Pietro Scalia '82, MFA '85: "Body of Lies" Oscar-winning editor

Published: Oct 2008 (updated Tue Jul 14, 2009) in Industry

In an exclusive video interview and podcast Q&A, alum reveals the thinking behind hard-hitting DiCaprio thriller

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Listen to Q&A Podcast (MP3)

About Pietro

The Melnitz Movies special preview of “Body of Lies,” a new espionage thriller directed by Ridley Scott, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe, brought Oscar™-annoited editor Pietro Scalia ’82, MFA ’85 back to his alma mater for an illuminating Q&A.

"Body of Lies" is Scalia's fifth project with Scott, and the editor ascribed the durability of that realtionship — which began on "Gladiator" (2000) and continued on "Hannibal" (2001), "Black Hawk Down" (2001) and "American Gangster" (2007) — to the director’s collaborative openess.

Far from regarding his editor as a mere technician, Scalia says, Scott encourages input on major narrative and expressive strategy. “It is only directors who are insecure who don’t want to hear suggestions,” Scalia says. “A master such as Ridley Scott has no such anxiety.”

One of the editor’s favorite examples of the impact he has had on the films he’s worked on in the famous opening shot of Scott’s “Gladiator:” a hand moving over a drifting golden field of wheat. This was a shot intended for another sequence that Scalia relocated on his own initiative. The juxtaposition of that image with the close up of Russell Crowe’s Maximus on the eve of battle implies, Scalia says, that the image is an internal one, a memory or a dream. It’s a way of “begining the story inside the character and then moving outward. You position the entire story as a human drama rather than an action movie.”

A thoughful man of wide-ranging interests, Scalia suggests that the breadth of the UCLA film program was crucial in fostering an ability to see manifold possibilities in the material that comes before him—and a willingness to take risks in working out how to express them.