Born on the shores of the North Sea, when the Kriegsmarine reigned there unchallenged, the German filmmaker Wolfgang Petersen, whose most outstanding work remains Das Boot, chronicle of the submarine war fought by the IIIe Reich and the Allies, died on Friday August 12 near the Pacific, in Brentwood (California), following pancreatic cancer, he was 81 years old. Contemporary of the architects of the renaissance of German cinema, Fassbinder, Wenders, Schlöndorff, Wolfgang Petersen had turned his back on Europe to settle in Hollywood, where he directed, from the 1980s, Clint Eastwood, George Clooney or Brad Pitt, becoming one of the kings of the American box office, going from political thriller (In the Line of Sight, Air Force One) to the disaster movie (Alert!, Poseidon) without always winning the support of the critics.
Wolfgang Petersen was born on March 14, 1941, in Emden, Lower Saxony, west of Hamburg. It was in the Hanseatic port that he studied and made his debut as a theater director before leaving for Berlin, where he studied at the Film and Television Academy. There he meets Holger Meins, the future leader of the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction), with whom he co-directs a short film.
Upon leaving the Academy, Petersen nevertheless took a very conventional path, making his television debut, directing several episodes of the detective series Tatort, on the set of which he meets the actor Jürgen Prochnow, who will accompany him throughout the German phase of his career. It was with Prochnow in the role of a student blackmailer that he made his first feature film in 1974, One or the other of us. Three years later, The consequence, story of homosexual love shattered by the moral order is attracting attention across Europe. Comes next The Chessboard of Passion (1978), with Bruno Ganz as a grand master.
Six Oscar nominations
It was then that Wolfgang Petersen got down to the project of Das Boot. With the support of the Bavaria studio, he had a submarine set built in which the actors would be locked up, with no more space than their models. With cinematographer Jost Vacano, he manages to arouse a feeling of claustrophobia for two and a half hours which initially convinces the German public, even if some of the critics reproach him for his militarism. The American release of Das Boot is a triumph. Distributed by Columbia, the film won six Oscar nominations (but none).
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