During the Malvinas/Falklands War he relocated to Los Angeles, and began a career in Hollywood working as the production designer for Wayne Wang in Slam Dance (1987).
[3] He also designed set for What Dreams May Come (1998), The Haunting (1999), Alfonso Arau's Zapata: El sueño de un héroe (2004), and Roland Joffé's There Be Dragons (2011), among others.
Zanetti's more than 40 theater and opera productions in Europe and South America include: A Masked Ball and Nabucco by Giuseppe Verdi, and Madama Butterfly and Tosca by Giacomo Puccini.
[6] Zanetti said that for the past fifty years, since the age of nineteen, he had been interested and influenced by Sufism; that the impact of "the Tradition" on him had been immense, and that Idries Shah had put in context an "enormous amount of knowledge", of "incredible depth".
[6] He added that the full, cultural impact of the Shah family's work in the tradition, including that of Zanetti's friend, film writer Arif Ali-Shah, will only become recognized and known with the passage of time, in years to come.