FILM TANK FORCE 1958 MOVIE
Wolfgang Petersen moved into American filmmaking with a pair of box-office disappointments – the science-fiction movie Enemy Mine (1985) and the Alfred Hitchcock homage Shattered (1991) – before bouncing back with In the Line of Fire, which grossed nearly $190m (£161m) and earned John Malkovich an Oscar nomination for his performance as a CIA veteran trying to assassinate the president.Īfter the release of Troy, which grossed nearly half a billion dollars worldwide but received mixed reviews, Petersen directed Poseidon (2006), a big-budget remake of the 1972 disaster film The Poseidon Adventure.
They slide down with enormous speed and crash onto the floor, and send mountains of water over the boat with unbelievable power. “The tanks were high up and filled with about 2,000 gallons of water. “When the water crashes over the boat, we provided that with our dump tanks,” he told an interviewer with the Directors Guild of America. Much of the movie was filmed in a specially constructed studio tank that helped Petersen create the illusion of monster waves threatening to capsize the Andrea Gail, which was tossed about like a toy boat. The film grossed more than $180m (£152m) at the box office and offered Petersen a chance to return to a maritime setting without having to re-enter the narrow tube of a submarine. He later directed Clooney and Mark Wahlberg in The Perfect Storm (2000), based on Sebastian Junger’s account of a Massachusetts fishing vessel lost at sea. He seemed especially comfortable working from historical material and journalistic research, adapting Richard Preston’s non-fiction book The Hot Zone into Outbreak (1995), a medical thriller about the spread of an Ebola-like virus. Petersen later transported viewers to the world of Homer’s Iliad, directing the big-budget war film Troy (2004) starring Pitt, Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom. “If people don’t dream any more, they won’t survive,” he told The New York Times, adding: “The whole idea of the film is that we need your imagination, your dreams, your wishes, your creativity to fight against all these dangerous problems in the world.” After three years working on Das Boot, Petersen said he was rejuvenated by the film, which celebrated the power of imagination and featured a flying dragon-dog and a magical kingdom called Fantasia. He also ventured into fantasy with The NeverEnding Story (1984), his first English-language movie, adapted from a bestselling children’s novel by Michael Ende. The latter made $315m (£266m) at the global box office and became one of the decade’s most popular action films. Das Boot grossed more than $80m (£68m) worldwide and reportedly became the highest-earning foreign-language movie ever released in the US, where Petersen went on to work with Hollywood stars such as George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Glenn Close, Dustin Hoffman and Morgan Freeman.Įven as he transitioned to big-budget action thrillers, Petersen sought to maintain a focus on intimate human drama in movies such as In the Line of Fire (1993) and Air Force One (1997). The film was nominated for six Academy Awards, with Petersen receiving an Oscar nod for his direction and another for his screenplay, which he had adapted from a novel by German author Lothar-Günther Buchheim.
By the time the film ended, he told the New Jersey Record, “The audience was in tears, in shock, and totally turned around by the message: ‘OK, I know these guys were the other side, but if you cut through to the bottom, what war is all about is kids on all sides getting killed.’” When he went to the Los Angeles premiere, he was alarmed to see the audience burst into applause as an opening title card noted that 30,000 German submariners had died during the war.
Petersen said he had initially worried about the film’s reception in the United States. He added, “Wolfgang Petersen’s direction is an exercise in pure craftsmanship.” “The film is like a documentary in its impact,” wrote film critic Roger Ebert, observing that there were sequences “when we feel trapped in the same time and space as the desperate crew”. Wolfgang Petersen, a German filmmaker whose 1981 drama Das Boot earned global acclaim for its humane depiction of U-boat sailors during the Second World War and who later had a long Hollywood career directing action-driven blockbusters including Air Force One, The Perfect Storm and Troy, has died aged 81.Īfter launching his directing career in the 1960s on West German television, Petersen was vaulted to international prominence by Das Boot ( The Boat), a harrowing anti-war film that brought audiences inside a cramped, sweaty German submarine.
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