Born on the shores of the North Sea, at the time when the Kriegsmarine (the German navy between 1935 and 19450 reigned supreme, German filmmaker Wolfgang Petersen died on Friday, August 12 in Brentwood, California, from pancreatic cancer at the age of 81. He is best known for Das Boot, a chronicle of the submarine war fought by the Third Reich and the Allies.
A contemporary of the architects of the renaissance of German cinema – Fassbinder, Wenders, Schlöndorff – Mr. Petersen turned his back on Europe to settle in Hollywood, where from the 1980s on he directed movies with stars like Clint Eastwood, George Clooney or Brad Pitt, becoming one of the kings of the American box office, moving from political thrillers (In the Line of Fire, Air Force One) to disaster films (Outbreak, Poseidon) without always winning the support of the critics.
Mr. Petersen was born on March 14, 1941, in Emden, Lower Saxony, west of Hamburg, where he studied and began his career as a theater director before leaving for Berlin to attend the Academy of Film and Television. There he met Holger Meins, the future leader of the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction), with whom he co-directed a short film.
Upon leaving the Academy, Mr. Petersen took a conventional path, making his debut in television by directing several episodes of the police series Tatort. On the set of that show, he met the actor Jürgen Prochnow, who would accompany him throughout the German phase of his career.
With Mr. Prochnow in the role of a student blackmailer, Mr. Petersen directed his first feature film, One or the Other of Us, in 1974. Three years later, The Consequence, the story of a homosexual romance shattered by the moral order, attracted attention throughout Europe. Then came Black and White Like Day and Night (1978), starring Bruno Ganz as the grandmaster.
Six Oscar nominations
It was then that Mr. Petersen began work on Das Boot. With the support of the Bavaria studio, he had a submarine set built in which the actors were confined, with no more space than the real-life sailors. With the help of cinematographer Jost Vacano, he managed to recreate this claustrophobic feeling for two and a half hours, which initially won over the German public, even if some critics maligned the film for its militarism. The US release of Das Boot was a triumph. Distributed by Columbia, the film received six Oscar nominations – but no statuettes.
Hollywood immediately gave the filmmaker the green light, but he preferred to follow up with another European production, the most expensive of its time – the adaptation of the children's story The Neverending Story, by Michael Ende, which was released in 1984. After a hesitant start, this extravaganza of special effects and sentiment eventually became a huge success, thanks in part to the soundtrack by Giorgio Moroder and Klaus Doldinger.
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