Yet his biggest drama was Troy (2004), a $175 million adaptation of Homer’s epic starring Brad Pitt, Brian Cox and Diane Kruger. Based on the novel by Michael Ende, it tells of a solitary young schoolboy (Barrett Oliver) who is drawn into the fantasy world he reads about in a magical book and helps to save the life of an ailing empress. In somewhat different vein, Petersen’s first English-language film had been The NeverEnding Story (1984), a children’s fantasy unkindly dubbed “the neverending movie” by some critics. There was also Air Force One (1997) with Harrison Ford and Glenn Close in which the US president’s aircraft is hijacked by Kazakh terrorists, ironically while he is returning home from delivering a “zero tolerance for terrorists” speech in Moscow, and The Perfect Storm (2000), based on a true story and featuring George Clooney as the captain of a fishing boat, the Andrea Gail, that was lost at sea in 1991. It’s just them, they’re facing their fears with each other, and that’s it.” “They can’t run away, there’s nowhere to go.
“It’s the claustrophobia of the boat,” he added. “With 45 people on a boat maybe you can tell more about war than big battles with thousands and all that kind of thing,” explained the director, who shot Das Boot in sequence over a year so that the crew’s increasingly shaggy appearance meant they looked as if they had been cooped up together for a lengthy period of time. Unusually for a foreign-language film it was also a hit in the US, earning six Academy Award nominations including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for Petersen. Wolfgang Petersen, who has died aged 81, was the German director of several water-based thrillers they include the tense U-boat drama Das Boot (1981), which gives a realistic account of the squalid and confined conditions of underwater warfare during the Second World War in which the viewer can almost smell the sweat, oil and tears.Īdapted from Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s semi-autobiographical 1973 novel of the same name, Das Boot was one of the most expensive postwar German films, and eventually one of the most commercially successful.
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