![]() debut, Petersen hit it big with In the Line of Fire. “What does that mean, what happened between that, what was the reality inside the submarine?”Īfter writing, directing and producing the mystery Shattered (1991), an homage to Alfred Hitchcock that starred Tom Berenger, Bob Hoskins and Greta Scacchi, for his U.S. ![]() “It’s a film about human beings in the war, about kids going out on a patrol and they come back as old men,” he said in a 1982 interview. Work on a couple of German telefilms led him to Das Boot. Petersen and Prochnow reteamed in 1977 for Die Konsequenz ( The Consequence), a ground-breaking film about homosexuals that was initially banned from theaters. His first feature, 1974’s Einer von uns beiden ( One or the Other), starred Prochnow and Elke Sommer and earned him a German National Film Award for best new director. 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). The Dustin Hoffman-starring Outbreak, his 1995 thriller about a pandemic, saw renewed relevance amid the real-world coronavirus outbreak. ![]()
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