Wolfgang Petersen, one in every of a handful of overseas administrators to make it massive in Hollywood, whose harrowing 1981 warfare movie, “Das Boot,” was nominated for six Academy Awards and have become one in every of Germany’s top-grossing movies, died on Friday at his dwelling within the Brentwood part of Los Angeles. He was 81.
The trigger was pancreatic most cancers, in keeping with Michelle Bega, a publicist on the company Rogers & Cowan PMK in Los Angeles. His loss of life was introduced on Tuesday.
Mr. Petersen was probably the most commercially profitable member of a technology of filmmakers energetic in West Germany from the Sixties to the ’80s, whose main lights included Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog. However he was equally identified in Hollywood.
Over 5 a long time Mr. Petersen toggled between his native Germany and america, directing 29 movies, lots of them box-office hits just like the Nineties political thrillers “Within the Line of Fireplace,” with Clint Eastwood, and “Air Pressure One,” with Harrison Ford.
With a knack for style filmmaking — motion movies had been one other robust go well with — he additionally made forays into fantasy “(The NeverEnding Story”), sword-and-sandal epic (“Troy’) and science fiction — all whereas attracting marquee names to star in them, like Dustin Hoffman in “Outbreak,” Brad Pitt in “Troy” and George Clooney in “The Good Storm.”
For all his success in Hollywood, nonetheless, “Das Boot,” a tense drama about sailors on a German U-boat throughout World Struggle II, is the work for which Mr. Petersen will principally probably be remembered. Within the English-speaking world, that regularly mispronounced title alone (“Boot” is spoken precisely just like the English “boat”) has attained a type of pop-cultural standing, because of references on “The Simpsons” and different TV exhibits.
“‘Das Boot’ isn’t only a German movie about World Struggle II; it’s a German naval journey epic that has already been successful in West Germany,” Janet Maslin wrote in her assessment in The New York Occasions when the movie opened within the U.S. in early 1982.
The film gained excessive reward for its historic accuracy and the clammy, claustrophobic impact achieved by the cinematographer Jost Vacano, who shot many of the inside scenes with a small hand-held Arriflex digicam. Though the essential response in Germany was divided, with some accusing the movie of glorifying warfare, it encountered a extra uniformly constructive response overseas. These days it’s thought of among the many most interesting antiwar movies ever made.
“Das Boot” (additionally titled “The Boat” in English-speaking nations) grossed over $80 million worldwide, and although it didn’t win an Academy Award, its six Oscar nominations — together with two for Mr. Petersen, for path and screenplay, and one for Mr. Vacano, for cinematography — stay a file for a German movie manufacturing. (It was not nominated within the best-foreign-language-film class; West Germany’s submission that 12 months was Mr. Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo,” which didn’t make the Academy’s brief checklist for the Oscar).
Mr. Petersen ready numerous variations of “Das Boot” over the following decade and a half. In 1985, German TV broadcast a 300-minute model (twice so long as the theatrical launch), which Mr. Petersen claimed was nearer to his unique imaginative and prescient however commercially unfeasible on the time.
After “Das Boot,” he teamed up with the producer Bernd Eichinger, whose fledgling studio, Constantin Movie, co-produced the English-language “The NeverEnding Story,” an adaptation of a 1979 fantasy novel by the best-selling German youngsters’s writer Michael Ende.
Launched in 1984, “The NeverEnding Story,” a couple of bullied boy who enters into an enchanted e book, was another-box workplace hit in Germany and overseas — though it, too, obtained its share of destructive evaluations, together with from The Occasions’s movie critic Vincent Canby, who referred to as it “graceless” and “humorless.”
Regardless of a tepid U.S. box-office return, which Mr. Petersen chalked as much as the movie’s being “too European,” “The NeverEnding Story” grew to become a cult favourite over the a long time, for its trippy manufacturing design, scrappy particular results and synth-heavy theme track, written by Giorgio Moroder and sung by the British pop singer Limahl.
The movie was principally shot at Bavaria Movie Studio, close to Munich, the place present-day guests can trip Falcor, the “luck dragon” that Mr. Canby in comparison with “an impractical tub mat.” (The studio’s theme park, Bavaria FilmStadt, additionally gives excursions of the submarine from “Das Boot.”)
Wolfgang Petersen was born on March 14, 1941, in Emden, in Northern Germany. His father was a naval lieutenant in World Struggle II who later labored for a delivery firm in Hamburg.
Rising up within the quick postwar interval, the younger Mr. Petersen idolized America and American films. On Sundays he would go to matinee screenings for kids on the native cinema to see westerns directed by Howard Hawks and John Ford and starring Gary Cooper and John Wayne.
