German director sprang to international acclaim with submarine drama Das Boot

Wolfgang Petersen, who has died aged 81, was a German filmmaker whose 1981 drama Das Boot earned global acclaim for its humane depiction of U-boat sailors during World War II. He later had a long Hollywood career directing action-driven hits including Air Force One, The Perfect Storm and Troy.

After launching his directing career in the 1960s on West German television, Petersen was vaulted to international prominence by Das Boot, or The Boat, a harrowing antiwar film that brought audiences inside a cramped, sweaty German submarine. ‘‘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’’. He added:

‘‘Wolfgang Petersen’s direction is an exercise in pure craftsmanship.’’

Petersen said he had initially worried about the film’s reception in the United States. 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 died during the war. By the time the film ended 2 1⁄2 hours later, 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’.’’

The film was nominated for six Academy Awards, with Petersen receiving two Oscar nods, for direction and for screenplay, which he adapted from a novel by Lothar-gunther Buchheim. Das Boot reportedly became the highest-earning foreign-language movie 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.

Even as he transitioned to big-budget thrillers, Petersen sought to maintain a focus on intimate human drama in movies such as In the Line of Fire (1993), featuring Clint Eastwood as a Secret Service agent trying to hunt down a would-be assassin, and Air Force One (1997), which became one of the decade’s most popular action films, starring Harrison Ford as a US president battling terrorists hijacking the presidential jet.

He also ventured into fantasy with The Neverending Story (1984), his first Englishlanguage movie, adapted from a best-selling children’s novel by Michael Ende.

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. ‘‘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.’’

Petersen later transported viewers to the world of Homer’s Iliad, directing the bigbudget war film Troy (2004) with Pitt. He seemed especially comfortable working from historical material and journalistic research, adapting Richard Preston’s nonfiction book The Hot Zone into Outbreak (1995), a medical thriller about the spread of an Ebola-like virus. He later directed Clooney and Mark Wahlberg in The Perfect Storm (2000), about a Massachusetts fishing vessel lost at sea.

‘‘I had never seen before these oranges and bananas and chewing gum . . . To us America was something like a paradise.’’

Wolfgang Petersen was born in Emden, a port city near the North Sea, and grew up in an era of postwar deprivation. He often lingered with other youngsters at the harbour, in the hope of catching sweets thrown by US sailors. ‘‘I had never seen before these oranges and bananas and chewing gum. We kids were like little rats down there, hungry, jumping on all that stuff. I have never forgotten that image of America. To us America was something like a paradise.’’

By the early 1950s, his family had settled in Hamburg. At 19, he became an assistant director at a theatre in the city. He also studied acting before earning an apprenticeship for German TV in the late 1960s, gaining recognition for his taut direction of crime dramas and stories about obsession.

His later work included The Consequence (1977), about the sexual relationship between an incarcerated young man and the prison warden’s teenage son that generated controversy for its sensitive, forthright depiction of gay love. That same year, he directed For Your Love Only, a feature-length episode of a TV crime series, about the affair between a teacher and a schoolgirl, played by Nastassja Kinski.

Around that time, executives from Bavaria Studios persuaded him to make Das Boot. Petersen insisted on unswerving accuracy to recreate the look and feel of a submarine, evoking what he described as ‘‘the smell of reality, the blood, the sweat and the tears, the claustrophobia’’. It took two years and hundreds of artisans to build two submarines and giant machines that would jostle them to create an aura of fear and turbulence.

His first marriage, to actress Ursula Sieg, ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife, Maria-antoinette Borgel, who worked as an assistant director on several of his early films; a son from his first marriage; and two grandchildren.

Petersen moved into US film-making 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. After 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. It was savaged by critics.

Petersen professed not to care about bad reviews, saying that too often reviewers were snobbish about his movies, failing to recognise the fact that they kept viewers glued to their seats. ‘‘I want to tell a story everybody loves,’’ he said after the premiere of The Neverending Story. ‘‘Another director might say: ‘That’s my vision and whoever understands it and loves it, fine. Whoever doesn’t, please go out!’ But that’s not me.’’ –