Pintilie was born in 1933 in Tarutino, at the time in Cetatea Albă County, Kingdom of Romania.
His productions there included George Bernard Shaw's Cesar and Cleopatra, Lorraine Hansberry's A Place in the Sun, William Saroyan's My Heart's in the Highlands, Max Frisch's Biedermann and the Firebugs, Nikolai Gogol's Inspector General and Anton Chekhov's Cherry Orchard.
From 1973 to 1982, he directed mainly in France at the Théâtre national de Chaillot and the Théâtre de la Ville where he staged, among other plays, Carlo Gozzi's Turandot, Henrik Ibsen's Wild Duck, and Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters and Seagull.
Sunday at Six o Clock won the Prize of the Jury at the International film festival in Mar del Plata, Argentina in 1966, and the Grand Prize of the Jury at the International Encounter of Films for Youth at Cannes, France, in 1967.
In 1968, he directed The Reenactment, considered by film historians to be the most important representation of Romanian cinema.