“Das Boot” launched Wolfgang Petersen as a filmmaker in Hollywood, the place he turned one of many prime filmmakers of motion adventures.
NEW YORK — Wolfgang Petersen, the German filmmaker whose World Warfare II submarine epic “Das Boot” propelled him right into a blockbuster Hollywood profession that included the movies “Within the Line of Fireplace,” “Air Pressure One” and “The Good Storm,” has died. He was 81.
Petersen died Friday at his house within the Los Angeles neighborhood of Brentwood after a battle with pancreatic most cancers, stated consultant Michelle Bega.
Petersen, born in Emden, Germany, made two options earlier than his 1982 breakthrough, “Das Boot.” Then the most costly film in German movie historical past, the 149-minute “Das Boot” (the unique minimize ran 210 minutes) chronicled the extreme claustrophobia of life aboard a doomed German U-boat in the course of the Battle of the Atlantic, with Jürgen Prochnow because the submarine’s commander. Heralded as an antiwar masterpiece, “Das Boot” was nominated for six Oscars, together with for Petersen’s path and his adaptation of Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s best-selling 1973 novel.
To Petersen, who grew up on the northern coast of Germany, the ocean lengthy held his fascination. He would return to it within the 2000 catastrophe movie, “The Good Storm,” a true-life story of a fishing boat misplaced at sea.
“The facility of water is unbelievable,” Petersen stated in a 2009 interview. “I used to be all the time impressed as a child how sturdy it’s, all of the harm the water might do when it simply turned inside a few hours, and smashed in opposition to the shore.”
“Das Boot” launched Petersen as a filmmaker in Hollywood, the place he turned one of many prime makers of motion adventures of large cataclysms that spanned warfare (2004’s “Troy,” with Brad Pitt), pandemic (the 1995 ebolavirus-inspired “Outbreak”) and different ocean-set disasters (2006’s “Poseidon,” concerning the capsizing of an ocean liner).
Petersen is survived by second spouse Maria-Antoinette Borgel, a German script supervisor and assistant director whom he wed in 1978, son Daniel Petersen and two grandchildren.
