You just have to have good people - "good people!" That's what the commander of U 96 murmurs in "Das Boot" as his submersible slowly rises to the surface again after sixteen hours spent anxiously on the seabed, and it could also be the motto, after which Wolfgang Petersen made films for almost fifty years.

Because Petersen was always surrounded by people who knew their craft: by the cameramen Jost Vacano, Michael Ballhaus and John Seale, the set designer Rolf Zehetbauer and his colleagues from the Hollywood studios Warner, Columbia and 20th Century Fox and last but not least by the American crème Movie Actors - Dustin Hoffman, Clint Eastwood, John Malkovich, Harrison Ford, Donald Sutherland, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Mark Wahlberg and many others.

He was a master who made others

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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This passion for the craftsmanship of the cinema is also the secret of the success of “Boot”, which was the most expensive German film production up until 1981.

The story of U 96's Atlantic voyage was also a parable of the German “national community” during the war, but you couldn't see that on the surface of the story.

It was about men who, like the men behind the camera, went about their business: radio operators, officers, gunners, engineers, all driven by the will to do their job as well as possible.

But it was precisely this shoal that made “Das Boot” the perfect war spectacle of the late Wall years, a fictional space of experience in which generations of World War veterans and their grandchildren could meet.

The formula still works:

The third season of the streaming series based on Lothar-Günther Buchheim's novel has just come onto the market.

The diving continues.

The man who shot the first German blockbuster since the 1950s came from the middle of public television, from the milieu of the "Tatort" series and the mini-series in the main evening program.

Wolfgang Petersen, who grew up in Emden and Hamburg as the son of a naval officer, first learned his profession at the theater and then at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin, before starting out as an assistant director at NDR.

In 1971 he filmed his first "Tatort" with Klaus Schwarzkopf as Commissioner Finke, and from then on the two formed a team.

Petersen discovered the young Nastassja Kinski for their last joint work, "Reifezeugnis" from 1977.

The story about a high school teacher's love affair with a student came from Herbert Lichtenfeld, but its style was pure Petersen, economical, precise, efficient.

In the list of the most successful "Tatort" episodes, "Reifezeugnis" is in second place;

even today you can still look at him without looking dusty.

After the international success of “Boot”, Petersen wanted to go to Hollywood, where his love of genre cinema had drawn him from the start.

But before that he had to adapt the “Neverending Story” for Bernd Eichinger, and his next project, the science fiction fable “Enemy Mine”, was also commissioned.

When he was finally allowed to film his own screenplay with "Death in the Mirror", his homage to the classic film noir seemed stiff and ponderous.

A chain of box office hits

Petersen's winning streak began with In the Line of Fire, which Clint Eastwood brought him to direct.

The character of the Kennedy assassination traumatized Secret Service agent, who becomes a hero on the second attempt, brought an unfamiliar vulnerability to Eastwood's features, and the showdown with John Malkovich in the elevator brought Petersen's proven talent in "Boot" to the stage narrow space again to advantage.

From there, one box-office success followed the other: the pandemic shocker Outbreak, the patriotic hijacking thriller Air Force One, the coastal fishing drama The Tempest, and finally the $200 million production Troy.

The film adaptation of Homer's Iliad was the turning point in Petersen's American career.

Though Troy grossed nearly half a billion dollars, the film fell short of producers' expectations, and after his next project, the shipwreck remake Poseidon, ran aground commercially, the director found himself unemployed in the city of his dreams .

He returned to Germany once more to re-adapt his early television crook comedy Four Against the Bank, but audiences did not recognize his handwriting.

Perhaps this handwriting never existed.

Rather, one would have to speak of a preference for certain subjects and characters, for men with hidden weaknesses, heroes with Achilles' heels, everyday types who discover their strengths in mortal danger.

Petersen, who rarely wrote the screenplays for his films himself, sought out stories in which such types had to prove themselves and he regarded them with an eye that combined professional respect and narrative affection.

The craftsman of the cinema loved all those who have mastered their profession, be it "Tatort" inspectors, submarine drivers, the fishermen in the western Atlantic or the swordsmen off Troy.

For half a century he was a dependable voice in the film realm.

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