![]() He directed his first play at the Ernst Deutsch Theater in Hamburg, earned an apprenticeship with Berlin Film and Television, and soon began directing German television programs, including the popular series Tatort ( Crime Scene). Again and again, he returned to stories of reluctant heroes: men who, whatever the odds and whatever the conditions, fight to do the right thing. The film shows war is war, and in war, young people die for horrible reasons.”Įxcept for a slapdash effort shot with some neighborhood kids on an 8-millimeter camera - “It was very generic,” he acknowledged - Petersen never made a Western, but his best work echoed the themes he absorbed from High Noon. “At the end of the film they all rose and gave a standing ovation. “When Das Boot first screened in Los Angeles and the title card came up: ‘Of 40,000 German submariners, 30,000 died,’ there was huge applause from the audience,” he recalled. It was a big ask to expect an international audience to “identify with Nazis in a submarine,” as Petersen told THR in 2016. The film was groundbreaking both technically - Jost Vacano’s claustrophobic cinematography and Klaus Doldinger’s haunting score were unlike anything done before in a war movie - as well as thematically. Starring Jürgen Prochnow as the captain of a doomed crew of German submariners who are plunged into a series of suicidal missions in the waning days of World War II, Das Boot was nominated for six Oscars, with Petersen claiming two for directing and for adapting Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s best-selling 1973 autobiographical novel. ![]() ![]() “I also like the element of water, because I think water is the most beautiful, almost mesmerizing element - and it’s most dangerous.” “You can really go into the characters and see how they react when there is no way to open the door,” he said in a 2000 interview. Several submarines of different sizes, including one that mimicked the claustrophobic innards of a real U-96, were constructed, and filming took a year, taking a toll on cast and crew. Petersen spent $18.5 million - then the biggest movie budget in German history - to make the antiwar classic Das Boot (1981). Rest In Peace.The Dustin Hoffman-starring Outbreak, his 1995 thriller about a pandemic, saw renewed relevance amid the real-world coronavirus outbreak. and I’ll always have a very special place in my heart for THE NEVERENDING STORY. “I love DAS BOOT, IN THE LINE OF FIRE, THE PERFECT STORM, OUTBREAK. “Very sad to hear Wolfgang Petersen passed away.” he tweeted. Tribute was paid on Twitter by the Doctor Sleep and Midnight Mass director Mike Flanagan. He then decided to take a 10-year hiatus before returning in 2016 with the German comedy Vier gegen die Bank. “I was on a roll at that time … I shouldn’t have done it, because it just doesn’t work like that. “What I probably should not have done is the film Poseidon,” he said in a 2016 interview. The latter was a critical and commercial misfire. The following years saw him direct the fact-based adventure The Perfect Storm, war epic Troy and disaster remake Poseidon. He teamed up with Clint Eastwood for the assassination thriller In the Line of Fire, which was nominated for three Oscars, before working with Dustin Hoffman in 1995’s disaster thriller Outbreak and Harrison Ford in 1997’s Air Force One.
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