Wolfgang Petersen, one of the few foreign directors to achieve great success in Hollywood, earned six Academy Award nominations for his tragic 1981 war film Das Boot, one of Germany’s highest-grossing films. became one, but died at home on Friday. Located in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. he was 81 years old.
Pancreatic cancer was the cause, according to Michelle Vega, spokeswoman for the Rogers & Cowan PMK agency in Los Angeles. His death was announced on Tuesday.
Mr. Petersen was one of the most commercially successful members of his generation of West German filmmakers from the 1960s to the 1980s, whose leading roles included Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog. was However, he was known in Hollywood as well.
Over the course of more than 50 years, Mr. Petersen has directed 29 films, traveling between his native Germany and the United States. A lot of it is 1990s Clint in his Eastwood-starring political thrillers “In the Line of Fire” and “Air Force One,” with Harrison Ford.
With his talent for genre filmmaking — action movies were also his forte — he also ventured into fantasy (The NeverEnding Story), sword and sandals epic (“Troy”), and science fiction — becoming a star. while attracting the marquee name. Like Dustin Hoffman in “Outbreak,” Brad Pitt in “Troy,” and George Clooney in “The Perfect Storm.”
But despite his success in Hollywood, “Das Boot,” a tense drama about a German U-boat sailor during World War II, is the one Petersen is most likely to be remembered for. It’s a tall piece. In the English-speaking world, thanks to references in “The Simpsons” and other TV shows, this often mispronounced title (“boot” is spoken exactly like “boat” in English) is only It has achieved a kind of pop culture status.
“Das Boot is more than just a German film about World War II. I wrote a review of her for The New York Times when it was published.
The film was acclaimed for its historical accuracy and the dank, claustrophobic effects achieved by cinematographer Yost Vacano, who shot most of the interior scenes with a small handheld Arriflex camera. Critical reaction in Germany was divided, with some accusing the film of glorifying war, but it was met with a uniformly positive reaction abroad. Considered one of the best anti-war films ever made.
“Das Boot” (also known as “The Boat” in English-speaking countries) grossed over $80 million at the worldwide box office, and although it failed to win an Academy Award, it was nominated for six Academy Awards. it was done. One is for his Mr. Vacano cinematography, which remains a record of German filmmaking. (It was not nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. West Germany’s submission that year was Mr. Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, which was not nominated for an Oscar at the Academy).
Over the next decade and a half, Petersen prepared various versions of “Das Boot.” In 1985, German television aired a 300-minute version of him (twice as long as his theatrical release). Petersen claimed it was close to the original vision, but was commercially unfeasible at the time.
After “Das Boot” he teamed up with producer Bernd Eichinger. Eichinger’s fledgling studio, Constantin Film, co-produced The NeverEnding Story, an English-language adaptation of his 1979 fantasy novel by German best-selling author Michael Ende.
Released in 1984, “The NeverEnding Story,” about a bullied boy who becomes obsessed with a magic book, was a box office hit in Germany and abroad. Vincent Canby called it “graceful and humorless”.
Petersen noted that the film was “too European,” and despite its lukewarm box office in the United States, “The NeverEnding Story” was a triumph of trippy production design, crappy special effects and synths. It gained a cult following for decades due to its heavy use of A theme song written by Giorgio Moroder and sung by British pop singer Limahl.
The film was primarily shot at the Bavarian Film Studios near Munich. Current visitors can ride Falco, a “lucky dragon,” which Canby compared to an “unreal bath mat.” (The theme park of the studio, Bayernfilmstadt, also offers tours of the submarine in “Dasboot.”)
Wolfgang Petersen was born on March 14, 1941 in Emden, North Germany. His father was a naval lieutenant during World War II and later worked for a shipping company in Hamburg.
Growing up in the immediate aftermath of the war, the young Mr. Petersen idolized America and American cinema. On Sunday, we went to a children’s matinee at our local cinema to see a Western directed by Howard Hawks and John Ford and starring Gary Cooper and John Wayne.
