 he earned his Masters of Fine Arts in Film and Theater Arts.

After his MFA, 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. With all his university experience, talent, enthusiasm and love for movies, the Swiss movie scene didn’t really work for him. Shortly after 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. But it wasn’t easy to get the job. Scalia admired Oliver Stone’s work and was blown away by “Salvador”, so he decided he wanted to work with Oliver. He got a contact through one of Olivier’s assistant editor’s sister. He kept bugging David, the assistant editor, to get him a job and he finally got it. Pietro Scalia worked his way through the tiers of editors working 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 finnaly asked to fully edit a film. It was “JFK”, for which Scalia was honored with an Academy Award, together with Joe Hutshing, his co-editor. Craig McKay was nominated the same year for editing “The Silence of the Lambs”. Interestingly enough Scalia would edit a sequel to the movie, the “Hannibal”, ten years later. He also received a BAFTA, British Academy Award, and A.C.E., American Cinema Editors Award, for his work.

Pietro Scalia has worked with Bernardo Bertolucci on “Little Buddha” (1993) and “Stealing Beauty” (1996), as well as with Sam Raimi on the “The Quick and the Dead” (1995). He earned two more Academy Award Nominations: first one in 1997 for “Good Will Hunting” and second in 2000 for the “Gladiator”, although he had to wait till 2001 to receive his 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 90’s.

In the recent years, Scalia edited such movies as “Levity” (2003) directed by Ed Solomon, documentary entitled “Ashes and Snow”, “The Great Raid” directed by John Dahl, and “Memoirs of a Geisha”, one of the most publicized and best movies of 2005 directed by Rob Marshall. He is currently working on a “Young Hannibal: Behind the Mask” – a movie that tells a story of a teenage Hannibal and Mischa Lecter after their parents are killed in World War II. It is being directed by Peter Webber and scheduled for release at the end of 2006.