Wolfgang Petersen, one in all a handful of international administrators to make it huge in Hollywood, whose harrowing 1981 conflict movie, “Das Boot,” was nominated for six Academy Awards and have become one in all Germany’s top-grossing movies, died on Friday at his residence 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 demise was introduced on Tuesday.
Mr. Petersen was essentially the most commercially profitable member of a era of filmmakers lively in West Germany from the Nineteen Sixties to the ’80s, whose main lights included Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog. However he was equally recognized in Hollywood.
Over 5 many years Mr. Petersen toggled between his native Germany and the USA, directing 29 movies, lots of them box-office hits just like the Nineteen Nineties political thrillers “Within the Line of Hearth,” with Clint Eastwood, and “Air Pressure One,” with Harrison Ford.
With a knack for style filmmaking — motion movies had been one other sturdy swimsuit — 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 ceaselessly mispronounced title alone (“Boot” is spoken precisely just like the English “boat”) has attained a sort of pop-cultural standing, due to references on “The Simpsons” and different TV reveals.
“‘Das Boot’ isn’t only a German movie about World Struggle II; it’s a German naval journey epic that has already been a success in West Germany,” Janet Maslin wrote in her evaluate in The New York Occasions when the movie opened within the U.S. in early 1982.
The film received excessive reward for its historic accuracy and the clammy, claustrophobic impact achieved by the cinematographer Jost Vacano, who shot a lot of the inside scenes with a small hand-held Arriflex digicam. Though the crucial response in Germany was divided, with some accusing the movie of glorifying conflict, it encountered a extra uniformly optimistic response overseas. These days it’s thought of among the many best antiwar movies ever made.
“Das Boot” (additionally titled “The Boat” in English-speaking international locations) 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 course and screenplay, and one for Mr. Vacano, for cinematography — stay a document 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 authentic 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 kids’s writer Michael Ende.
Launched in 1984, “The NeverEnding Story,” a few bullied boy who enters into an enchanted ebook, was another-box workplace hit in Germany and overseas — though it, too, obtained its share of adverse critiques, together with from The Occasions’s movie critic Vincent Canby, who known 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 many years, for its trippy manufacturing design, scrappy particular results and synth-heavy theme music, 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 bathtub mat.” (The studio’s theme park, Bavaria FilmStadt, additionally presents 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 rapid postwar interval, the younger Mr. Petersen idolized America and American motion pictures. On Sundays he would go to matinee screenings for youngsters 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 once I was 8 years previous, 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 wished to change 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 Nineteen 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 large 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 at least one explicit 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 usually succeeded, with fashionable early-career thrillers that tackled thorny political and social points. “Smog” (1972) handled the consequences of air pollution within the Ruhr, the economic 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 Large Tales” (1997, written with Ulrich Greiwe), Mr. Petersen recalled the primary American check screening of “Das Boot” in Los Angeles. Firstly, the viewers of 1,500 applauded when the display flashed with the statistic that 30,000 Germans onboard U-boats had been killed throughout the conflict. “I assumed: 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 few fighter pilot pressured to cooperate with a reptilian enemy after they each land on a hostile alien planet. Ms. Maslin known as it “a expensive, awful-looking science-fiction epic with one of many weirdest story strains ever to hit the display.”
A 12 months later, Mr. Petersen moved to Los Angeles, the place he would stay for 20 years, working with huge stars in a string of mainstream successes that included the political dramas “Within the Line of Hearth” (1993), a few 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 few 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 few capsized luxurious liner.
Even at their most industrial, Mr. Petersen’s movies usually 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 primarily based 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 known as his inventive advantage into query.
“If somebody requested me whether or not I felt like an artist, I might have an odd feeling, as a result of I don’t actually know,” he as soon as stated. “What’s an artist? Perhaps it’s somebody who produces one thing way more intimate than movie, extra like a composer or author or painter.”
“My ardour,” he added, “is telling a narrative.”