“I learned about the medium of cinema when I was eight years old and was instantly hooked,” he told future Nobel Prize winner in literature Elfriede Jelinek in a 1985 German Playboy interview. “When I was 11, I decided that I wanted to be a film director.”
In 1950 his family moved to Hamburg, and when Wolfgang was 14, his father gave him an 8mm film camera for Christmas.
After graduating from high school, Petersen was exempt from compulsory military service because of his crooked spine. In the early 1960s he was assistant director at the Jungstheater in Hamburg (now Ernst His German Theater). He then studied theater for several semesters in Hamburg and Berlin, and in 1966 he entered the German Academy of Film and Television, the first film school in West Germany, in Berlin.
In 1970, his graduation film ‘I’ll kill you, wolf’ was featured on West German television and this led to an offer to direct the long-running German crime series ‘Tatort’.
Over the next decade, Mr. Petersen worked at a frenetic pace, directing both television shows. The big screen began in 1974 with the psychological thriller “One or the Other of Us.”
From the beginning, audience approval was paramount to him. In a Playboy interview, he recalled of certain films, “I crouched down at the cinema to see how the audience would react.” “And what happened?
He was often successful, producing popular early-career thrillers that tackled troubling political and social issues. “Smog” (1972) deals with the effects of pollution in the Ruhr area, an industrial area in northwestern Germany. “The Consequence” (1977) was controversial for its candid depiction of homosexuality, which was taboo at the time.
He was married to German actress Ursula Sieg from 1970 to 1978. Later, he met Maria Antoinette on the set of “Smog”, where he married Borgel, where she worked as a screenwriter.
He is survived by his wife and son from his first marriage, filmmaker Danielle, and two grandchildren.
Petersen had made nearly 20 films before making Das Boot. This film established his international fame and opened the door to Hollywood.
In his autobiography, I Love Big Stories (1997, co-authored with Ulrich Greiwe), Petersen recalls the first American test screening of Das Boot in Los Angeles. At the outset, an audience of 1,500 applauded as the statistic appeared on the screen that 30,000 Germans died on U-boats during the war. “I thought: This is going to be a disaster!” Petersen wrote. Two and a half hours later, the film received a big round of applause.
After The Neverending Story, Petersen made Enemy Mine (1985). This is his sci-fi movie starring Dennis Quaid, about a fighter pilot who is forced to work with a reptilian foe after landing on a hostile alien planet. Maslin called it “an expensive, shoddy science fiction epic with one of the strangest storylines ever to hit the screen.”
A year later, Mr. Petersen moved to Los Angeles, where he remained for 20 years, collaborating with big stars on a string of mainstream successes including In the Line of Fire (1993), a political drama about the Secret Service. “Air Force One” (1997) about an agent’s efforts to prevent the assassination of the president and the hijacking of the president’s jetliner. Also, the disaster film “Outbreak” (1995) about a deadly virus, “Perfect Storm” (2000) about a commercial New England fisherman caught in a terrible storm, “Poseidon” (2006), “The Poseidon Adventure” , the 1972 blockbuster about a capsized luxury liner.
Petersen’s films, even the most commercial, often had an undercurrent of political commentary. Discussing the Iliad-inspired Troy (2004), Mr. Petersen drew parallels between Homer’s epic and the reign of George W. Bush. “A power-hungry Agamemnon who wants to create a new world order – it’s absolutely current,” he told German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.
His film career seemed to come full circle in 2016 with ‘Vier gegen die Bank’, a remake of the 1976 comedy heist film based on Ralph Maloney’s American novel ‘The Nixon Recession Caper’. This was Mr. Petersen’s first German-language film since “Das Boot” a quarter-century ago.
Throughout his career, he seems to have been indifferent to critics who questioned his artistic merits.
“If someone asked me if I felt like an artist, I would feel weird because I’m not sure,” he once said. “What is an artist? Maybe a composer, a writer, a painter, someone who creates something much more intimate than a film.”
“My passion is storytelling,” he added.
