![]() "The film is rooted in a profound pessimism about what's unfortunately happened to this country in the last 30 years. "When John's character says, ‘Nothing they told me was true and there's nothing left worth fighting for,' I think his words will resonate for many people," Petersen told The Los Angeles Times. Petersen considered the political thriller - which cast the heroic Eastwood as the tired but devoted defender of a less honorable president - an indictment of Washington. ![]() I needed time to get a feeling for this work - it's not Germany anymore." "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.įilmmaker Wolfgang Petersen, who broke into Hollywood with the Oscar-nominated 'Das Boot' and went on to direct blockbusters like 'Air Force One' and 'In the Line of Fire,' died on Friday of pancreatic cancer. Eastwood met with Petersen, checked out his work and gave him the job. Seeking a director for the film, Eastwood thought of Petersen, with whom he had chatted a few years earlier at a dinner party given by Arnold Schwarzenegger. In it, Petersen marshalled 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. "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 ebolavirus-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." Adapted from Michael Ende's novel, "The NeverEnding Story" was about a magical book that transports its young reader into the world of Fantasia, where a dark force known as the Nothing rampages.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. "In school they never talked about the time of Hitler - they just blocked it out of their minds and concentrated on rebuilding Germany," Petersen told The Los Angeles Times in 1993. 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-Gunther 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 Jurgen 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. 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.
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