Pietro Film
Gordon Neal
His 1961 film Divorce Italian Style earned him a Best Original Screenplay Oscar and a Best Director nomination at the 35th Academy Awards. Seven of his films competed at the Cannes Film Festival, with his 1966 comedy The Birds, the Bees and the Italians winning the Palme d'Or.
He studied acting and directing at Rome's Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. During his time in school, Germi supported himself by working as an extra, bit actor, assistant director, and, on occasion, writer. Germi made his directorial debut in 1945 with the film Il testimone. His early work, this film included, were very much in the Italian neorealist style; many were social dramas that dealt with contemporary issues pertaining to people of Sicilian heritage.
Through the years, Germi shifted away from social drama towards satirical comedies, but retained his loved element of the Sicilian people. In the 1960s, Germi received worldwide success with the films Divorce Italian Style, Seduced and Abandoned, and The Birds, the Bees and the Italians. He was nominated for Academy Awards in both directing and writing for Divorce Italian Style, and, subsequently, won in the writing category. He also won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for The Birds, the Bees and the Italians. His 1968 film Serafino won the Golden Prize at the 6th Moscow International Film Festival.[1]
He was born in Catania, Sicily,[1] and later emigrated to Aarau, Switzerland as a child with his parents.[2] There, he attended Swiss-German schools until high school. After graduation, he decided to move to the United States to pursue his college education. He 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 through five years of UCLA and in 1985 he earned his Master of Fine Arts from the UCLA Film School.[3]
After his MFA, a couple of short films, a screenplay, two video documentaries, and a 16 mm 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 Konchalovsky's Shy People. Later, he received an assistant editor position working with Oliver Stone. However, it was not 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 as 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. Scalia edited a sequel to the movie, Hannibal ten years later. He also received a BAFTA Award and A.C.E. Award for his work.[4]
When America entered World War II, prominent Hollywood directors enlisted to make government-sponsored documentaries, notably John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler, George Stevens, and John Huston. The youngest among them, Huston had been a screenwriter before turning to directing with The Maltese Falcon (1941). San Pietro is the second of his three war documentaries, filmed when Huston was a captain in the army and released after his promotion to major. It followed his relatively straightforward Report from the Aleutians (1943) and preceded Let There Be Light (completed in 1946 but suppressed until 1980), his moving documentary about the psychological wounds of war.
The main battle around San Pietro, an ancient town of no particular note in the mountains of central Italy, pitted German forces against the Allies, primarily American infantry, from December 8 to 16, 1943. The Allies had invaded Sicily in July; Mussolini had been thrown from power by the Italians, who sued for a separate peace (many soldiers joining the Allies, as glimpsed in the film). Germany had easily taken over the country and was well entrenched militarily by the time of the bloody U.S. landing on the Italian mainland at Salerno in September.
Pietro Marcello: I found myself in France for family matters. I was there for two years. Because I was in France, I had the opportunity to make a film in France. Up until that point, all of the films that I had made were shot in Italy. After making Martin Eden, I have to confess that I was feeling very tired. I had sort of self-produced all of my films.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about casting. Raphal Thierry reminded me of Michel Simon and some of his great films. And then Louis Garrel is so perfectly cast, along with Juliette Jouan and Nomie Lvovsk. Can you talk about the process of getting all of them onboard? Was there a lot of preparation, or do you just kind of discover things on set?
Pietro's latest film, The Golden Gate, won both Best Narrative Short and Best in Show at the CSU Media Arts Festival 2021. Pietro also teaches producing & directing at San Francisco Film School and is the Film Chair at CSSSA.
Marcello: I firmly believe that Ermanno Olmi has been such a great director because he came from the world of documentaries as well, and he had built his foundation on documentaries, and he was director of photography, as well as a producer. The process allows one the possibility of turning a set upside down, because I love flawed films. The important thing is that the film has soul. I do not believe in films that are built on paper. This most likely also comes from the Italian and European tradition of doing a certain type of movie.
Marinelli: It might seem that we always talk about the two of us and that we made the film by ourselves. Truthfully, it was a beautiful experience because it was a shared work, with everyone. I remember getting ready for the film as a great collective mo- ment. But there is no doubt, the wonderful things that helped me get into the film. There were the long walks Pietro and I took together through the arches, talking, sitting, eating fried pizza and just being in Naples made us fall in love with everything.
"Pietro Germi: The Latin Loner" was curated by Antonio Monda. The series is sponsored at PFA by the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco. Special thanks to Amelia Antonucci, Antonio Breschi, Fedele Confalonieri (Mediaset), Gillo Pontecorvo, Rosanna Santececca, Mario Sesti. The man who gave us Divorce, Italian Style was serious about laughter; comedy may have been a last resort. "Pietro Germi: The Latin Loner" traces similar themes in Germi's work, from the populist lyricism of his postwar dramas, to hard-edged crime films, to the grotesque cruelty of his comedies. A master craftsman who knew how to work the parts of studio filmmaking toward a brilliant whole, Germi has been compared less often to Italian auteurs than to Hollywood professionals like Howard Hawks-another whose dramas and comedies alike helped define their genres; Billy Wilder, who recognized a kindred spirit in Germi; and John Ford, whose vision he translated... "Pietro Germi: The Latin Loner" was curated by Antonio Monda. The series is sponsored at PFA by the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco. Special thanks to Amelia Antonucci, Antonio Breschi, Fedele Confalonieri (Mediaset), Gillo Pontecorvo, Rosanna Santececca, Mario Sesti. The man who gave us Divorce, Italian Style was serious about laughter; comedy may have been a last resort. "Pietro Germi: The Latin Loner" traces similar themes in Germi's work, from the populist lyricism of his postwar dramas, to hard-edged crime films, to the grotesque cruelty of his comedies. A master craftsman who knew how to work the parts of studio filmmaking toward a brilliant whole, Germi has been compared less often to Italian auteurs than to Hollywood professionals like Howard Hawks-another whose dramas and comedies alike helped define their genres; Billy Wilder, who recognized a kindred spirit in Germi; and John Ford, whose vision he translated into a Sicilian landscape. "On first viewing it may be hard to recognize (the) exquisite attention to detail in the best of Germi's films," Richard Corliss wrote, "if only because they hurtle past so ferociously as to make White Heat look like Red Desert. In the great Warner Brothers tradition of editing, Germi shaves split seconds off the ends of his shots, aggravating the subterranean tensions of his scenarios."Born in Genoa to a lower-middle-class family, Germi spoke to the foibles and struggles of that strata, both as a director and as an actor with a powerful screen presence. He was drawn to Sicily as a subject and boldly portrayed its open landscapes and closed society; in the comedies, its passions and contradictions. But if he was "of the people" on screen, on the set he was famously demanding, even ruthless. In life, Pietro Germi shunned the celebrity system and the critical establishment; in death, he was repaid in kind. "No other filmmaker, perhaps, has been so attentively listened to by the vast public of contemporary Italy; and few others, perhaps, have been forgotten so quickly," wrote Germi biographer Mario Sesti in a new book from which this series takes its title. "Pietro Germi: The Latin Loner" is an important revival of Germi's films, and in the process, a vigorous celebration of the golden age of cinema all'italiana. 2000
How did you get involved in the project?
I got involved in the project under the recommendation from the actor JK Simons. It felt great when the producer called me and said you were recommended to the production directly from JK. I have shot him in two feature films, and he is always a pleasure to work with.