AustLit

Screenwriter, director, and actor.

Australian-born, American-trained script-writer Michael Petroni is a graduate of the American Film Institute (Los Angeles), where he wrote the script for Till Human Voices Wake Us, which he also directed (though his directorial debut was the 1999 short film Trespasses, which he filmed in Texas and which was produced by Sandra Bullock). He is credited as First Assistant Director of the film Ex Voto (1997). He has also directed an episode of American television series Masters of Science Fiction (the 2007 episode 'The Awakening', based on Howard Fast's short story 'The General Zapped') and the short film Boys Own Story (2007), which he also wrote and which was nominated for two AFI Awards: Best Screenplay in a Short Film and Best Short Fiction Film.

As an actor, he played a bit-part in the 1989 American film Lock Up, as well as appearing in two episodes of the Australian comedy series DAAS Kapital (1991-1992), in which he played Bob, a psychotic who inhabits the mind of one of the main characters. He also appeared in the first episode of the American television series Masters of Horror (2006).

Petroni is best known, however, as a script-writer. Petroni's professional biographies usually note that he worked as a comedy writer on Australian television in the early 1990s, though they do not specify the programs for which he wrote. In the same year in which he wrote and directed Till Human Voices Wake Us, he also scripted the films The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, co-written with Jeff Stockwell, and Queen of the Damned, co-written with Scott Abbott (both 2002).

In 2003, he co-created the supernatural television program Miracles for American network ABC-TV, but barring the first episode (which Petroni wrote with his co-creator Richard Hatem), Petroni contributed no scripts for the series (all scripts were written by American script-writers, including David Greenwalt).

He followed this in 2007 with the script for 'The Awakening' (for Masters of Science Fiction) and the short film Boys Own Story. His most recent films have all been supernatural works, including the horror films Possession (an American film based on the 2002 Korean film Addicted) and The Rite (2011) and the fantasy film The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader, co-written with Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely,