Ferretti, Dante

(1943-)

   Art director and production designer. One of Italy's most nationally respected and internationally renowned designers, Ferretti graduated in architecture from the University of Rome before embarking on a career in the cinema. Still in his early 20s, he began working as an assistant designer on Pier Paolo Pasolini's Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1964) and Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows, 1966) before becoming the principal production designer for Medea (1969) and for all of Pasolini's subsequent films. In the following years he worked with many of the other major Italian directors, including Elio Petri, Luigi Comencini, and Marco Ferreri. In 1978 he initiated a very fruitful collaboration with Federico Fellini by creating the sets for Prova d'orchestra (Orchestra Rehearsal) and thereafter designed all of Fellini's films. With his national reputation firmly established, in the 1980s he also began to work internationally and received a David di Donatello for his design of Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Name of the Rose (1986) and Oscar nominations for his work on Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) and Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet (1990). In the 1990s he worked regularly as art director and production designer for Martin Scorsese and received Oscar nominations for his work on Scorsese's Age of Innocence (1994), Kundun (1997), and Gangs of New York (2002). In 2004, having already been nominated for an Academy Award six times, he finally received the Oscar for his work on Scorsese's The Aviator.

   Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema by Alberto Mira