“I received to know the medium of movie after I was 8 years outdated, and I used to be instantly smitten by it,” he advised Elfriede Jelinek, a future Nobel Prize winner for literature, in a 1985 interview for German Playboy. “Once I was 11, I made a decision I needed to turn into a movie director.”
In 1950, his household moved to Hamburg, and when Wolfgang was 14, his father gave him an eight-millimeter movie digicam for Christmas.
After graduating from highschool, Mr. Petersen was exempted from compulsive navy service due to a backbone curvature. Within the early Sixties, he labored as an assistant director on the Junges Theater (now the Ernst Deutsch Theater) in Hamburg. He then studied theater in Hamburg and Berlin for a number of semesters earlier than enrolling on the German Movie and Tv Academy Berlin, West Germany’s first movie college, which opened in 1966.
In 1970, his commencement movie, “I Will Kill You, Wolf,” was picked up by West German tv, and this led to a directing provide for the long-running German crime sequence “Tatort.”
Over the following decade, Mr. Petersen labored at a feverish tempo, directing for each tv and the massive display, beginning in 1974 with the psychological thriller “One or the Different of Us.”
From the start, viewers approval was of central significance to him. “I crouched within the cinema to see how the viewers would react” to 1 specific movie, he recalled within the Playboy interview. “And what occurred? Individuals walked out of the movie. I used to be devastated. As a result of I’m obsessive about making movies for everybody.”
He typically succeeded, with widespread early-career thrillers that tackled thorny political and social points. “Smog” (1972) handled the consequences of air pollution within the Ruhr, the commercial area in Northwest Germany. “The Consequence” (1977) was controversial for its frank depiction of homosexuality, a taboo subject on the time.
He was married to the German actress Ursula Sieg from 1970 to 1978. He later married Maria-Antoinette Borgel, whom he had met on the set of “Smog,” the place she labored as a script supervisor.
He’s survived by his spouse in addition to a son from his first marriage, Daniel, a filmmaker, and two grandchildren.
Mr. Petersen had practically 20 movies to his credit score by the point he made “Das Boot.” A triumph that few, if any, might have predicted, the film established his worldwide repute and opened the door to Hollywood.
In his autobiography, “I Love Massive Tales” (1997, written with Ulrich Greiwe), Mr. Petersen recalled the primary American check screening of “Das Boot” in Los Angeles. At first, the viewers of 1,500 applauded when the display flashed with the statistic that 30,000 Germans onboard U-boats had been killed in the course of the warfare. “I believed: That is going to be a disaster!” Mr. Petersen wrote. Two and a half hours later, the movie obtained a thunderous ovation.
After “The NeverEnding Story,” Mr. Petersen made “Enemy Mine” (1985), a science fiction movie starring Dennis Quaid a couple of fighter pilot pressured to cooperate with a reptilian enemy after they each land on a hostile alien planet. Ms. Maslin referred to as it “a pricey, awful-looking science-fiction epic with one of many weirdest story traces ever to hit the display.”
A 12 months later, Mr. Petersen moved to Los Angeles, the place he would stay for twenty years, working with massive stars in a string of mainstream successes that included the political dramas “Within the Line of Fireplace” (1993), a couple of Secret Service agent’s efforts to forestall a presidential assassination, and “Air Pressure One” (1997), in regards to the hijacking of the presidential jetliner. There have been additionally the catastrophe movies “Outbreak” (1995), a couple of lethal virus, “The Good Storm” (2000), about industrial New England fishermen caught in a terrifying tempest, and “Poseidon” (2006), a remake of “The Poseidon Journey,” the 1972 blockbuster a couple of capsized luxurious liner.
Even at their most industrial, Mr. Petersen’s movies typically had undercurrents of political commentary. Discussing the “Iliad”-inspired “Troy” (2004), Mr. Petersen drew parallels between Homer’s epic and the reign of George W. Bush. “Energy-hungry Agamemnons who wish to create a brand new world order — that’s completely present,” he advised the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.
His movie profession appeared to return full circle in 2016 with “Vier gegen die Financial institution,” a remake of his 1976 comedy-heist movie based mostly on an American novel, “The Nixon Recession Caper,” by Ralph Maloney. It was Mr. Petersen’s first German-language movie since “Das Boot” a quarter-century earlier.
All through his profession, he appeared unconcerned by critics who referred to as his inventive benefit into query.
“If somebody requested me whether or not I felt like an artist, I’d have a wierd feeling, as a result of I don’t actually know,” he as soon as mentioned. “What’s an artist? Perhaps it’s somebody who produces one thing far more intimate than movie, extra like a composer or author or painter.”
“My ardour,” he added, “is telling a narrative.”
