![]() ![]() "Then I came into the stormy international scene. Up to 'NeverEnding Story,' my career was one success after another," Petersen told The Associated Press in 1993. You look at other directors they don't have the big successes all the time. ![]() "In the Line of Fire" was a major hit, grossing $177 million worldwide and landing three Oscar nominations. In it, Petersen marshaled his substantial skill in building suspense for a more open-air but just as taut thriller that careened across rooftops and past Washington, D.C., monuments. "Das Boot" launched Petersen as a filmmaker in Hollywood, where he became one of the top makers of cataclysmic action adventures in films spanning war (2004's "Troy," with Brad Pitt), pandemic (the 1995 ebola virus-inspired "Outbreak") and other ocean-set disasters (2000's "The Perfect Storm" and 2006's "Poseidon," a remake of "The Poseidon Adventure," about the capsizing of an ocean liner).īut Petersen's first foray in American moviemaking was child fantasy: the enchanting 1984 film "The NeverEnding Story."Īrguably Petersen's finest Hollywood film came almost a decade later in 1993's "In the Line of Fire," starring Clint Eastwood as a Secret Service agent protecting the president of the United States from John Malkovich's assassin. We all lived for American movies, and by the time I was 11, I'd decided I wanted to be a filmmaker." "We kids were looking for more glamorous dreams than rebuilding a destroyed country, though, so we were really ready for it when American pop culture came to Germany. They just blocked it out of their minds and concentrated on rebuilding Germany," Petersen told the Los Angeles Times in 1993. "In school, they never talked about the time of Hitler. In the confusion of postwar Germany, Petersen - who started out in theater before attending Berlin's Film and Television Academy in the late 1960s - gravitated toward Hollywood films with clear clashes of good and evil. Petersen, born in 1941, recalled as a child running alongside American ships as they threw down food. Heralded as an antiwar masterpiece, "Das Boot" was nominated for six Oscars, including for Petersen's direction and his adaptation of Lothar-Günther Buchheim's best-selling 1973 novel. The 149-minute film (the original cut ran 210 minutes) chronicled the intense claustrophobia of life aboard a doomed German U-boat during the Battle of the Atlantic, with Jürgen Prochnow as the submarine's commander. Petersen, born in the north German port city of Emden, made two features before his 1982 breakthrough, "Das Boot," then the most expensive movie in German film history. Petersen died Friday at his home in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Brentwood after a battle with pancreatic cancer, said representative Michelle Bega. You find yourself rooting for them only to say to yourself, “Hey, wait a minute, they’re supposed to be the bad guys.Wolfgang Petersen, the German filmmaker whose World War II submarine epic "Das Boot" propelled him into a blockbuster Hollywood career that included the films "In the Line of Fire," "Air Force One" and "The Perfect Storm," has died. “Das Boot” is that rare German war film that’s not about Nazis but about decent men who were as much the victims of Nazism as were many of their country’s enemies. If anything, that the men speak English (with only a slight German accent) only heightens what was already one of Petersen’s signal achievements, which was to persuade us to forget that the men were Germans. A subtitled five-hour version doesn’t exist, but no matter: only the minor characters seemed to be dubbed, and the English dialogue is on the whole excellent. When Petersen shot his film he also shot a long version for German television and prepared this English-language version of it for the BBC. At either length it is a major cinematic achievement. What “Das Boot” loses as sheer suspenseful entertainment at the far longer running time it gains in seriousness and indelibility. And the more we experience the men’s hardships and claustrophobia, the more deeply we feel the film’s message. Yet in being so lengthy, we feel all the more trapped in that narrow, cluttered U-boat with its quietly stalwart captain (Jurgen Prochnow, really superb) and his loyal men. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |