![]() ![]() 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. He died on the arms of his wife of 50 years, Maria Antoinette.Get Connecticut local news, weather forecasts and entertainment stories to your inbox. Per Deadline, Petersen passed last Friday in his Brentwood home after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He took a 1o-year hiatus before directing his final film, the German-language comedy “Four Against the Bank,” in 2016. Petersen’s last film in Hollywod was the 2006 disaster movie remake “Poseidon,” which sank at the box office. Next up, while excoriated by some critics, Trojan War story “Troy” starring Brad Pitt as Achilles was also a box office success. It was an enormous box office success, grossing nearly $330 million dollars. Next up came summer blockbuster “Perfect Storm,” the massive maritime survival movie based on a true story and starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg. ![]() Petersen’s later success with “In the Line of Fire,” starring Eastwood as a Secret Service officer, propelled him into making Hollywood tentpoles like “Outbreak” and the blockbuster “Air Force One.” Petersen worked with beloved cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, longtime a collaborator of Martin Scorsese and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, on the latter films. Petersen then forayed into Hollywood with fantasy film “NeverEnding Story,” which remains a cult favorite and marvel of in-camera effects with its sprawling good-versus-evil tale of a young warrior trying to save the land of Fantasia from dark forces. Go Inside The U-96 Submarine In This Fascinating ‘Das Boot’ Documentary Featurette – Watch Petersen was born in Germany in 1941, and it was in Hamburg in the 1960s that he started directing plays before moving into TV movies for German television, eventually gaining notices for his 1974 psychological thriller debut “One or the Other of Us.” But Petersen reached an international audience with the 1982 release of “Das Boot,” a nearly three-hour German-language underwater film about the men serving aboard German WWII U-boats. In addition to the WWII submarine warfare film that earned six Academy Award nominations including Best Director, Petersen also directed 1984’s beloved family favorite “The NeverEnding Story,” “Enemy Mine” (1985), Clint Eastwood political thriller “In the Line of Fire” (1993), pandemic disaster movie “Outbreak” (1995), Harrison Ford presidential hijacking thriller “Air Force One” (1997), and swords-and-sandals tentpole “Troy” (2004). Deadline first reported the news of his passing. Wolfgang Petersen, the Oscar-nominated director of throwback epics like “ Das Boot” and “ The Perfect Storm,” has died at the age of 81. ![]()
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